Tag Archives: crime and justice

An Indiana Court Just Said Women Can’t Be Jailed for Ending Their Own Pregnancies

by ThaoGoodell Posted on July 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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The Indiana Court of Appeals on Friday overturned the feticide conviction of a woman found guilty in the death of her child after she bought abortion-inducing drugs off the internet. Purvi Patel was sentenced to 20 years behind bars in 2015 after an Indiana trial court convicted her of two felonies: feticide and “neglect of a dependent.”

Patel, in her mid-30s, was managing her family’s restaurant in rural Indiana when she got pregnant. After doing research online, Patel ordered mifepristone and misoprostol (the same drugs typically prescribed for a medical abortion by a clinic) from a Hong Kong pharmacy for $72. In July 2013, Patel texted a friend, “Just lost the baby.”

But when she started experiencing severe bleeding, Patel went to the emergency room. There, her doctors called the police, who found the baby, which they estimated weighed a little over a pound, in a dumpster near Patel’s work. One of the ER physicians, who was also a member of a pro-life medical organization, left the hospital to join police in the search. About a week later, Patel was arrested and charged with feticide and neglect.

During her trial, attorneys for Indiana argued that Patel was at least 25 weeks into her pregnancy and that her fetus was not only viable but also took at least one breath before dying. They also argued that the state’s feticide law, passed in 2009 to protect pregnant women from acts of violence, could be used to criminalize pregnant women, not just third-parties. In 2015, after two years behind bars, Patel was convicted of both charges.

Patel’s attorneys, along with abortion rights advocates, vowed to overturn what they called a wrongful and contradictory conviction.

“Even assuming Indiana’s feticide law could somehow become an abortion criminalization law, many people were initially baffled by how Patel could be charged with two seemingly contradictory charges: feticide for ending a pregnancy and also child neglect for giving birth to a baby and then failing to care for it,” wrote Lynn Paltrow, the founder and executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which provided legal support to Patel’s case.

In its ruling on Friday, the Appeals Court noted the contradiction, calling the outcome “absurd,” but found that the state’s feticide statute doesn’t require a dead fetus, despite the common definition of the word. Instead, the law just requires that a person terminates the pregnancy.

But the court did overturn the feticide conviction, ruling that the statute wasn’t meant to be applied to pregnant women themselves. The court also ruled that Patel’s class A felony charge should be bumped down to a class D felony. The case will go to a trial court for resentencing.

Jill E. Adams, a lawyer and the chief strategist for the University of California-Berkeley Law School’s new Self-Induced Abortion Legal Team, which also gave legal support to Patel, told Mother Jones that Patel does not plan to challenge the new felony charge.

“The SIA Legal Team is pleased the court recognized that feticide laws are intended to protect, not prosecute, pregnant women,” she wrote in an email. “Women don’t need to be stigmatized and sentenced; instead, they need safe, affordable access to provider-directed and self-directed health care.”

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An Indiana Court Just Said Women Can’t Be Jailed for Ending Their Own Pregnancies

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"Please Don’t Let Hate Infect Your Heart": Read Slain Baton Rouge Officer’s Heartbreaking Facebook Post

by RIATerrenc Posted on July 18, 2016

Mother Jones

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On July 8, three days after Alton Sterling was shot and killed by Baton Rouge police outside a convenience store, Montrell Jackson reflected on the challenge of being a black man and a police officer in the city he loved.

“These are trying times,” he wrote in a Facebook post, confirmed by the Associated Press and NPR. “Please don’t let hate infect your heart. This city MUST and WILL get better.”

More than a week later, Jackson, 32, became one of at least three police officers killed in an altercation with a gunman in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. At least four other officers were injured. The suspected shooter, identified as 29-year-old ex-Marine Gavin Eugene Long, attacked authorities just 10 days after a shooting near a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas left five officers dead and nine other people injured. Jackson’s half-brother Kedrick Pitts told NPR on Sunday that the post came in light of the recent Sterling’s death and described Montrell as a well-known officer who “loved the thrill and loved being there for others.”

