Killings spur calls for cops to back off
Tactics criticized in deaths of unarmed black men
Anita Ross holds a photo of police shooting victim Stephon Clark, an unarmed black man, as protesters block the entrance to Sacramento City Hall last month.
Before Sacramento police officers made the split-second decision to shoot Stephon Clark in his grandmother’s backyard, igniting weeks of community outrage over the death of the unarmed black man, they made another critical choice — to confront him suddenly in the dark with guns drawn.
The decision to open fire on the 22year-old father, who police believe may have smashed windows in the area but carried only a cell phone, has drawn accusations of racial profiling. It is also likely to be the focus of prosecutors who must decide whether the officers used unreasonable force and committed a crime in the March 18 shooting.
But some community members and law enforcement critics are asking broader and perhaps even more difficult questions: What about the tactics? Should officers seek to reduce deadly encounters by refraining from charging into some situations in the first place, putting themselves in positions where they may feel compelled to use deadly force?
Police say chasing suspects is a fundamental act in law enforcement, and that backing off and potentially allowing suspects to get away is too a high price to pay.
Critics, though, say the importance of making arrests must be balanced with more robust efforts to de-escalate perilous situations. After all, some say, many police departments have for years been prohibited from engaging in some high-speed vehicle pursuits — the idea being that the chases endanger bystanders.
“Part of this relates to changing the mentality where police are not warriors, but guardians,” said John Crew, a retired attorney and police practices specialist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “Charging in is often the exact wrong thing to do because you’re creating risk.”
The criticism worries Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer and professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. He said that the vast majority of cases in which police chase suspects don’t result in anyone getting shot, and that “to give up one of the prime functions of police — catching criminals — to avoid the rare case in which the suspect gets shot is indeed a high price for society to pay.”
That balancing of when to engage and when to back off has been a particular source of debate in the Bay Area, providing a backdrop to several fatal police shootings, including that of Mario Woods in the Bayview neighborhood in December 2015, which is still under investigation.
Officials have said five officers who shot Woods did their best in confronting a stabbing suspect who still had a knife, wouldn’t heed commands and wasn’t subdued by pepper spray and beanbag rounds. The video of the shooting, though, showed officers surrounding Woods before one of them stepped in front of him. The gunfire went off as Woods shuffled slowly along a wall and did not appear to directly threaten police.
The case led San Francisco to change its use-of-force policies to emphasize de-escalating potentially deadly encounters. Another policy, which
city officers from shooting into moving vehicles, was designed to prompt police to get out of the way of a fleeing vehicle rather than standing their ground and opening fire.
Nonetheless, just four months after Woods’ death, San Francisco officers killed 45-year-old Luis Gongora-Pat in the Mission District, a shooting that also remains under investigation. Surveillance video obtained by The Chronicle showed officers arrived on scene, immediately closed in on the homeless man and fired beanbags and then bullets at him.
The officers said GongoraPat came at them with a knife, but the dead man’s relatives and others wondered why officers advanced on him so quickly. Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris, who represents the families of Woods and Gongora-Pat, said those cases and many others could have been resolved peacefully if police hadn’t rushed in.
“What I see most of all is officers using poor tactics,” Burris said. “They create a confrontation, and they shoot their way out of it. But if they had properly assessed the situation, they wouldn’t have had to use deadly force.”
Gongora-Pat’s younger brother, José, who has joined others in holding rallies on the steps of the San Francisco Hall of Justice to demand charges against the officers, said recently, “What the police should be doing is taking the time to talk to people — to get to know them and where they are sitting in life.”
In the Stephon Clark case, Sacramento police were called to his grandmother’s neighprevents borhood on reports of a man breaking vehicle windows. A Sacramento County Sheriff ’s Department helicopter spotted a man hopping a fence into a backyard on a thermal camera.
The deputies radioed to officers on the ground, who were scouring the neighborhood on foot, around 9:15 p.m. In police body-camera footage released days after the shooting, two officers are seen walking along 29th Street, when one of them apparently spots Clark.
“Over here,” one of them says before he and his partner head up a home’s driveway toward the backyard. Seconds later, an officer shouts, “Hey! Show me your hands. Stop. Stop! Show me your hands. Gun!” And then, “Show me hands. Gun! Gun! Gun!” The officers then fire 20 shots at Clark, killing him.
Sacramento police officials said Clark advanced on them “while holding an object which was extended in front of him. The officers believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them.” The officers are not heard identifying themselves as police in the videos.
Clark’s grandmother, Sequita Thompson, has said he would often knock on a back window to ask to be let into the home through the garage door.
An independent autopsy commissioned by Clark’s family showed he was hit eight times, including six times in the back. Benjamin Crump, an attorney for Clark’s family, said the autopsy contradicted officers’ accounts of the incident.
But some in the law enforcement community have said the officers were in a difficult position. Ed Obayashi, a deputy and legal adviser with the Plumas County Sheriff ’s Office who has trained officers in use of force, said he believes the Sacramento officers did everything “by the book.”
“Don’t blame the officers,” he said. “Based on what I’ve seen and what led up to it, that is how officers are trained.”
Crew, of the ACLU, believes training needs to change, and that communities troubled by police shootings in recent years are willing to endorse policies that result in police, at times, allowing suspects to get away.
“What society is speaking out at in increasing numbers,” he said, “is the idea — the horrific reality — that people are getting killed in circumstances where we know those deaths are avoidable.” Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle. com Twitter: @EvanSernoffsky