Not in San Francisco
Where police violence is invisible
San Francisco police have a long and brutal history of killing, a practice of murder by law enforcement that extends right up to the present. But you wouldn’t know it from talking to most of the white and wealthy residents who make up much of this city. For them, corrupt policing that promotes officers who murder is something that happens elsewhere, not in progressive San Francisco.
This surreal blind spot hit me once again during the George Floyd protests when I saw his name spring up, along with Black Lives Matters, on window signs across the City. Conspicuously missing from these signs were the names of any of the Black residents of San Francisco killed by police in recent years.
A week ago I came across sidewalk chalk art in a wealthy white neighborhood on the west side of the City, invoking the names of 26 souls lost to police violence across the country, none of them from San Francisco. The name of Oscar Grant, killed by police in over Oakland back in 2009, appears on the chalked list. But nowhere on the list were the names of the 74 people killed by San Francisco police from 1990 to the present, including the 24 killed by San Francisco police since Grant’s murder in Oakland.
While the 74 souls lost to police violence in San Francisco are entirely invisible to most white residents in the city, the names of these martyrs are known and revered in the City’s Black and Brown communities. They include Mario Woods, Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez Lopez, and Luis Gongoro Pat who were recently memorialized in a gorgeous and powerful mural that has gone up in the City’s Mission District.
I moved to San Francisco in 1994 and soon found myself joining the public protest that sprung up when San Francisco police murdered Aaron Williams, an African-American resident, in June of 1995. Williams was brutally beaten, pepper-sprayed, and bound by SFPD officers who dumped him and left him to die unattended in the back of a police wagon. Then, in 1996, I found myself protesting the killing of Mark Garcia who was tackled, hogtied, pepper sprayed and died of a massive heart attack in the back of a paddy wagon on the way to General Hospital in April 1996.
The San Francisco police blamed these deaths on “sudden custody death syndrome.” There was no discipline much less any criminal charges for these killings.
A few years later, in 1998, I once again found myself protesting with many others when San Francisco police gunned down Sheila Detoy who was a passenger in a vehicle. Former police commissioner Peter Keane writing in the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Detoy was: shot dead by a plainclothes San Francisco police officer as she sat as a passenger in a car pulling out of a driveway. The officer was seeking another passenger in the car, a young man who had not shown up for a court appearance on a drug charge. He fired into the car and the bullet tore through Shiela’s neck. She bled to death. What happened next was horrible in its own right. With a cruelty that defies understanding, a department spokesperson issued an official statement just hours after she was killed. He said: ‘She was no innocent victim. She was trying to live the hip-hop lifestyle.’ Rather than disciplining the officers, the SFPD went on to promote them.
The see-no-evil attitude among the more privileged in San Francisco helps local police to avoid reform. Most recently San Francisco’s mayor responded to the George Floyd protests and the ensuing police riots across the country by proposing to ban the use bayonets, tanks and tear gas by San Francisco police. Meanwhile the City’s police department continues to stonewall more than 230 recommendations for reforming policing in San Francisco, recommendations issued in 2016 by the U.S. Justice Department.
Banning bayonets and tanks is great. But that’s not what San Francisco police used to kill any of their 74 victims.
The extensive reform recommendations by the U.S. Justice Department reflect the culture of rot and corruption that extends deep throughout the San Francisco police department. Just last year the City was forced to approve a $13 million payment to settle a lawsuit brought by Jamal Trulove an African-American resident living in the Sunnydale Housing Project who was framed by San Francisco police for a murder he did not commit and spent six years in prison. None of the officers involved in the scheme have faced any discipline.
This Saturday, I will head up to Bernal Hill, a few blocks from my house, where I will join a gathering at the memorial for Alex Nieto located where he was gunned down in a hail of bullets fired by San Francisco police.
I will bring with me the memories of Aaron Williams, Mark Garcia, and Sheila Detoy. RIP.
