San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — Four San Francisco police officers who had faced possible dismissal for a 2004 shooting death that caused an uproar in the Western Addition have been cleared of all disciplinary charges, five years after the case against them was filed.
The city’s civilian-run police watchdog agency filed a disciplinary complaint against the officers one year after 29-year-old Cammerin Boyd was shot to death May 5, 2004, after a car chase. The complaint accused two of the officers of using excessive force and two others of wrongly chasing Boyd, who was a suspect in an attempted kidnapping.
Boyd’s mother also sued the city and eventually lost, but the disciplinary charges against four officers lingered until last week.
That’s when the watchdog agency, the Office of Citizen Complaints, withdrew charges against three of the four officers and the Police Commission cleared the fourth, 43-year-old Timothy Paine.
Paine and his partner, Officer James O’Malley, 40, had been accused of improperly firing their guns. Also cleared were Officers Ferdinand Dimapasoc, 43, and Owen Sweeney III, 61, who had been charged with violating the police policy on pursuits.
Chief bypassed
The Office of Citizen Complaints filed the charges with the Police Commission, bypassing then-Police Chief Heather Fong.
Boyd had a history of run-ins with police. Three days before San Francisco police shot him, he led Oakland officers on an 80-mph chase through that city after fleeing from a traffic stop. He was out on bail when he was killed.
The events that led to Boyd’s death began when a woman flagged down police at the corner of Eddy and Laguna streets and said a man with a gun in a black SUV had tried to kidnap her.
Officers spotted Boyd’s rented Chevy Blazer nearby and followed him. Paine was driving an unmarked police car, and as Boyd sped down Turk Street, the disciplinary charges alleged, Paine fired a shot after another officer involved in the chase said Boyd had shot at him.
No imminent danger
The Office of Citizen Complaints said Paine had no justification for firing because there was “no objective evidence” to show that anyone was in imminent danger, or that officers had exhausted all reasonable means of apprehension.
Once the chase ended on Larch Way outside the Plaza East public housing project, O’Malley yelled at Boyd to put his hands up, the charges said. O’Malley then fired, and other officers, hearing the shots, fired as well, the charges said.
The Office of Citizen Complaints said O’Malley had told investigators that he thought the SUV was moving and that he was afraid Boyd would escape. However, he didn’t say Boyd posed an immediate threat, according to the charges.
Although District Attorney Kamala Harris found that Boyd had fired at least one shot as the chase ended, O’Malley didn’t cite that to the Officer of Citizen Complaints as a reason for shooting.
Some were upset
The shooting angered some Western Addition residents who believed Boyd had been trying to surrender.
At Boyd’s funeral, Van Jones, then executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and later an environmental adviser to President Obama, said, “We are being squeezed between street violence and police violence, between the police not being there and then police overkill.”
The Office of Citizen Complaints did not give a reason for dropping the charges against the three officers before a Police Commission hearing Wednesday on the case against Paine, said the panel’s president, Joe Marshall. The panel found in Paine’s favor.
‘Unacceptable’ delay
Police Commissioner Jim Hammer, who oversaw the evidentiary hearing for Paine and the other officers, said he had concluded that the four did nothing wrong.
“I do commend the OCC for, at the end of the day, dismissing charges they could not prove,” Hammer said.
He said it was “absolutely unacceptable” that the case had taken five years to resolve.
The commission has been struggling to clear a backlog of disciplinary cases. The panel voted Wednesday to require that a hearing on charges against an officer be held within 90 days of a case being filed.
Copyright 2010 San Francisco Chronicle