IN THE 5 YEARS REVIEWED, THERE HAVE BEEN NO PROSECUTIONS AFTER FATAL INCIDENTS AND, WITH RARE EXCEPTIONS, NO DISCIPLINE
Chinedu Okobi was a Black man walking in a city where people of his race make up less than 1% of the population. And when he began acting oddly on an October afternoon in 2018, wandering into traffic on El Camino
Real in Millbrae, sheriff’s deputies quickly arrived.
Okobi, who wasn’t armed, tried to walk away when an officer questioned him. Minutes later, the father and Morehouse College graduate who had battled with mental illness was dead, stunned seven times with a Taser by a San Mateo County deputy until his heart gave out. At one point, he is heard screaming on a video, “somebody help me,” before deputies pile on top of him.
“If officers had done that to a dog, people would be up in arms,” said Ebele Okobi, who has pushed in vain for someone to be held accountable for her brother’s death. “He kept saying, ‘What did I do?
Help me.’ But there was no one.”
Many in the ultra-liberal Bay Area imagine the region lies a world away from Minneapolis or Atlanta or Louisville, where the killings of unarmed Black people have ignited a national reckoning over police violence and race. But a Bay Area News Group review of 110 law enforcement killings in the five-county Bay Area since 2015 tells a different story.
While Black people make up only 7% of the combined population of Alameda, Contra Costa, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, they accounted for a staggering 27% of those killed by police in the region since 2015, the news organization’s analysis found.
And that translates to one of the largest such disparities in the
nation. A new study from researchers at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that Black people here are more likely to be killed by police than in any other metro area in America but Oklahoma City.
Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton called it “extremely disheartening.”
That isn’t the only alarming trend.
Toxic mix, lethal consequences
About 1 out of 5 people killed by police — like Okobi — were not armed, the analysis found. And 40% of those who were unarmed were Black.
Overall, a majority of those killed were experiencing some kind of mental health crisis.
Before the deadly encounters, there was no evidence that nearly 45% of those killed, including Okobi, were committing any kind of violent crime.
And those findings don’t include the Solano County city of Vallejo, which has been plagued by questionable police shootings of Black people and is being investigated by the state attorney general.
What they do clearly show is how the combination of race, mental illness and aggressive policing often fuel a toxic mix of misunderstandings with lethal consequences.
To be sure, several of those killed by police were stone-cold “bad guys” who were threatening lives after killing others, including a San Jose police officer. Reviews of many of those cases show officers clearly under attack, risking their lives when a fatal outcome would have been difficult, if not impossible, to avoid.
But there were many examples that raised significant questions about officers’ decisions — and district attorneys’ overwhelming propensity to justify the fatal results. An expolice officer-turned-sociology professor who reviewed a video last week of Okobi’s death at this news organization’s request called it “cops gone wild” and a travesty that the officers were neither disciplined nor criminally charged.
Like Okobi, Roy Nelson Jr. was an unarmed Black man with a history of schizophrenia, suffering a mental health episode and committing no crime when his ex-wife called 911 to report he was hallucinating and needed psychiatric help. He was later found to have methamphetamine in his system.
“I can’t breathe,” Nelson insists on a video recorded by Hayward police after a group of officers pulled him from a patrol car because he wouldn’t stop kicking the door. The officers handcuff the 300-pound man, face down on the ground, then try to wrap him in a restraint similar to a straitjacket.
“I can’t breathe,” he says again, in a plea that feels even more harrowing five years later, after George Floyd repeatedly uttered that same phrase and died under a police officer’s knee in Minneapolis.
Roy Nelson died too. So did Rakeem Rucks, who also yelled, “I can’t breathe,” while face down in the dirt as Antioch cops piled on top of him in 2015 after finding him in an altered state, high on methamphetamine. According to a lawsuit filed by Rucks’ family, officers put their knees on his neck as he struggled until his death.
None of the officers in any of those deadly encounters were disciplined.
In fact, there is one constant in each of the 110 cases examined: Not a single officer who killed someone in the Bay Area in the past 5 1/2 years has been prosecuted. Only once has a police chief fired an officer.
Equating race with danger?
