1/28: Critical Hearing About Sheila Detoy

OPEN FORUM
ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Pattern of SFPD coverups runs deep

Van Jones

Tuesday, March 11, 2003


SFPD SCANDAL

It is ironic that the present SFPD scandal was sparked by three off- duty officers beating two civilians -- especially considering that both survived. SFPD officers have killed civilians and behaved horribly afterward without arousing such passions.

The sad and underreported truth is this: The conduct making headlines today is part of a years-long pattern of SFPD coverups after questionable police activity:

-- Take the killing of Gregory Hooper in February 2002. Off-duty officer Steve Lee got into a fistfight with Hooper, a street vendor who had turned his life around after a stint in state prison. Eyewitnesses reported that after the fight ended, Lee shot the unarmed Hooper four times in the chest at point- blank range. At least three witnesses told The Chronicle that Lee fired not in self-defense but in anger. Lee had a record of off-duty misconduct, having been cited previously by the Office of Citizen Complaints. But the SFPD and district attorney quickly exonerated the officer.

-- An earlier coverup followed the May 1998 police shooting of 17-year-old Sheila Detoy. To arrest 22-year-old Raymondo Cox in a drug case, plainclothes officer Gregory Breslin rushed toward a car full of unarmed youths with his gun drawn. As panicked driver Michael Negron sped around Breslin, the officer opened fire, killing Detoy and hitting Negron in the back.

Breslin, who previously had been disciplined for covering up police brutality, said he fired in self-defense as the youth tried to run him down. All of the bullets, however, had come from beside and behind the car -- indicating that the officer fired as the car drove past, not toward, him. Those facts would earn an ordinary citizen a murder or manslaughter charge. Instead, the SFPD homicide investigator was defending the shooting to the press as "justifiable."

Smelling a coverup, Bay Area PoliceWatch tried to get the investigator removed from the case -- to no avail. In the end, the city quietly paid Detoy's family $100,000. But the SFPD and DA's office fully exonerated Breslin,

who has since been promoted.

But guess who the investigator in the Detoy case was? Then-Lt. David Robinson -- now a deputy chief under indictment for allegedly covering up the Alex Fagan Jr. incident.

-- In March 2002, five officers opened fire on a 100-pound, mentally disabled man named Richard Tims, killing him. The barrage of ricocheting bullets destroyed a bus shelter, sprayed the block and felled onlooker Vilda Curry -- forever robbing the 39-year-old mother of her ovary and the use of her leg. Five cops should have been able to take Tims' knife without firing a single bullet. Instead, they shot two people. All officers were cleared in that case, too.

-- And after police gunned down Idriss Stelley at the Metreon in 2001, the family couldn't even get a police report or find out which officers were on the scene for nearly a year.

The true scandal this time around is not about three drunk cops acting up and benefiting from a onetime coverup. The scandal is that the SFPD has been behaving like this for years.

Many reforms are necessary. The Board of Supervisors should be empowered to appoint some members to the Police Commission, so that timid body can stand up to the chief and the mayor on tough cases. And the DA's office should establish a permanent "blue desk," to prosecute criminal police abuse.

And we all need to be less trusting of a police department that consistently chooses to cover up problems that it should be working overtime to clean up.

Van Jones, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in San Francisco, is a longtime law enforcement watchdog and founder of Bay Area PoliceWatch.

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