Video spurs police reforms
But skeptics worry SFPD’s changes won’t go far enough
The aftermath of the fatal shooting of Mario Woods by San Francisco police officers Dec. 2 has followed a script that’s become sadly familiar in the wake of numerous similar killings across the nation in recent years.
Video emerges of the incident, raising serious questions about whether police acted properly. An outraged community calls for justice and for the chief ’s resignation. Civil rights attorneys file a lawsuit, demanding information police department officials say they cannot give.
But the shooting, in which at least five officers opened fire on a limping man they say was armed with a knife, has also led city officials to begin examining the factors that could have played a part in the killing.
Experts and critics say that however the investigations into the Woods shooting play out, the question is not whether it will change how San Francisco operates when it comes to officer-involved shootings. It’s whether the city will go far enough to prevent the same outcome the next time.
“As taxpayers and as San Francisco residents, we need to be committed to ensuring that the institutions that are meant to protect and serve us fulfill their mission in a way that allows us to exist and to feel safe in our communities,” said
Samuel Sinyangwe, a San Francisco policy expert with Campaign Zero, a plan born from the Black Lives Matter movement focused on ending officerinvolved killings. “I think there is a moment now where the community has demanded change, and the institutions have begun to take notice.”
The way police treat people in their communities needs to be reformed, the Rev. Amos Brown, head of the city’s NAACP chapter, said Saturday night.
“We don’t need Tasers, we need trust,” Brown said. “We don’t need shields, we need common sense.”
Changing police tactics
Since the shooting, police Chief Greg Suhr has reached out to a national policing organization to explore new deescalation techniques. The Police Commission has reopened the discussion on the department’s use-of-force policy for the first time since 1995. Patrol cars are being stocked with protective shields, and the debate over whether to arm officers with stun guns is back in full swing.
“I don’t know if there is anybody I’ve talked to inside or outside the department that didn’t find the video upsetting,” Suhr told the Police Commission on Wednesday. “A lot of things are in motion already, and a lot of things will unfold in the next 30 days.”
Many use-of-force experts and community advocates lauded the efforts to reform policy and training, but some said more needs to be done. Some are suggesting that state legislators need to look into fixing laws so that what happened to Woods won’t ever happen again.
Woods was shot to death by officers in the Bayview district. He was the suspect in a stabbing, and police say he was still armed with the kitchen knife used in the earlier crime.
The chief said the officers — identified Friday as Winson Seto, Antonio Santos, Charles August, Nicholas Cuevas and Scott Phillips — had no choice but to use lethal force after attempts to disarm Woods with beanbag rounds and pepper spray were unsuccessful.
Three separate investigations into the shooting are ongoing, but experts say the shooting most likely will be ruled justified — and an indicator of a need for reform.
“This is a situation where probably the police use of deadly force was within conventional practice,” said Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley criminologist and law professor. “But when you look at the video, you will say that the conventional practice has to be wrong. This is a place where criminal law fails and police training standards fail. They fail not because they disallow this and we didn’t catch it, but because they allow it and it was unnecessary.”
Factors in judging a killing
Investigators looking into officer-involved shootings follow several guidelines in determining justification, with the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case Graham vs. Norton being the most significant.
The case establishes three factors under which to judge a killing: the seriousness of what the subject is accused of, whether the subject is trying to flee, and whether the subject constitutes an immediate threat. It also requires investigators to judge the “reasonableness” of a particular use of force from the perspective of an officer on the scene, and essentially not overthink what went into a splitsecond decision.
“The law is there to protect the police,” said Ed Obayashi, an instructor at the Alameda County Regional Training Center on use-of-force investigations. “There is a public policy basis for laws, and the public policy basis for giving the officers this level of protection is so they don’t hesitate in doing their jobs.”
Training and policy reform is something the American Civil Liberties Union is advocating in the wake of the Woods shooting. Micaela Davis, an ACLU staff attorney, said San Francisco officers need to put more emphasis on crisis-intervention training — how they respond to subjects in mental distress. Woods’ family said he may have been suffering from a psychiatric breakdown at the time of his death.
Police Commission President Suzy Loftus said 400 officers have been certified in crisisintervention training in the department of about 2,100. For the first time, police academy recruits must undergo as many hours of training for crisis intervention as they undergo for firearms.
In addition, Davis said officers need training in implicit racial bias, which Suhr said has already begun at the police academy.
Greater public access sought
On a state level, Davis suggested changing laws to allow the public access to police conduct records. A 2006 California Supreme Court Case, Copley Press vs. Superior Court, held that misconduct charges are confidential.
“At the end of the day, these are public servants who are armed with firearms and are acting in our name,” Davis said. “We deserve to know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it, and we deserve to be making our own decisions about why that’s proper.”
Others are pushing for the state to reform the investigation process for officer-involved incidents. One bill would create a special a state independent law enforcement panel to investigate such cases.
In San Francisco, the district attorney’s office investigates and determines whether to take criminal action in use-of-force incidents. No officer in San Francisco in recent history has been brought up on charges for an on-duty killing.
“It’s hard for a prosecutor to think of the cops as a bad guy — they work with them,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force.
District Attorney George Gascón declined to comment. Attorney General Kamala Harris told The Chronicle last year that she thought the current system had enough safeguards.
Though she could not comment on the Woods shooting, Loftus said she is committed to making sure the department and the commission make good reforms in the wake of his death.
“I’m an optimist,” she said. “I hope that at our next meeting that what we are trying to do will be clear.”