Law enforcement officers with histories of misconduct will
no longer be hired in San Francisco under the terms of a non-binding resolution
introduced at the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Tuesday.
If approved, the resolution would urge the San Francisco
Civil Service Commission to prohibit the city’s police and sheriff’s
departments from hiring officers with a history of serious misconduct.
Types of behavior that would disqualify a candidate from
joining either force would include the use of excessive force, racial and other
acts of discrimination and being dishonest when reporting or investigating a
crime or the misconduct of another officer.
“We’ve now seen another black man killed at the hands
of law enforcement in Minneapolis. This is something that has been happening
for decades across the country,” Supervisor Shamann Walton said.
Walton said he was moved to introduce the resolution by the
death of George Floyd, who was killed during an encounter with a group of Minneapolis
police officers, one of whom, Derek Chauvin, has a long history of misconduct.
The killing resulted in the firing of four officers and
Chauvin’s arrest and has sparked widespread peaceful protests and riots
nationally.
“We’re working hard to make sure that officers are
going to be prosecuted and incarcerated when they kill unarmed black men, when
they kill unarmed people of color,” Walton said during a videoconference
media briefing Tuesday. “This resolution is one step towards making sure
that we can keep our communities safe.”
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin said that while
state law makes it nearly impossible for the public or even his office to
uncover officer misconduct, the resolution is a “small but critical
step” for addressing the problem.
“In some cases, it might be impossible because of the
lack of transparency, but in other cases it may not be,” Boudin said,
noting that often serious cases of police misconduct are reported by the media,
for example.
“We can’t guarantee that we have all the information
that we need, but what we can do and what this resolution aims to do is to
ensure San Franciscans that, to the extent possible, we are not ever hiring
people who have a history of that kind of misconduct,” Boudin said during
the briefing.
The resolution also urges the commission to avoid hiring
officers who left their previous departments in the midst of misconduct investigations.
Boudin and Walton both said there is much more work to do in
order to enact substantive police reform and noted that in order for the
resolution to have any teeth, it would need to be approved by the city’s voters
as a charter amendment, something Walton is considering.
The president of the city’s police union, Tony Montoya, said
he wasn’t consulted on the resolution’s draft and called it
“disingenuous.”
“It sounds to me like they are asking for something
that’s already done, which is not a good use of resources,” Montoya said.
“Charter amendments are very costly. I’m not saying there isn’t room to
improve or adapt, but please show me where it’s broken so I can fix it.”
Montoya said prospective new hires are vetted by the
departments after signing a waiver that allows investigators to look into their
backgrounds, including any findings of misconduct when they were with other departments.
“Those are people that I wouldn’t want to work with
personally and if in fact those allegations were proven, they were sustained,
our department wouldn’t hire them in the first place,” he said.
Source: NBC Bay Area