San Francisco’s Police Problem

Public Servants or Occupying Army?

In the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, many white people woke up to a reality that was hardly news in most communities of color, where death-by-police is all too common. What’s new is that the rest of us are suddenly hearing about the Eric Garners, Freddie Grays, and Sandra Blands who die literally every day in this country.

The rest of the United States is beginning to understand what the police already represent to so many communities from Ferguson to Baltimore to Waller County, Texas, to—yes—San Francisco. Far from seeing the police as a source of help and protection, many Americans feel the same way about them as people living under corrupt authoritarian regimes feel about their police or armies. They see them as an occupying force, not there to protect and serve but to frighten and extort.

Many Americans are not used to thinking of our police as agents of extortion, but a recent Justice Department (DOJ) report on the police and the municipal courts of Ferguson, for instance, tells a different story. The department found that “City officials have consistently set maximizing revenue as the priority for Ferguson’s law enforcement activity. Ferguson generates a significant and increasing amount of revenue from the enforcement of code provisions.” The Harvard Law Review reported that in 2013, Ferguson issued more arrest warrants than the city has residents—one and a half for every citizen. The report adds:

In Ferguson, residents who fall behind on fines and don’t appear in court after a warrant is issued for their arrest (or arrive in court after the courtroom doors close, which often happens just five minutes after the session is set to start for the day) are charged an additional $120 to $130 fine, along with a $50 fee for a new arrest warrant and 56 cents for each mile that police drive to serve it. Once arrested, everyone who can’t pay their fines or post bail (which is usually set to equal the amount of their total debt) is imprisoned until the next court session (which happens three days a month). Anyone who is imprisoned is charged $30 to $60 a night by the jail.

After the Justice Department released the report, the city spent six months negotiating with the DOJ on a complete overhaul of its police and courts. But when Ferguson’s own negotiators brought this proposed “consent decree” to the city council, the council members rejected it. So now the Justice Department has announced that it will sue Ferguson to force it to make changes that the city insists will cost too much. “There is no cost for constitutional policing,” says Attorney General Loretta Lynch. She’s right. What she didn’t say, because she shouldn’t have to, is that the costs of unconstitutional policing include ravaged communities and a divided nation.

In many places it’s hard to get information about what goes on inside police forces because a thicket of laws protects them. In California, a 1978 law, signed by Jerry Brown in his first go-round as governor, makes it almost impossible to learn anything about the individual police officers involved in the deaths of Alex Nieto and Amilcar Perez Lopez, or whether their records reflect significant prior complaints or charges. The Modesto Bee reports that under this law:

“peace officer personnel records are confidential, including personal data, promotion, appraisal and discipline records, and ‘any other information the disclosure of which would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’ Only a judge can order their release as part of a criminal case or lawsuit.”

This makes it difficult, for example, to know whether a particular officer has a record of brutality complaints, or indeed whether a whole police department has such a record. Civil rights attorney and former justice of the California Supreme Court Cruz Reynoso told the Bee that citizens seeking information about police killings face “a wall of silence.”

Here in San Francisco, we might finally shake some of that information loose. In January, the Board of Supervisors responded to organized grassroots pressure by voting unanimously to request a Department of Justice review of the police department. We can only hope that when the DOJ releases its report on San Francisco’s police, my city will respond better than Ferguson did. We need more than a thorough housecleaning at the SFPD, starting at the top with Police Chief Greg Suhr. The whole community, indeed the whole country, would do well to rethink why we have police and what we really want them to do. Not shooting so many people might be a good place to start.

Maybe Herb Caen was more prescient than he knew when he called San Francisco Baghdad by the Bay. Maybe we should not be surprised when police forces claim impunity for crimes they commit against the communities of color they “serve.” They’re only doing on a small scale what the United States does on the international stage—when it claims the right to bomb, invade, and occupy foreign countries, without accepting any responsibility for the human misery that results.

Article Appeared @http://www.thenation.com/article/san-franciscos-police-problem/

 

 

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