“He felt hurt. He wants justice for their family also. But he just asked every to respect everyone, to continue to love everyone, and he just wanted everyone to get through this together. He didn’t want any hatred going on, especially killing,” Pitts said. “He was a police officer. He wanted peace.”

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"Please Don’t Let Hate Infect Your Heart": Read Slain Baton Rouge Officer’s Heartbreaking Facebook Post

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Obama: An Attack on Law Enforcement Is an Attack on All of Us

by DanutaEarnshaw Posted on July 17, 2016

Mother Jones

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After an ambush on police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, that left at least three officers dead and three others wounded Sunday morning, President Barack Obama spoke at the White House today, saying it is up to “all of us” to create a united front against violence.

“We as a nation have to be loud and clear that nothing justifies violence against law enforcement. An attack against law enforcement is an attack against all of us and the rule of law that makes society possible,” said Obama. “This has happened far too often.”

Obama expressed his condolences to the families of the officers killed in Baton Rouge and called on Americans to “temper our words and open our hearts” ahead of the upcoming conventions. This is the 16th time Obama has addressed the nation after a shooting.

“We have to make sure that our best selves are reflected across America, not our worst. That is up to us,” said Obama. “Only we can prove, in our own actions and words, that we will not be divided, even if we have to do it again and again and again. That’s how this country gets united. That’s how we bring this country together.”

The shooting in Baton Rouge comes just 10 days after a deadly shooting in Dallas that killed five police officers and injured seven others. Baton Rouge has been the site of several protests since the fatal shooting of Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old black man who was selling CDs outside a convenience store when he was shot by the police. On July 13, the ACLU of Louisiana along with other community groups filed a lawsuit against the Baton Rouge Police Department, alleging that police officers used excessive force against protesters.

Watch Obama’s full statement below:

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Obama: An Attack on Law Enforcement Is an Attack on All of Us

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

by denesefetherston Posted on July 13, 2016

Mother Jones

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Illustration by Richie Pope

One morning in April 2015, Rayid Ghani was sitting among more than a dozen big-city police chiefs and officials in a fourth-floor conference room across the street from the White House. It was the latest in a series of meetings about curbing police abuses that the Obama administration had urgently called. The day before, a cellphone video had emerged showing a white South Carolina cop shooting an unarmed black man in the back, sparking another wave of Black Lives Matter protests and eventually prompting an FBI investigation. Ghani didn’t know much about law enforcement, having spent most of his career studying human behavior—things like grocery shopping, learning, and voting. But the Pakistani-born data scientist and University of Chicago professor had an idea for how to stop the next police shooting.

Back when he worked for the consulting company Accenture, Ghani had figured out how to guess the final price of an eBay auction with 96 percent accuracy. In 2012, he served on Obama’s reelection campaign, pinpointing supporters who were most likely to shell out donations. Ghani now believed he could teach machines to predict the likelihood that cops would abuse their power or break the law. It was, he thought, “low-hanging fruit.”

Experts have long understood that only a small fraction of cops are responsible for the bulk of police misconduct. In 1981, when research showed that 41 percent of Houston’s citizen complaints could be traced to 12 percent of the city’s cops, the US Civil Rights Commission encouraged every police department to find their “violence-prone officers.” Ever since, most major departments have set up a system to identify so-called bad apples. These systems typically use software to flag officers who have received a lot of citizen complaints or have frequently used force. But each department’s model is different and no one really knows how well any of them work. Some may overlook officers with many red flags, while others may target cops who haven’t broken any rules. What’s more, the police chiefs at the White House meeting had a hunch that the bad apples were gaming their systems.

Ghani saw a different problem: The departments simply weren’t using enough data. So he made the top cops gathered in Room 430 an offer. If they handed over all the data they’d collected on their officers, he’d find a better way to identify the bad cops.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina signed up, agreeing to give Ghani and his team 15 years’ worth of personnel records and other data, provided that its officers’ identities remained anonymous. Charlotte was a good test lab for Ghani’s project. It had also had two recent police shootings; the case against one officer ended in a mistrial, and the other officer was never charged.

