S.F. settles suit over racial bias in arrests
$225,500 payout in case of Tenderloin drug sting
San Francisco officials have agreed to pay $225,500 to settle a lawsuit brought by seven black men and women who said city police officers and federal agents singled them out because of their race during a sting operation intended to arrest dealers peddling drugs near schools.
The seven individuals were all arrested as part of Operation Safe Schools, a joint initiative between federal law enforcement agencies and the San Francisco Police Department intended to arrest drug dealers conducting business near schools in the Tenderloin — a neighborhood rife with handtohand drug transactions.
Federal law carries a oneyear minimum sentence for anyone arrested and convicted of dealing within 1,000 feet of a school. Thirtyseven people were arrested as part of the joint operation — in which San Francisco police were tasked with identifying suspects and making arrests — in two waves, from August to November 2013 and from October to December 2014.
All of the 37 people arrested were black “even though the Tenderloin is a diverse area where people of all races openly sell drugs,”
said the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which represented the seven defendants in their case against the city alongside attorneys from the law firm Durie Tangri.
“These are not people who would otherwise ever be on the federal government’s radar in any way, shape or form,” said Shilpi Agarwal, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.
Some of the defendants pleaded guilty to drug charges, but 12 decided to fight their cases. Federal prosecutors abruptly dropped their charges, however, when attorneys for the alleged dealers uncovered evidence of racial targeting by police during the discovery process before trial. The lawsuit against the city also referenced the Police Department’s history of racial bias, including the racist text message scandal that rocked the department when the messages surfaced in 2015.
Agarwal said federal prosecutors are protected by immunity laws shielding them from lawsuits, leaving little chance that anyone would sue the federal government over the racial targeting.
So the attorneys turned instead to San Francisco, alleging in a 2018 lawsuit that police specifically targeted black people for arrest during the Safe Schools operation. Seven individuals, including the lead plaintiff, Tiffany Cross, decided to join the suit against the city.
“The federal prosecution I went through was extremely stressful mostly because I was faced every day with the possibility of having to leave my kids,” Cross said in a statement.
John Coté, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office, emphasized that “the federal government led this operation, and San Francisco police officers acted in accordance with federal directives. The San Francisco Police Department did not intentionally discriminate during this federal operation, and the plaintiffs have agreed to dismiss the individual officers from the lawsuit.”
David Stevenson, a spokesman for the Police Department, declined to comment on the settlement, referring all questions to the city attorney’s office.
As part of the settlement, San Francisco’s Department of Police Accountability will also be required to include a new “racial bias” category on police citizen complaint forms in an effort to make it easier for victims of racial profiling to seek compensation.