San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ACLU attorney kept an eye on police
John Crew was a young American Civil Liberties Union lawyer in 1984 when his office in San Francisco heard that police were demanding identification cards from homeless people and arresting those who had none. He was sent to the scene and received less than a warm welcome.
“They demanded to know what I was doing. Demanded my ID, got angry, seized my notebook, put me in handcuffs, put me in a patrol wagon,” Crew recalled in a 2020 interview with Steve Zeltzer of the San Francisco Labor Video Project. That was despite the fact, he said, that “the law said if you’re not reasonably suspected of a crime, you didn’t have to produce ID.”
Crew was not prosecuted, and the case instead led to a monetary settlement by the city, said Alan Schlosser, who was then legal director of the ACLU of Northern California, based in San Francisco. More importantly, it led to an acknowledgment by San Francisco police — still inscribed in their department’s policy manual — that people have the right to observe and film officers’ contacts with suspects and do not have to identify themselves unless they are reasonably suspected of a crime. It was one of several policy changes Crew initiated in decades of interactions with the SFPD.
“John’s instincts were to go out in the street and see what the problem was,” and he was “the most relentless advocate I’ve ever seen,” said Schlosser, who hired Crew as an intern in 1981, when he was still a law student at UC Hastings, and worked with him for 40 years.
Crew was “spirited, funny, passionate and a ceaseless whirlwind of ideas, strategies, and insights regarding how best to fight the police and achieve something like accountability, if not justice,” said Michelle Alexander, author of the 2010 best-seller “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” She worked with Crew while she led the San Francisco ACLU’s Racial Justice Project, starting in 1998, and he was director of the office’s Police Practices Project.
Crew, who devoted his legal career to police oversight, died Oct. 7 at age 65. Friends said his body was found in his car that morning, at his home in the Noe Valley neighborhood. The night before, he had given a passionate speech at a fundraiser for John Hamasaki, a former San Francisco Police Commission member who is running for district attorney.
“John had a sense of community like none other. He changed the world, block by block, meeting by meeting,” said Tom Yankowski, a neighbor for more than 20 years. He recalled Crew’s participation in block parties and other outdoor get-togethers, political meetings and projects to help the needy, while raising two biracial daughters with his wife, Sheila Gadsden, who died of cancer 10 years ago. About 45 neighbors attended an informal memorial in his honor, Yankowski said. A formal memorial service is being planned.
Crew was born in Los Angeles, attended Northwestern University and joined the ACLU during his last year at UC Hastings. He spent about 15 years as director of the Northern California office’s Police Practices Project, left in 2001, but continued working with the ACLU for the next two decades, focusing on law enforcement policies in California and other states, said Carmen King, a spokesperson for the office. He served as the office’s interim executive director in 2008-09.
One early assignment was to monitor police treatment of demonstrators at the 1984 Democratic National Convention at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Schlosser said Crew headed for the streets and found onlookers whose observations were used in a lawsuit against the city. And after police mounted horses to break up the protests and make arrests, Crew negotiated another new policy — also still in effect — that prohibits San Francisco officers from using horses to “move or disperse passive individuals who are sitting or lying down,” bans driving motorcycles into crowds and generally bars interfering with demonstrations unless there is evidence of a risk to public safety.
Since then,“San Francisco has had remarkably few problems with police and demonstrators, and it has a lot to do with John’s work,” Schlosser said. “John was at Police Commission meetings every week, pushing them on how important it was to have police accountability.”
He said Crew also won passage of an ordinance limiting police surveillance of political activities, and later campaigned successfully to discourage San Francisco from joining the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, which gathers information on suspected terrorists and their supporters.
Perhaps his most satisfying victory came in 2018, when the San Francisco Police Officers Association sponsored a ballot measure, Proposition H, to give officers more latitude on using Taser stun guns on suspects, Schlosser said. The police union, arguing that Tasers save lives, had a huge fundraising advantage, and “everybody thought it was a hopeless battle,” Schlosser said. But Crew, who believed Tasers actually lead to the use of deadly force, mounted a determined campaign against Prop. H, and it was rejected by more than 60% of the city’s voters.
“He knew the ins and outs of how police departments were run and how they should be run,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Hastings who worked with Crew as a civil rights attorney. “I would see Police Commission members (before a meeting) and they would say, ‘Oh God, we’re going to get schooled.’ ”
His relations with police were generally unfriendly but, for the most part, respectful.
“They hated him at the Police Department, though I think there are many police officers who saw that what he wanted was for them to have the tools and standards to be professional,” said Samara Marion, who spent 20 years with the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability, formerly known as the Office of Citizen Complaints. “He was ... incredibly generous, kind, thoughtful. Even those who hated him in the Police Department respected him.”
Paul Henderson, director of the Department of Police Accountability, said in a statement that “John Crew was an important critical voice in San Francisco police reform and a key driver of several current SFPD policies. Whether you were the chief, a commissioner or director of DPA, John held us all to a higher standard.”
Tracy McCray, president of the Police Officers Association, told the San Francisco Standard that Crew “was a staunch advocate and a good sparring partner. He fought for what he believed in; it doesn’t matter what side you were on.”
One former officer who is particularly grateful to Crew is Capt. Yulanda Williams, who retired in June after 32 years on the force and is still president of Officers for Justice, which advocates for racial equality among police. In 2015, she learned she had been one of the targets of racist and sexist text messages from other officers. The thousands of texts, written by at least 14 officers in 2011 and 2012, called Black people “monkeys” and encouraged the killing of “half-breeds,” among other slurs. Most of the officers were suspended or fired, and prosecutors had to dismiss criminal charges in some of the cases the officers had investigated.
Crew “didn’t know me before that,” but “reached out immediately to offer support,” said Williams, who is Black. “He brought in the ACLU, community members . ... He provided not only moral support but resources so I could find within me the ability to do my complete career.
“In every sense of the word,” she said, “he was a warrior for social justice.”
Crew is survived by his daughters, Simone Crew, 31, and Erica Crew, 27.