Since 2001, Charlotte had flagged officers for review based on certain criteria, like if the cop had used physical force against a suspect three or more times over the past 90 days. Once an officer was flagged, an internal affairs team would decide whether to issue a warning or to notify his supervisor. But the criteria were built on “a gut feeling,” explains Chief Kerr Putney. “It was an educated guess, but it was a guess nonetheless. We didn’t have any science behind it.” When Ghani’s team interviewed cops and supervisors, almost everyone said the system failed to account for factors like what neighborhoods the officers patrolled or which shifts they worked.

The system also created a lot of false positives, dinging more than 1,100 cops out of a 2,000-person force. “The officers felt like we were accusing them when they didn’t do anything wrong,” Putney says. Out on the street, cops were concerned accidents or even justified uses of force might be seen as foul play. When Ghani’s team dove into the data, they discovered that nearly 90 percent of the officers who had been flagged were false positives. “It was a huge eureka moment,” Putney says.

Identifying who was truly a problem cop was an obvious priority, but Ghani also wanted to predict who was most likely to misbehave in the future. So his team started to mine more data—any available information on the stops, searches, and arrests made by every Charlotte officer since 2000. In the end they analyzed 300 data points, trying to find which ones could best predict an officer’s chances of acting badly.

Ghani’s first set of predictions was shaky; it still incorrectly flagged about 875 officers, though it did correctly identify 157 officers who wound up facing a complaint or internal investigation within the following year—making it 30 percent more accurate than Charlotte’s previous model.

It came as no surprise that Ghani’s team eventually found that one of the best predictors of future problems was a history of past problems—like using unjustified force or getting into car accidents, for example. But the team also confirmed something many experts and officers had long suspected but could never demonstrate: Officers subjected to concentrated bouts of on-the-job stress—handling multiple domestic-violence or suicide calls, or cases involving young children in danger, for example—were much more likely to have complaints lodged against them by community members. “That’s something we’ve known anecdotally, but we’ve never seen empirical evidence before,” explains Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

Ghani’s research is already spurring changes in Charlotte. His team found that when three or more officers responded to a domestic-violence call, they were much less likely to use force than when only two officers were called to the scene. Putney says that realization has led his department to rethink how it handles emotionally charged incidents. He is eager to see what Ghani’s research says about shift rotations as well. Often, the youngest and least experienced cops get stuck on night shifts, which tend to be the most stressful and violent, and “where they can become desensitized and calloused,” he says. Putney also hopes to use Ghani’s research as a guide for traits to look for when hiring new officers. He is circumspect, though, about the ability to accurately foresee a police officer’s behavior. Some variables will always be unpredictable, he says, like when things go wrong at 3 a.m. But with 300 data points, he adds, “maybe there’s some science behind this after all.”

Ghani agrees there are limitations to his big-data approach. Even the most accurate predictions won’t eliminate bad cops. Preventing abuses may require a wider look at how officers are recruited, trained, counseled, and disciplined—as well as addressing personal and systemic biases. Without that layer of human intervention and analysis, personnel decisions based on predictive data alone could ricochet through a police department, harming morale and possibly making things worse.

“This is the first step,” Alpert says. “It may not be a panacea, but we’ve got to start thinking differently.” Eventually, Ghani says, data from dashboard and body cameras will factor into his calculations, and his system will help dispatchers quickly decide which officer is best suited to respond to a certain type of call at any given moment. He hopes most large police departments will adopt prediction models in the next five years. Most of the police officials at that White House meeting have said they’d like to work with him, and his team is negotiating with the Los Angeles County sheriff and the police chief of Knoxville, Tennessee. “I don’t know if this will work at every department,” he says. “But it’s going to be better than what it is now.”

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How Science Could Help Prevent Police Shootings

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How the Stanford Sexual-Assault Case Could Change the Legal Definition of Rape

by Gloria30H4004 Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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A month has passed since outrage over a sexual assault at Stanford University swept the internet, spurring protests at the school’s graduation and outcry in the US House of Representatives. Brock Turner, the 20-year-old convicted of sexually assaulting a woman outside a fraternity, was sentenced on June 2 to just six months in county jail. According to Judge Aaron Persky, a longer sentence would have a “severe impact” on the young man; many believed Turner got off easy thanks to his privilege.

