Name: SF mayor releases police reform plan to deal with racism, use of force, homelessness, mental health
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SF mayor releases police reform plan to deal with racism, use of force, homelessness, mental health

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This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateSan Francisco Mayor London Breed on Thursday unveiled a four-point blueprint for police reforms that would transform the day-to-day course of policing in a department largely occupied by calls about homelessness and mental health issues.Breed’s proposal would remove sworn officers from such calls for noncriminal activities, replacing them with trained and unarmed professionals who she said would be better equipped to handle situations like neighbor disputes, school discipline interventions or behavioral health crises. The reforms would additionally fortify accountability policies, ban the use of military-grade weapons and divert funding to communities of color.“San Francisco has made progress reforming our police department, but we know that we still have significant work to do,” Breed said in a statement. “We know that a lack of equity in our society overall leads to a lot of the problems that police are being asked to solve. We are going to keep going with these additional reforms and continuing to find ways to reinvest in communities that have historically been underserved and harmed by systemic racism.”Breed’s reforms don’t include a budget or details on how they should be carried out. The intent is to provide a road map for the city’s Police Commission and city departments, which would hammer out the specific policies.More for youBy ending police responses to noncriminal activity, San Francisco would follow models from other cities like the Cahoots program in Eugene, Ore. The nonprofit, crisis-intervention center acts as its own arm of the city’s 911 response services.The mayor’s plan would also codify a policy that explicitly bars the use of military-grade weapons against unarmed civilians, including the use of tear gas, bayonets and tanks.“The initiatives Mayor Breed is announcing today are consistent with our department’s commitment to the Collaborative Reform Initiative and our aspiration to make the San Francisco Police Department a national model in 21st Century policing,” Police Chief Bill Scott said in a statement. “We understand that it’s necessary for law enforcement to listen to African American communities and embrace courageous changes to address disparate policing practices, and we recognize it will take sacrifice on our part to fulfill the promise of reform.”Roma Guy, a former San Francisco health commissioner, called Breed’s proposals an “action plan.”“The beginning has begun,” she said. “We are ready — let’s get to work.”Lateefah Simon, a BART director and president of the Akonadi Foundation, a nonprofit focused on civil rights for young people of color, also praised the mayor’s plan.“Leaders across California must meet this moment and take bold steps to reimagine public safety,” she said. “Mayor Breed and San Francisco are committing to doing the hard work needed to ensure that Black communities — most impacted by state violence and disinvestment — have resources and support.”Broad support already exists for the idea to replace officers with social workers and behavioral health experts on service calls that don’t involve criminal acts or threats to public safety — particularly in incidents involving the city’s homeless population.Some homelessness activists and other critics of Breed’s administration have seized on the among the mayor, Scott and other members of the city’s top brass, saying the messages show her repeated calls to “clean up” tent encampments as evidence of the city’s police-led response to homelessness.Scott was one of multiple city leaders looped into those text conversations, along with public health and homelessness officials.The reforms are separate from, but related to, Breed and Supervisor Shamann Walton’s plan to reallocate a portion of the Police Department’s budget to the black community as a reparation for decades of policymaking in San Francisco that led to the systemic disenfranchisement of the black community. The mayor and Walton committed to leading a “collaborative process.”San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya said he appreciated the mayor’s “reasonable approach” to the proposals. He added that the union “is always open to engaging in collaborative discussions with the Mayor, and other stakeholders, to improve policing in our city.”While it does not yet include a firm timeline, Breed’s proposed reforms will foist new mandates on a department in implementing a range of recommendations handed down by the Justice Department in 2016.Federal officials urged San Francisco police to adopt a host of reform initiatives after a six-month investigation into the department that was prompted by the killing of Mario Woods and other fatal police shootings. A subsequent report in the way police tracked and investigated use-of-force incidents and other glaring deficiencies.Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.Scott was hired in 2017 in part to implement the Justice Department’s reforms after his predecessor, Greg Suhr, resigned amid public upheaval in the wake of several high-profile police killings of African Americans and Latinos. Scott pledged to press on with the reform initiatives under the guidance of state officials after then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions pulled resources away from efforts that assisted local jurisdictions with community policing efforts.In March, state officials found that the Police Department had complied with less than 15% of the Justice Department’s original 272 recommendations. However, significant progress was made around the department’s use-of-force incidents, which dropped by 24% in 2019, contributing to a 47% decline since 2016, state officials said.Still, force was deployed disproportionately against black and Latino people with 39% of total incidents involving black men and 22% involving Latino men in the last quarter of 2019. The city’s black population stands at around 5%, and use-of-force incidents do not always occur against city residents.The economic woes exacted by the coronavirus pandemic prompted Breed to mandate 10% across-the-board cuts for all departments that rely on the city’s roughly $6 billion general fund. However, those cuts will not include spending mandated by the City Charter or voter-approved set-asides.San Francisco’s Police Commission unanimously rejected a proposal to cut $23 million from the department’s general-fund budget at around 2:30 a.m. Thursday, following hours of public comment that mostly called for defunding the police.San Francisco Public Defender Mano Raju, who had called on the commissioners to vote down the budget, stressed in a statement that it would have left the same number of officers on the streets and maintained the same departmental structure.“A much smaller, much altered police department and policing model is what San Franciscans are calling for and the current moment demands nothing less,” Raju said.Correction: Supervisor Shamann Walton’s name was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.Megan Cassidy and Dominic Fracassa are San Francisco Chronicle staff writers. Email: Twitter: ,Updated to include drought zones while tracking water shortage status of your area, plus reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Area’s largest water districts.

This is a carousel. Use Next and Previous buttons to navigateSan Francisco Mayor London Breed on Thursday unveiled a four-point blueprint for police reforms that would transform the day-to-day course of policing in a department largely occupied by calls about homelessness and mental health issues.Breed’s proposal would remove sworn officers from such calls for noncriminal activities, replacing them with trained and unarmed professionals who she said would be better equipped to handle situations like neighbor disputes, school discipline interventions or behavioral health crises. The reforms...

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Megan Cassidy

Dominic Fracassa

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SF mayor releases police reform plan to deal with racism, use of force, homelessness, mental health

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