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Fatal OIS video spurs San Francisco reforms, skeptics question effect

As video emerged of the incident, it raised questions about whether police acted properly

By Vivian Ho
San Francisco Chronicle

SAN FRANCSICO — The aftermath of the fatal shooting of Mario Woods by San Francisco police officers on Dec. 2 has followed a script that’s become sadly familiar in the wake of numerous similar killings across the nation in recent years.

Video emerges of the incident, raising serious questions about whether police acted properly. An outraged community calls for justice and for the chief’s resignation. Civil rights attorneys file a lawsuit, demanding information police department officials say they cannot give.

But the shooting, in which at least five officers opened fire on a hobbling man they say was armed with a knife, has also led city officials to begin examining the factors that could have played a part in the killing.

Police Chief Greg Suhr has reached out to a national policing organization to explore new de-escalation techniques. The Police Commission has reopened the discussion on the department’s use-of-force policy. Patrol cars are being stocked with protective shields, and the debate over whether to arm officers with stun guns is back in full swing.

Now, experts and critics say, however the investigations into the Woods shooting play out, the question is not whether it will change how San Francisco operates when it comes to officer-involved shootings. It’s whether the city will go far enough to prevent the same outcome the next time.

“As taxpayers and as San Francisco residents, we need to be committed to ensuring that the institutions that are meant to protect and serve us fulfill their mission in a way that allows us to exist and to feel safe in our communities,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a Campaign Zero data scientist and policy expert working to end all officer-involved killings. “I think there is a moment now where the community has demanded change, and the institutions have begun to take notice. I think in this moment, it is essential for these changes to actually happen.”

Woods died shortly after he was shot by officers in the Bayview neighborhood at about 4:30 p.m. He was the suspect in a stabbing, and police say he was still armed with the kitchen knife used in the earlier crime.

The chief said the officers — identified Friday as Winson Seto, Antonio Santos, Charles August, Nicholas Cuevas and Scott Phillips — had no choice but to use lethal force after attempts to disarm Woods with beanbag rounds and pepper spray were unsuccessful.

Three separate investigations into the shooting are ongoing, but experts say the shooting most likely will be ruled justified — and an indicator of a need for reform.

“This is a situation where probably the police use of deadly force was within conventional practice,” said Franklin Zimring, a UC Berkeley criminologist and law professor. “But when you look at the video, you will say that the conventional practice has to be wrong. This is a place where criminal law fails and police training standards fail. They fail not because they disallow this and we didn’t catch it, but because they allow it and it was unnecessary.”

Investigators looking into officer-involved shootings follow several guidelines in determining justification, with the 1989 U.S. Supreme Court case Graham vs. Norton being the most significant.

Judging A Killing
The case establishes three factors under which to judge a killing: the seriousness of what the subject is accused of, whether the subject is trying to flee and whether the subject constitutes an immediate threat.

The case requires investigators to judge the “reasonableness” of a particular use of force from the perspective of an officer on the scene, and essentially not overthink what went into a split-second decision.

“The law is there to protect the police,” said Ed Obayashi, an attorney and Inyo County sheriff’s deputy who is an instructor at the Alameda County Regional Training Center on use-of-force investigations. “There is a public policy basis for laws and the public policy basis for giving the officers this level of protection is so they don’t hesitate in doing their jobs.”

Obayashi said he supports the basis behind the use-of-force laws in the state and appreciates that it is uniform for all jurisdictions. However, he points to the differences in pursuit policies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction as an example for how use-of-force incidents could be handled — while the law is the same on a macro level, at a micro level, different departments have different policies in place to fit the populations they serve.

This is a discussion that has already emerged in San Francisco in the days after Woods’ death. At last week’s Police Commission meeting, the panel set a plan in place to re-examine the department’s use-of-force policy. The commission indicated as well that it will be turning into policy a department bulletin that encouraged de-escalation techniques in instructing officers to “create time and distance” when a subject appeared to be a threat only to him or herself.

Training, Policy Reform
Training and policy reform is something the American Civil Liberties Union is advocating for in the wake of the Woods shooting. Micaela Davis, an ACLU staff attorney, said in particular, San Francisco officers need to put more emphasis on crisis-intervention training — how they respond to subjects in mental distress. Woods’ family said he may have been suffering from a psychiatric breakdown at the time of his death.

Police Commission President Suzy Loftus said 400 officers have been certified in crisis-intervention training in the department, and for the first time, police academy recruits are required to undergo as many hours of training for crisis intervention as they undergo for firearms.

In addition, Davis said officers need training in implicit racial bias, which Suhr said has already begun at the police academy.

“We can talk about proper training and proper policy all we want, but if we don’t address issues around racial bias and improper use of force in communities of color, then no discussion of policy is going to change that,” she said.

Davis also advocated for change on a state level, in changing laws to allow the public access to police conduct records.

“California is one of the most secretive states in the country on police conduct,” Davis said. “At the end of the day, these are public servants who are armed with firearms and are acting in our name. We deserve to know what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and we deserve to be making our own decisions about why that’s proper.”

More can be done on a state level, said Sinyangwe, the Campaign Zero data scientist. He said he supports creating a special prosecution unit to investigate officer-involved killings.

No Officer Charged
In San Francisco, the district attorney’s office is the entity that investigates and determines whether to take criminal action in use-of-force incidents. No officer in San Francisco has ever been brought up on charges for an on-duty killing.

“This is something we need to rethink as a country,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “It’s hard for a prosecutor to think of the cops as a bad guy. They work with them. Hire someone who doesn’t need to have that strong relationship with the police and do a professional job. It gets complicated, as they say.”

Coypright 2015 the San Francisco Chronicle

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