The case might have passed with little attention but for a powerful statement that the victim, known only as Emily Doe, read aloud to her attacker at the sentencing hearing. Millions soon read the letter online, and since then, lawmakers and activists have seized on the issue of sexual violence in California, funneling the internet outrage into tangible legislative efforts and campaigns. While some efforts have focused on the judge who decided the sentence—for example, erecting a billboard and collecting signatures to remove him from the bench—others have sought broader changes in California rape law, hoping to ensure the next offender receives a harsher punishment. “We all need to try to protect the next Emily Doe against the next Brock Turner,” Alaleh Kianerci, the prosecutor in the case, told a state Senate committee in late June.

Here are the efforts you need to know about:

Mandatory minimums: Three weeks after the sentencing, Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen sponsored legislation that would introduce mandatory prison time for certain kinds of sexual assaults.

Turner’s six-month county jail sentence was tied to his conviction on one charge, assault with intent to rape. He was also convicted on two other charges—penetration of an intoxicated person and penetration of an unconscious person, both of which carry a sentence of three to eight years in state prison—but a legal exemption allowed the judge to sentence him to probation on both. Rosen’s bill would eliminate that exemption, making the penalties for sexual penetration of an unconscious or intoxicated person the same as that for sexual assault through physical force.

“Instead of brandishing knives or threats, these predators use vodka or beer,” Rosen testified to the Senate Committee on Public Safety on June 28. “They use the cover of the outdated, offensive perception that campus sexual assaults are simply youthful, drunken indiscretions. Violating an unconscious woman is never an indiscretion. It is a violent, predatory, and deeply destructive crime.”

The bill, introduced in the California House by Assemblymen Evan Low and Bill Dodd (both Democrats), quickly drew criticism for introducing new mandatory minimums. Natasha Minsker, director of the ACLU’s California Center for Advocacy and Policy, cautioned against any laws taking away a judge’s discretion based on backlash to a single, high-profile case. “Everyone’s imaging Brock Turner and wanting him to get a longer sentence,” Minsker said. “We can’t change that sentence. Instead, the mentally ill defendant, or the defendant who has life circumstances that should be taken into consideration—that’s the person who’s going to get the longer sentence. And that person is almost certainly black or Latino.”

Recalling the judge: Within days of the sentence, Stanford law professor Michele Landis Dauber, a longtime advocate for sexual-assault victims, had begun organizing a recall campaign against Judge Aaron Persky. The campaign argues that Perksy was too lenient in his sentencing decision, in which he cited the “adverse collateral consequences on the defendant’s life”—including media attention and lifelong sex offender registration—as reasons for the light sentence.

“We believe he’s biased,” Dauber said, pointing to Persky’s related decisions—including a recent case in which Persky gave a Latino man a three-year sentence after he pleaded guilty to similar charges.

Critics of the recall, including a group of former Santa Clara County Superior Court judges, argue that Persky’s decision in the Turner case was based on a probation officer’s report, and that a recall would threaten judicial independence by making judges worry about public opinion in their decisions. Dauber, however, says that accountability to the people is already built into the state judicial system. “Under the California constitution, all of our judges are elected,” she said. “A recall is part of that process.”

Right now, the recall campaign is laying groundwork for a campaign that will need to collect around 80,000 signatures from Santa Clara County voters and raising funds (almost $350,000 so far, according to Dauber). They’ll launch their on-the-ground effort next April, aiming to put the recall on the November 2017 ballot.

While the recall campaign does not accuse Perksy of illegal conduct, California lawmakers have also asked the state’s judicial ethics body to investigate the judge. UltraViolet, a women’s rights activist group, is also campaigning for an ethics investigation into Persky’s decision.

Redefining rape: While Turner was publicly excoriated as a rapist, California law technically does not consider his crimes to be rape, since they don’t fall within its strict definition of “nonconsensual sexual intercourse.” That’s why state lawmakers led by Assemblywomen Cristina Garcia and Susan Eggman are seeking to update the archaic state code’s definition of rape to include more acts that are currently considered part of the broader category of sexual assault.

