Back in February the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) regarding their use of force policies and ethnic disparities in arrests. On Wednesday the Justice Dept. released their findings of that investigation, noting that police in San Francisco “disproportionately used force on people of color, and stopped and searched them more often than it did white people.”
Federal officials reviewed 548 use-of-force cases between May 2013 and May 2016, finding 37% of the people whom city police used force against were African American, a larger percentage than for any other ethnic group. Nine of the 11 people who were killed during use-of-force incidents in that time frame were people of color. [...]
Federal officials made 272 separate recommendations for reform in the report, including better training with batons to non-fatally subdue suspects with knives.
The study found that the department did not properly investigate officer use-of-force incidents, does not keep “complete and consistent officer-involved shooting files,” and generally had outdated information technology systems and tools to identify patterns of misconduct. [...]
Federal investigators also discovered that while black and Latino drivers were more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, they were “less likely to be found with contraband.”
Here’s another bombshell the six-month study found:
“The department was not transparent about officer discipline, completing only one investigation into the deadly use of force during the three-year period — and an analysis of 500 use-of-force incidents showed city police officers properly categorized the type of force used on only five occasions.”
The six-month study examined the period under former police chief Greg Suhr’s leadership. Suhr, who had been appointed in 2011, resigned in May of this year, after the SFPD shot and killed a woman sitting in a car believed to have been stolen. Police said the woman attempted to drive off when they approached and crashed into another vehicle. Calls for Suhr’s firing had begun in earnest after the SFPD shot and killed Mario Woods in December of 2015. The shootings were simply one cause of concern out of many about the behavior of the department’s officers.