Charges of racism in drug busts
The San Francisco Police Department is infected with a culture of racism, the American Civil Liberties Union charged in a lawsuit over undercover police drug buys in the Tenderloin that led to the arrests of 37 people, all of them African American.
Evidence from the 2013-15 arrests, including video footage, shows that police targeted blacks for selling small amounts of drugs while ignor-
ing dealers of other races, the ACLU and private attorneys said in a suit to be filed Thursday in federal court.
They said studies dating to at least 2002, some commissioned by the city, have documented the department’s “long history of racially discriminatory law enforcement.” That history involves “alarming racial disparities in traffic stops and searches; arrest rates for all offenses, including drug offenses; and the disproportionate use of force on black people.”
The lawsuit also cites the text-messaging scandal of 2011-12, in which officers exchanged racist, sexist and homophobic texts, some of which referred to African Americans as monkeys and endorsed “white power.” Disclosure of the messages in 2015 forced prosecutors to re-examine thousands of cases the officers had handled. A recent court ruling could lead to the firings of nine of the department’s officers.
“The SFPD’s history of racially discriminatory law enforcement is well documented and still inadequately addressed,” said ACLU attorney Novella Coleman. Despite the multiple studies, she said, the department “has failed abysmally to take appropriate and meaningful steps to reform its unlawful ways.”
In response, John Coté, spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the Police Department “did not engage in selective enforcement” during the Tenderloin drug arrests. Those arrests were led by federal agents, and city police “acted in accordance with federal directives,” Coté said.
“The San Francisco Police Department prides itself on being one of the most diverse, forward-thinking and transparent law enforcement agencies in the country,” he said.
The Tenderloin drug arrests, by a team of plainclothes San Francisco and federal drug agents, were labeled Operation Safe Schools. The joint operation was carried out under a federal law that increased sentences for drug sales within 1,000 feet of a school — a description that covers virtually all of the Tenderloin, the suit said.
The neighborhood is racially mixed, and one survey found that about half the drug dealers there are black, the suit said. Yet, the officers, who chose the suspected dealers to approach and solicit sales, arrested solely African Americans. In one videotaped incident, the suit said, an undercover officer turned down a drug sale from a woman he described as an “Asian chick” while waiting for a black woman to get off her cell phone so that he could approach her. Another officer was recorded saying “BMs,” or black males, preceded by a profanity, the suit said.
Twenty-five of those arrested pleaded guilty. The remaining 12 went to court and were allowed to seek evidence of discriminatory prosecution in a June 2016 ruling by U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, who said he found “substantial evidence of racially selective enforcement.” Federal prosecutors then dropped the charges against them.
Six of those 12 defendants are plaintiffs in the suit, which seeks damages for financial losses, including loss of employment for several defendants, their lawyers said.
In accusing the department of a history of discrimination, the suit cited an ACLU study in 2002 that found that black motorists in San Francisco were more likely to be stopped by police than others and that blacks and Latinos were more likely to be
“The history SFPD’s of racially discriminatory law enforcement is well documented and still inadequately addressed.” Novella Coleman, ACLU attorney
searched, even though the searches were actually less likely than others to reveal criminal evidence.
In 2006, the suit noted, The Chronicle published an investigative report finding that San Francisco had the highest arrest rates for black people of any city in California. The city then commissioned a study by a national expert who concluded, among other things, that the SFPD was failing to document and report many police stops and searches, the suit said.
The lawyers cited subsequent reports that reached similar conclusions, including a 2016 report by the U.S. Justice Department that found disproportionate arrests, searches and use of deadly force against blacks in San Francisco. The report also said the SFPD had failed to improve training or take other steps to remedy the bias found in previous studies, the suit said.
A 2016 report by The Chronicle, cited in the lawsuit, found that blacks made up less than 6 percent of San Francisco’s population but accounted for 16 percent of motorists stopped for traffic violations between 2013 and 2015.
Those studies over the past 16 years, the suit said, reveal a department “that suffers from widespread racial bias, systematically and selectively enforces the law against black people (and) refuses to be held accountable.”