Changing times:
Evolving state laws and reformminded district attorneys are making cases to hold police accountable for killings more likely in the Bay Area.
For decades, prosecutors in the Bay Area rarely charged police officers who killed civilians while on the job.
These onduty incidents — often shootings of people of color — were typically shielded from public scrutiny: Police controlled the investigations, making it difficult for prosecutors to build their cases. And district attorneys, who traditionally have worked closely with law enforcement, had little reason to threaten those relationships.
Yet the winds appeared to be shifting even before officials from San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s office walked into the Hall of Justice on Monday morning to file manslaughter charges and an arrest warrant for the officer who fatally shot 42yearold Keita O’Neil in 2017.
The charges against former San Francisco Police Department Officer Christopher Samayoa marked the city’s first homicide case for a police use of force, and the third such prosecution in the Bay Area. In September, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley charged San Leandro police Officer Jason Fletcher with manslaughter for the April shooting of 33yearold Steven Taylor in a Walmart.
In recent weeks, O’Malley also pledged to reopen the investigation into the 2009 fatal shooting of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer, the Bay Area’s first homicide prosecution of a police officer on duty. Johannes Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 2010, but other officers at the scene were not charged — something legal observers expect O’Malley will take on.
“You have in the Bay Area the preconditions for there to be more activity on this front,” said Jack Glaser, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. He noted that several progressive attorneys have won top prosecutor seats throughout the region in recent years: Boudin in San Francisco, Diana Becton in Contra Costa County and Tori Verber Salazar in San Joaquin County.
Then there is O’Malley, who is considered a moderate in the Bay Area, but would likely qualify as liberal in most other parts of the country. And Boudin’s predecessor, progressive George Gascón, is now set to bring his ideals to Southern California after recently clinching a hardfought election for the district attorney seat in Los Angeles.
To some degree, state laws have evolved in these progressive prosecutors’ favor: Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB392, which restricts officers from using deadly force unless it is “necessary” to prevent an immediate threat to someone’s life, or to catch a person fleeing after committing a violent felony.
More importantly, public sentiment has turned, Glaser said: First with the inception of cell phones and social media; and again with the particularly shocking, nineminute killing of Floyd.
Like Floyd, O’Neil, Grant and Taylor were Black men.
“What Black people in America have known for centuries — that they are subjected to disproportionately excessive force by the police — the rest of the country is waking up to, in the face of this video evidence,” Glaser said.
The initial turning point came a decade ago, with the death of Grant. Some legal observers remember it as the most consequential moment for police accountability since the 1991 videotaped beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. Grant’s killing set in motion a form of citizen documentary, in which witnesses captured stunning useofforce incidents on cell phones and uploaded the footage to YouTube and other social media.
Still, in spite of recent charging decisions and campaign promises to be tough on law enforcement, Oakland civil rights attorney John Burris said he wonders how long prosecutors will be willing to stay the course.
“The question is — is this a moment, or a movement?” asked Burris, who represented Grant’s family members and friends in federal civil rights suits against BART.
He said he wants to see “fewer officers killing people without any repercussions.” Burris also has a list of untried killings by police officers that he said deserve a second look. Among them is the case of Mack “Jody” Woodfox, an unarmed man who was running from a car in Oakland’s Fruitvale district when an officer shot and killed him in 2008.
Other test cases loom in the months ahead. In Solano County, the district attorney is still investigating the June shooting of 22yearold Sean Monterrosa, who was kneeling outside a Vallejo Walgreens when police arrived to check out a report that a store had been broken into and was being robbed. Officer Jarrett Tonn spotted Monterrosa with a bulge in his sweatshirt pocket and shot him from the back seat of a police pickup truck. The bulge turned out to be a hammer.
And in Contra Costa County, Becton is weighing whether to charge Danville Officer Andrew Hall for shooting an unarmed man, Laudemer Arboleda, through the passenger side window of Arboleda’s Honda in 2018. Officers responding to a report of a suspicious person confronted Arboleda on a residential street; they began following him when he ignored their commands, got into his car and drove away. Hall said he shot in selfdefense, fearing the fleeing vehicle would hit him.
While these decisions play out across the Bay Area, Boudin sought to assure his city’s residents that, in bringing charges in the O’Neil case, he was serious about holding law enforcement accountable going forward.
“In San Francisco, there has been a long history of officerinvolved shootings leading to no accountability whatsoever, further cementing the idea that police are above the law,” Boudin told reporters, gathered at the steps of the Hall of justice. “That stops today.”