SAN FRANCISCO (CROWN) – Despite reform efforts, San Francisco police still have a long way to go to end racial profiling.
A new progress report shows that San Francisco police stopped, searched and used force on black people significantly more often than any other race in 2021.
The board was reportedly frustrated and disappointed with this update, and many had questions about what is going wrong with the police department’s current reform procedures.
This is because they have already implemented a majority of the nearly 300 reform recommendations from the State Department of Justice.
“The gray line with the trend line is the stops for black African Americans, the demographic, you can see a pretty steep decline from 2018 to now, the last quarter of 2021, but that’s not enough,” said San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott.
“The differences are still higher per capita than any other demographic, and although there is a decline, we have a lot of work to do in that area.”
Scott presented the results at Tuesday’s board meeting.
The report was released by the state Department of Justice after it recommended nearly 300 reforms in 2016 following several police-related deaths, including the 2015 assassination of Mario Woods.
While the SFPD implemented hundreds of these reforms with only 27 left to complete, Chairman Shaman Walton says something is wrong with the reform.
“It means to me that something is definitely not in line, and so with the 27 recommendations that are still left, it seems like those are the recommendations that would change a lot of the dynamics,” Walton says.
Last year, blacks were stopped at an average rate of almost 39 times per year. 1,000 inhabitants compared to an average of seven times per. 1,000 inhabitants for white people.
Black people were also 10 times more likely to be sought compared to whites.
While there was an overall decline in police use of force incidents, the use of force on African Americans was 12 times more likely than on white people.
“There are still inequalities in the numbers that we need to address and we will work to continue addressing, but the trend line is really a step in the right direction,” Scott said.
Scott says the retention of the remaining 27 reforms is mainly due to a lack of technology support.
While the police, the board and others came up with proposals to solve these problems, senior lawyer at the Law Committee on Civil Rights, Tifanei Ressl-Moyer, says that the city leaders will have to find new solutions.
“It’s been for decades that law enforcers have talked about local police or maybe just putting more colored people on law enforcement staff, and it does not help, not in the ways that people ask for change to happen and then believe without for the box here and get creative instead of repeating the same practice that has proven to fail, ”said Ressl-Moyer.
While there has been some progress in reducing the overall number of these cases, the Attorney General’s Office finds the racial differences very worrying.
They continue to encourage the department to collaborate with community members, groups and academics.