Over the past month, the streets of the Bay Area have come alive with protests over Floyd’s death. But the stark facts about who dies at the hands of police in the Bay Area suggest there is plenty right here to fuel the debate over policing and racial justice.
Perhaps no one knows that better than Oakland civil rights lawyer John Burris.
“Historically, police officers in this area are much quicker to shoot against African Americans than they are others,” said Burris, who has sued police departments in California hundreds of times and has represented the families of Okobi, Nelson and Rucks in excessive-force lawsuits.
“The part that’s most troubling to me,” Burris said, is “the lack of respect for Black lives and consideration for the collateral damage it causes.”
The research is clear — race matters. Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University law professor, recently co-wrote a paper based on thousands of cases that found police in the U.S. are more than twice as likely to shoot Black people than people of other races.
“It doesn’t matter if they are armed or unarmed, or if they are in a mental health crisis or not. Or if they are neither armed nor mentally ill. Regardless of the circumstances, regardless of whether they are standing still, whether they are attacking, or withdrawing, Black people are always going to be more likely to be shot,” Fagan said in an interview.
“We don’t know if (the reason) is implicit bias,” he said. What is clear, he said, is that “police equate race with danger.”
Alice Huffman, president of the California and Hawaii NAACP, said Black people know why.
“We can’t pin it on racism, but we know it is,” she said. Law enforcement investigations of police killings are often “halfassed and not on point,” and when racist tactics or cops are exposed, “it’s because someone is already dead.”
Nikki Romans sees it differently. Her late husband, Sgt. Ervin Romans, was one of four Oakland police officers killed in March 2009 by an ex-convict on the deadliest day for law enforcement in the city’s history.
“I hate that they are putting the stigma on all these officers. There’s Black officers who have been in shootings,” said Romans, whose father was Black and mother is white. She makes a point of never mentioning the race of Lovelle Mixon, her husband’s killer, who was Black.
“Any time I’ve spoken about the guy who killed my husband, anytime I would bring it up, I always said it was a bad person,” she said. “A bad person killed my husband that day.”
Policing mental health
People of color accounted for more than two-thirds of the deaths in the news organization’s survey, and, for Latinos, the numbers also are eye-opening: While about 30% of the people killed by Bay Area law enforcement since 2015 were Latinos, they make up only 20% of the five-county region’s population.
Asians, on the other hand, represent about 34% of the population but were only 10% of those killed by police. Whites are 37% of the Bay Area and accounted for 32% of deaths at the hands of police.
The numbers on mental illness among those killed also were striking. In the news organization’s review of 72 cases that included information about mental health, two-thirds of the people killed were experiencing some kind of issue.
Across the country, police are the predominant first responders to 911 calls about mental health emergencies. Getting them out of that business has been a significant focus of the many police reform efforts spurred by the recent protests. In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed’s defunding plan proposes that trained, unarmed professionals replace police in responding to such noncriminal matters.
Even many police officials agree changes need to be made.
“This idea that the police do too much is not a new phenomenon. We do too much when it comes to mental illness. We don’t have what we need yet,” said San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia. “We have ambulances for the physically injured, and I have no idea why we don’t have ambulances driving around to respond to mental illness.”
Discipline is rare
But of all the issues stoking public intolerance of policing-as-usual, the flashpoint may be how the justice system treats cops who kill — even as the dramatic police violence is increasingly captured on smartphone videos and officers’ body cameras. The Bay Area News Group review found little evidence of accountability.
Only once in the 110 killings was an officer outright fired by his department — San Francisco police Officer Chris Samayoa had been on the job for only four days and was on probation when he fatally shot Keita O’neil, an unarmed Black man running from police after a carjacking.
The only other officers who were disciplined for policy violations — two in a pair of San Francisco PD cases, and five officers in Oakland for one fatal shooting — were punished through oversight panels, not the departments themselves.
The San Jose Police Department in the Bay Area’s largest city was responsible for most of the deadly encounters in the survey — 19. Nine of those killed were Latinos and one was a Black person. The department has cleared its officers in all of those killings, including the 2018 Christmas Day fatal encounter with 24-year-old Jennifer Vazquez, who was killed after a high-speed chase. After the shooting, police realized a witness had given them bad information and they had been chasing the wrong car.
