By Vivian Ho
San Francisco Chronicle
SAN FRANCISCO — As organizers work to promote what is thought to be the first nationally crafted plan by activists spawned from demonstrations against police killings from Oakland to Ferguson, San Francisco police officials say they’re open to the plan’s recommendations — mostly because they have already begun to make many of the suggested reforms.
However, the Black Lives Matter activists who developed the Campaign Zero plan say much work is still needed by all police departments to bring down the number of killings by law enforcement officers nationwide. And San Francisco, with a flurry of recent controversies despite its progressive reputation, is not foolproof.
Campaign Zero comes a year after protests erupted across the country following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., at the hands of police Officer Darren Wilson. The protests, and the Black Lives Matter movement that helped organize them, grew with each subsequent law enforcement killing of unarmed black men and women.
“The movement’s been a year of helping people understand that the issue is a lot closer to them than they originally thought,” said DeRay Mckesson, an activist who rose to prominence during the Ferguson demonstrations and is a member of the Campaign Zero planning team. “People across the country now realize there’s a crisis. Campaign Zero is a focus on how to end it.”
10 Areas For Reform
The plan highlights 10 areas for reform that include civilian oversight, better training in de-escalation and understanding of subconscious bias, the use of body cameras, more diversity in police forces and de-prioritizing minor quality-of-life offenses that tend to disproportionately criminalize low-income communities of color.
The recommendations draw from protester input, practices already in place by police departments and the Department of Justice’s Ferguson Report. They also mirror many of the suggestions made by President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing — a report that San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr said his department is working to follow.
He said because of that, the department has already implemented many of Campaign Zero’s suggested reforms. A proposed policy for body cameras is expected to be presented in front of the Police Commission next week, every police recruit that graduates from the academy is certified in crisis intervention, and the department is working to train everybody in identifying implicit bias.
Known For Diversity
The department has also been known for its push for diversity, with officials issuing a call for Asian women officers this month. And the city’s Charter policies for its Police Commission and Office of Citizen Complaints are cited in the Campaign Zero plan as examples to follow.
“San Francisco has played a role in treating police-community relationships differently for a long time,” said Suzy Loftus, Police Commission president. “We’ve made progress and I think it’s important to note that many other communities across the nation are just beginning to have a conversation.”
Loftus said the commission is working to create a department general order based on a bulletin issued by Suhr in 2011 that follows Campaign Zero’s suggestion to reduce use-of-force situations and de-escalate tension in confrontations. The bulletin called for creating time and distance when an individual is considered a threat to only him or herself.
But Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy expert on the Campaign Zero planning team, said his experiences living in the Tenderloin neighborhood suggest that there’s room for improvement.
“You routinely see people getting stopped by police and frisked in some instances for just standing on the sidewalk,” he said. “When you see these practices happening, it targets people who are low-income, black and homeless. You have black folks as 6 percent of the population and 40 percent of those arrested. That points to a wider problem of discriminatory policing that a lot of the reforms in Campaign Zero can stop.”
San Francisco police have also come under fire in the past year for racist and antigay text messages exchanged between officers and, more recently, for a video depicting 14 officers arresting a one-legged homeless man that many criticized as being an unnecessary display of force.
Questions For SFPD
Several killings by San Francisco police officers have also ignited protests, including several after two plainclothes officers in February fatally shot Amilcar Perez-Lopez, a 20-year-old Guatemalan immigrant living in the Mission District. Officials said he was killed because he lunged at them with a knife after he had attempted to steal a bicycle. An independent autopsy report conducted by a family attorney found that Perez-Lopez had been shot in the back.
The fatal shootings of Alex Nieto and O’Shaine Evans in 2014 also led to protests, questions of the Police Department’s narrative of each killing and claims filed against the city.
Suhr said his officers in the Tenderloin are mostly responding to complaints filed by neighborhood residents, and that they do not intentionally target low-income people of color. He said his officers only use lethal force in defense of themselves and others, as is department policy.
“What would be nice is if nobody ever used a weapon or pointed a weapon or threatened a police officer or another citizen with a weapon,” he said. “The officers have a right to defend themselves.”
He said that though he hasn’t talked to Campaign Zero organizers, he’s open to it. In the end, Suhr said, his police officers don’t wish to kill anybody either.
“Every single one of these situations is a tragedy, and hard on everybody involved,” he said. “If there never had to be another one, I don’t think there’s a police chief, police officer or anybody that wouldn’t be happy.”
Copyright 2015 the San Francisco Chronicle