While their initial version of what’s known as Assembly Bill 701 was opposed by the ACLU due to its vague language on sentencing, later versions have made clear that the proposal will not change the sentences for the crimes it considers rape. An updated definition would hew more closely to the FBI’s definition of rape, which was expanded in 2012. Under the bill, Turner’s conviction on charges of sexually penetrating an unconscious and intoxicated person would qualify as rape. So would sexual assaults among members of the same sex, and forcible penetration by a “foreign object.”

A revised version of AB 701 was introduced on June 16 and could be reviewed by committee as soon as early August, according to an Eggman staffer. “When we fail to call rape ‘rape,'” the lawmakers said in a statement, “we rob survivors and their families of the justice they deserve.”

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How the Stanford Sexual-Assault Case Could Change the Legal Definition of Rape

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Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

by PorterGunson65 Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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In a press release late Friday, the Dallas Police Department provided details about their investigation into the gunman in Thursday’s mass shooting, 25-year-old Micah Johnson, a local resident and former soldier who served in Afghanistan. They said that a search of Johnson’s home revealed “bomb making materials, ballistic vests, rifles, ammunition, and a personal journal of combat tactics.” Strangely, the Dallas PD included a couple of select details about Johnson’s Facebook account:

The suspect’s Facebook account included the following names and information: Fahed Hassen, Richard GRIFFIN aka Professor Griff, GRIFFIN embraces a radical form of Afrocentrism, and GRIFFIN wrote a book A Warriors Tapestry.

It is unclear why the Dallas PD chose to include this information regarding Griffin, who was a member of the seminal 1980s rap group Public Enemy. The press release contained no further context about it.

Johnson’s Facebook page (which is no longer available online) reportedly contained a photo of Johnson posing with Griffin, who quickly took to Twitter to say that he had no relationship with the attacker.

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Why Are Dallas Police Linking the Shooter to Rap Group "Public Enemy"?

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The City Of Dallas Is Coming Together To Mourn Last Night’s Tragedy

by HarleyHunger Posted on July 8, 2016

Mother Jones

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The shooting attack that killed five police officers and injured seven others in Dallas after a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest Thursday night sparked a torrent of angry recriminations from politicians and pundits on television and social media. But the tragedy also led to an outpouring of support for the Dallas Police Department, the officers who were killed, and their families.

Many protesters were quick to remind the public that the demonstration had been peaceful leading up to the attack, and that police officers and bystanders rushed to protect people throughout the chaos. People began bringing flowers to the Dallas police department the same night of the attack, and on Friday came out in support for the slain officers, placing bouquets on top of two squad cars that had been set up as a memorial.

Here is a snapshot of how people responded to last night’s shooting:

On Friday morning, President Obama condemned the attack as a “vicious, calculated, and despicable attack on law enforcement.”

“We are horrified over these events, and we stand united with the people and police department in Dallas,” he said.

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The City Of Dallas Is Coming Together To Mourn Last Night’s Tragedy

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Civil Rights Groups Move to Expose Government Spying on Black Lives Matter

by AudreaDEIhfkzevp Posted on July 5, 2016

Mother Jones

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Against a backdrop of surveillance of the Black Lives Matters movement ahead of the Republican National Convention, two civil rights organizations are aiming to further expose government tracking of the movement’s members. On Tuesday, New York City-based groups Color of Change and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed a joint Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security seeking documents, video and audio recordings, and other information on policies and protocols related to the surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists.

The request covers surveillance conducted in 11 cities that have seen large-scale protests over the police shooting or in-custody deaths of black people, including Baltimore, Chicago, New York City, Oakland, Cleveland, and St. Louis, where protests erupted in Ferguson after the killing of black teenager Michael Brown in August 2014. (The request cites Mother Jones‘ reports on the Department of Homeland Security tracking protesters at a Freddie Gray-related rally, and the monitoring of social media activity by prominent Black Lives Matter activists Deray McKesson and Johnetta Elzie by a private cyber security firm.)