But Garcia, one of the first big-city police chiefs to publicly condemn Minneapolis officers in the George Floyd case, insists he reviews his officers’ use of force with a sharp eye. He said he has disciplined officers for shooting at moving cars in nonfatal cases.
“We have changed policies even though an officer was cleared,” Garcia said.
Other law enforcement officials, like San Joaquin County District Attorney Tori Verber Salazar, say the road to holding police responsible for their violent acts is a hard one. Police unions, pro-police groups and trade associations wield immense power in the state, and district attorneys work with and depend on police officers daily to win convictions.
“Any district attorney who says they don’t consider that when making a (charging) decision is lying,” said Salazar, who took the extraordinarily rare step of charging a Stanislaus County deputy with involuntary manslaughter in the 2017 shooting death of a woman whose husband said was having a bipolar episode when she failed to pull over for police.
Stanislaus County sheriff’s Deputy Justin Wall shot and killed Evin Olsen Yadegar, 46, as she tried to slowly pull around several police vehicles. A video of the shooting shows Wall aiming his handgun into the passenger-side window of the car. Neither he nor any other officer was in Yadegar’s path when he fired four shots.
Salazar said it is not the job of a district attorney to “save (an officer’s) job” when one commits a crime. While some of the state’s 57 other district attorneys have been supportive of her for taking on the case, she said, others “want to distance themselves from me.”
The news organization’s analysis did not include jail deaths, such as the 2015 fatal beating of a bipolar inmate that led to seconddegree murder convictions for three Santa Clara County corrections officers.
There hasn’t been a cop prosecuted in a killing in the Bay Area since thenBART Officer Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant in the back as the unarmed Black man lay handcuffed on the platform of the Fruitvale BART station on Jan. 1, 2009. The highprofile case was moved to Los Angeles, where a jury found Mehserle guilty of a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter, sparking protests in Oakland.
Becton, the Bay Area’s only Black district attorney, said it’s clear something has changed.
“This time where we find ourselves, especially focusing on the recent murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor (in Kentucky), just really underscored the importance of having more accountability and more transparency in our criminal justice system,” Becton said. “This is not just a moment, it really is a movement that will move the needle in terms of how we do business.”
‘Policing at its worst’
In the decade since Grant’s death, the statistics of unarmed Black men dying at the hands of police continue to mount into an enduring stain.
How Chinedu Okobi ended up on that list sparked only modest public protest — and might have been ignored altogether, had his sister not had passion and a powerful platform. Ebele Okobi, a Facebook employee in London, recently spoke about her experience with her brother’s death during the company’s Juneteenth staff seminar alongside others who lost loved ones in killings that shook the Black community, including Sandra Bland’s sister and Trayvon Martin’s mother.
She is highly critical of San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe, who cleared the officers involved in Okobi’s death, a decision he defended in an interview last week.
“As I looked at the conduct, he wasn’t complying with them, he was resisting,” Wagstaffe said. The officer “who fired his Taser was following his training,” and “unfortunately (Okobi’s) body could not take the electrical charge,” and his heart stopped.
San Mateo County Sheriff Carlos Bolanos, who did not respond to interview requests, found that his officers had violated no department policies.
But the retired Boston police lieutenant who reviewed the video of Okobi’s death blasted both Wagstaffe and Bolanos for their decisions.
Okobi’s death was “policing at its worst: by chaos, confusion, and crisis,” said Thomas Nolan, who is now a visiting associate professor of sociology at Emmanuel College in Boston.
Wagstaffe’s decision not to charge the officers “with at least manslaughter in Mr. Okobi’s killing is a miscarriage of justice and one that rightfully erodes the public’s confidence and trust in the criminal justice system and in particular law enforcement’s treatment of people of color,” Nolan said.
He also criticized Bolanos, saying any use of force policy that “in some sort of twisted and bizarre interpretation” justified the actions of the officers who confronted Okobi “should be scrapped and rewritten.”
After enduring the scenes of her brother’s death, Ebele Okobi said she can’t bring herself to watch footage of other people killed by police — again and again.
“Reading about George Floyd,” she said, “and hearing the last words he said, he called for his mother, that to me should be a fundamental demonstration of how inhumane it is to be murdered in the middle of the street.”