SFPD Accountability Measure—Long Overdue!!!!!!

Community Support: June 19—SF Police Department Accountability Measure
Greetings:



Community support for this measure will be important to its passage. Please forward and distribute. Details below.

Over the past several months, reports issued by the ACLU, the Office of Citizen Complaints, the Controller, the Civil Grand Jury have all documented a breakdown in police accountability. From the Department failing to provide OCC investigators documents in a timely manner to its failure to act quickly on cases of sustained misconduct, the process is breaking down. Further, the Police Commission -- the body charged with overseeing the police department-- has refused to hold hearings on these issues and others of great concern to the community. This failure of oversight mandates reforms.

The proposed charter amendment (introduced by Sup. Ammiano) will do the following: (1) Split appointments of the Police Commission between the Board of Supervisors and Mayor to make the Commission more independent and responsive to community concerns. (2) Grant the OCC the authority to bring charges directly before the Police Commission to prevent cases of sustained misconduct from being dismissed due to inaction by the Department. (3) Grant the OCC greater access to documents so that they can complete their
investigations in a timely manner without delays caused by the Department.

These reforms are much needed and will go a long way towards increasing police accountability.

The hearing will be held at 9:30 a.m. at City Hall. I hope you will be able to attend. The meeting may last a while (and I know its at an inconvenient time) but it is very important that we have numbers to demonstrate community support for this measure.

Attached is a copy of the charter amendment and legislative digest.

Any questions, feel free to give me or my assistant An Tran a call at 621-2493.

If you do not want to receive these alerts in the future, e-mail An at ppintern [at] aclunc.org to be taken off this list.

Mark

Mark Schlosberg
Police Practices Policy Director
ACLU of Northern California
1663 Mission Street, Suite 460
San Francisco, CA 94703
(415) 621-2493 (phone)
(415) 255-8437 (fax)