The groups filed the request because they believe surveillance of Black Lives Matter is more systematic than is currently understood and jeopardizes the activists’ First Amendment rights, says Rashad Robinson, the director of Color of Change. “The government has done a real coordinated effort about what’s happening among activists, but nobody is monitoring what the government is doing,” Robinson says. “The more information we have, the better we can go about the kind of pushback and systemic change necessary to stop it.”

You can read the full FOIA request here.

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Civil Rights Groups Move to Expose Government Spying on Black Lives Matter

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Cinemark Is Asking Survivors of the Aurora Massacre to Pay $700,000 in Legal Fees

by EmersonEdwin676 Posted on July 1, 2016

Mother Jones

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Cinemark, the country’s third-largest movie theater chain, is asking survivors of a 2012 mass shooting at an Aurora, Colorado, cineplex to reimburse it for nearly $700,000 in legal fees.

In 2012, survivors and family members of victims filed a lawsuit accusing Cinemark of failing to take proper security measures before the shooting, which left more than 12 people dead and 70 wounded. In May, a jury ruled against the plaintiffs after Cinemark argued it could not have predicted or prepared for the attack.

Colorado’s courts allow winners civil cases to recover their legal fees, and in June Cinemark filed a “bill of costs” for $699,187, according to the Denver Post. The company’s attorneys declined a request for comment by Mother Jones but have told a judge they need the money to cover expenses related to the lawsuit, like the costs of preserving evidence and retrieving records.

It’s not yet clear whether the survivors will pay the full amount—a judge must approve the final figure, and further appeals could affect Cinemark’s attempts to seek reimbursement. But that hasn’t tempered public outrage at the request, with some calling for a boycott of the movie theater chain on Twitter.

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Cinemark Is Asking Survivors of the Aurora Massacre to Pay $700,000 in Legal Fees

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Why the San Francisco Police Department Is Under Heavy Fire

by FrederickWilloug Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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The San Francisco Police Department has faced intense criticism and growing scrutiny after two scandals involving racist texts by cops and a string of fatal officer-involved shootings, including that of 26-year-old Mario Woods. Against a backdrop of calls for reform and a hunger strike, the San Francisco Chronicle published a report in May looking at police shootings and use of force more broadly by the SFPD over the past 15 years. The Chronicle reviewed police data, medical examiner’s reports, and district attorney’s reports dating to 2000, revealing some stark findings:

From 2000 to 2015, there were 95 officer-involved shootings, 40 of them fatal. No charges were filed against officers in any of the shootings.
In the majority of the cases, suspects were armed with guns; eighteen cases involved suspects armed with knives, and in 11 cases the suspects were unarmed.
There were six fatal police shootings in 2015—double the year before and the highest count in 15 years. Of the eight people fatally shot by SFPD officers since last January, four were Latino, two were black, and two were white.
More than 60 percent of fatal police shootings since 2010 involved suspects with a history of mental illness.
About 160 officers, or roughly seven percent of the 2,200-strong force, were involved in the shootings. Six officers were involved in more than one.

Mother Jones sat down with San Francisco County district attorney George Gascon to talk about the Chronicle’s findings, ongoing reform efforts, and morale inside the department. Gascon, who served as chief of the SFPD before becoming a prosecutor, has called for the state attorney general’s office to investigate the SFPD for discriminatory policing practices, and has advocated for reform. “When you talk about racism in this country, we’re not exempt from that,” he said, referring to problems plaguing other police departments around the country. “And I think the beginning of a solution to that is to accept that we have the same problems and collectively—we as a nation need to begin to fix this problem.”

Morale among the rank and file is mixed, Gascon said. “There’s a sizeable number of people within the police department that believe that reform has to take place…there are other people that feel under siege,” he said, particularly since the firing of chief Greg Suhr, a move which some officers believe was political.

“What is clear to me,” he added, “is that things cannot continue to be the way that they are.”

Here are some of Gascon’s specific thoughts on reform and accountability for the SFPD:

Use of Force
There have been two fatal police shootings in San Francisco thus far in 2016. Luis Gongora was shot several times in the Mission District in April after he lunged at officers with a knife, according to the SFPD. And Jessica Williams, 29, was shot once by an officer in Bayview in May while an officer tried to remove her from a vehicle suspected to be stolen.

The SFPD should adopt a use-of-force policy that requires officers to respond to physical threats with the minimum force necessary, Gascon said. Enforcing a more restrictive policy would both reduce the number of fatal police encounters and put officers at less risk of legal action for running afoul of the “reasonable force” legal standard, he said. Under current interpretations of the law, no particular weapon or level of force is more reasonable than another in responding to threats that pose great bodily harm to officers—but department leadership can draw its own line, Gascon said. “What you do is you’re modifying behavior with this line. And you’re creating a buffer, so that if you make a very restrictive policy, even if the officer violates policy they’re still very far way from violating the law.”

Last Wednesday, the seven-member San Francisco Police Commission unanimously approved a new policy mandating that officers attempt to de-escalate conflict situations before using force against a suspect. The policy has the support of the police union and civil rights groups, but still has to go through negotiations between the union and the city before being adopted.

The Police Commission is also considering outfitting all officers with Tasers as a way to give them less lethal options for responding to threats. The president of the police union said the shooting of Woods, who wielded a knife, could have been avoided if officers had been equipped with Tasers. Gascon called for officers to be equipped with Tasers when he was chief of police in 2010. Now he says that officers should have Tasers at their disposal, but that they shouldn’t get them until they’ve been trained in a more restrictive use of force policy that encourages minimum force across the weapons spectrum. “A Taser can be abused as well,” he noted. “I believe that Tasers are another tool that should be available to officers. But that has to be done in the context of a very strict policy.”

Accountability
Currently, the San Francisco police department leads investigations into officer-involved shootings, while the DA’s office conducts its own investigation into the shooting. Investigators from the DA’s office respond to the scene but rely heavily on the SFPD for information, which doesn’t always get passed along. “The worst case scenario is what we’re doing today,” Gascon said. “Perhaps the only thing that could be worse than that is if we didn’t go to the scene at all.” Earlier this month, a ballot measure was passed requiring the Office of Citizen Complaints to conduct an investigation into every police shooting. Previously it only conducted investigations when a complaint was filed with the office—which rarely happened.

The SFPD can’t continue to investigate itself for shootings involving its own officers, Gascon said. Ideally, the California state attorney general’s office should investigate police shootings, he said, though that agency says it lacks the resources. Gascon has proposed creating a special division within the district attorney’s office that would be exclusively responsible for investigating officer-involved shootings. The division would consist of investigators and prosecutors who were hired and trained specifically to investigate police shootings and would not be involved in the work of the DA’s office on other criminal cases. This would build trust, he said, between the police department and the community in terms of the integrity of police-shooting investigations.

In Gascon’s view, the SFPD should also regularly publish updated information about complaints against officers and use of force incidents on its website every 30 days, including the numbers of each, the race of the victims, and the race, gender, and age of the officer involved.

Skeptics of Gascon’s proposal have noted that his office has never charged a police officer involved in a shooting—there have been 43 cases since he became DA in 2011; 31 are closed and 12 remain open. Gascon told Mother Jones that current legal precedent on “reasonable force” allows officers wide latitude to decide what use of force is necessary, and the bar is high for demonstrating that an officer crossed the line. That’s a key reason why the SFPD’s policy needs to be changed, he said.

But Gascon also said that the public can have unrealistic expectations of how police should use force and how investigations into police conduct should be run. “The public sometimes is very influenced by what they see in movies…where police officers have this incredible marksmanship,” he said, noting that people often ask why officers don’t just shoot suspects in the leg.

The law governing how police can use force is different from that governing how civilians can use force, Gascon also notes. “The law recognizes that during their day to day operations doing their work, they’re going to be confronted with situations where they’re going to have to use force, whereas the average person wouldn’t have to.”

Excerpt from: 

Why the San Francisco Police Department Is Under Heavy Fire

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