Don’t Abolish the Police: Let’s Remake and Reimagine
San Francisco Police cadets with Chief Bill Scott in 2019.
By Joel P. Engardio
There is a lot of anger towards police right now. And for good reason, given the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a long list of unchecked abuses of police power in many cities — including San Francisco — over many decades.
The video of Floyd’s agonizing eight-minute execution under the knee of a uniformed officer sparked nationwide protests on a scale not seen in more than half a century. Everyone was a witness to the officer’s callous disregard to Floyd’s pleas of not being able to breathe and calling out for his mother. It broke our hearts and enraged a wide cross-section of Americans.
Chants of “enough” at mass demonstrations were followed by “defund the police.”
District Attorney Chesa Boudin recently tweeted “my office has received over 1,000 emails demanding that San Francisco defund the police department.”
What exactly were people demanding in the emails to Boudin? “Defund the police” has a range of definitions from cutting and reallocating police budgets to the outright abolition of a police department.
The multiple meanings have created a lot of confusion at a critical time when people need to understand what exactly is being proposed. Our elected officials shouldn’t speak in slogans. They must communicate responsibly and with clarity — especially when so much is at stake.
Are we talking about Mayor London Breed’s version of defunding the police? She and her counterpart in Los Angeles became the first mayors to announce they would redirect a portion of their police budgets to organizations that serve the Black community.
Or is it the Minneapolis version, where city council members have very clearly called for a dismantling of the police force? When liberal Mayor Jacob Frey said “I cannot support the full abolition of the police,” the large crowd gathered around him chanted “Shame!”
The SFPD is certainly not exempt from shameful acts of racial bias and violence. And yet today, we are one of only a few cities to have embraced all eight policies that significantly reduce instances of police violence. The New York Times included San Francisco on a list of cities “where police reform has worked.”
The remake and reimagine option
Since budgets are the true reflection of values and priorities, a budget willing to redress generations of systemic racism is an important statement. It says that America truly believes that Black lives matter and will finally confront the original sin of slavery.
We must ask then, what is the most meaningful and effective way to accomplish this with San Francisco’s police budget? Simply abolishing our police department would be reckless. Instead, we should remake and reimagine the SFPD.
This is what San Jose has chosen. Mayor Sam Liccardo announced his budget will focus on police reform without defunding the department. Governor Gavin Newsom said he prefers “reimagining” law enforcement instead of “eliminating” police. Even presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said he favors reform over defunding.
In San Francisco, we can do the following:
Dedicate funds to retrain the current force and hire a new generation of officers who come from the communities that the police have historically failed.
Invest in more social workers and treatment beds so that we stop using police officers as our only response to homeless encampments or residents suffering from severe mental illness and drug addiction on our streets. We must stop using our jails as de facto mental institutions.
Create a dedicated side force of unarmed peace officers focused on building community trust and addressing non-violent crime.
Investment is the best pathway to police reform: Train officers to be community-oriented while giving them enough staffing and resources to keep everyone safe.
Consider three facts
The first fact is that we need police, especially police that vulnerable communities can trust to protect them from criminals. Just ask the small business owners — many who were people of color — who were victims of looting and violence in recent weeks.
Even the protesters who call for abolishing the police recognize some sort of organized system is needed to ensure community safety.
The second fact is that crime has risen in San Francisco compared to this time last year. Homicides, burglaries, car thefts and arsons were already up in April, in what should have been a quiet time during the coronavirus pandemic shutdown and before the unrest of May and June’s police protests.
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said his force “felt overwhelmed” by the large protests and he had to request 200 additional officers from counties across California to help keep order when violence and looting occurred after completion of peaceful marches.
This underscores the third fact. As much as people might feel we have too much police presence, San Francisco is operating with far fewer officers per capita compared to other cities.
The following numbers provide perspective: Chicago has 44 police officers for every 10,000 residents. New York City has 42. But San Francisco only has 26. Our police officers must work nearly twice as hard under tough conditions.
Some might argue the numbers in Chicago and New York are too high. Even if they were dramatically reduced by a third, San Francisco would still be trailing in officers.
Stretched too thin
When a popular Vietnamese restaurant near City Hall was brazenly robbed at lunchtime last month, news reports and social media posts sympathized with the traumatized owner and wondered why it took two hours for police to show up.
Perhaps police were too busy dealing with the rampant open air drug dealing on downtown streets. Yet instead of arresting drug dealers, the Chronicle reported that every available officer — including the narcotics unit — moved to patrol duty at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. It was necessary to reassure anxious residents as the entire city went into shut down.
That brings us back to the owner of Turtle Tower. She was “in shock” and feeling “helpless,” she told the Chronicle, as she sat sobbing after the robbery.
Why did she have to wait so long to get help? The answer is simple: We don’t have enough police officers in San Francisco. They are asked to do too much while stretched way too thin.
The prospect of no police protection has alarmed many San Franciscans.
Sobering numbers
Nearly 10 percent of San Francisco’s sworn officers retired or left the force last year. How many officers do we need in San Francisco? The City Charter, our local constitution, says 1,971. It’s an entirely arbitrary number dreamed up in 1994 when we had nearly 200,000 fewer residents. And we’ve never reached that goal even as our population exploded.
It turns out we need at least 2,176 police officers, according to a city-commissioned study by the Matrix Consulting Group. The report concluded that current police staffing is “severely inadequate.”
City Hall should commit the resources needed for the recruitment, training and retention of a properly sized police force. Public safety is a fundamental job of city government and should be given funding priority.
Police reform question
Given the national outrage over police abuses, this is a sensitive time to call for more police officers.
People are questioning whether they can trust those currently in service, especially given the history of racial bias, sexism and homophobia in San Francisco’s police department.
This was the headline in the May 1976 edition of the police union journal: “Why Gays Should Not Work As City Police Officers.”
“The homosexual has a problem with his identity,” the article opined. “Such a disturbed personality should not even be allowed to be a policeman.”
In 1978, former police officer Dan White shot and killed gay Supervisor Harvey Milk after killing liberal Mayor George Moscone, who angered the police force by pushing for reforms. Some officers at the Hall of Justice reportedly cheered when they learned of the assassinations.
In 1979, the federal government issued a consent decree to force SFPD to hire more people of color and women. Even with federal oversight, the problem persisted more than two decades and the decree wasn’t lifted until 1998.
Then in 2015, San Francisco police officers shot and killed Mario Woods, sparking outrage when the officers involved weren’t prosecuted. Shortly after, different officers shot and killed Louis Gongora. The district attorney at the time, George Gascón, wouldn’t press charges in either case because it was determined the officers were operating within legal protocol — but the protocol was wrong.
After the Woods murder, the SFPD finally changed its use-of-force policy. It now includes a focus on de-escalation when a suspect appears to be having a mental health crisis.
Today, San Francisco’s strict police conduct policies contributed to a 47 percent decline in use of force since 2016. The New York Times even mentioned San Francisco as a city “where police reform has worked” and cited how we recently went one year without an officer-involved shooting — our longest such span in nearly two decades.
San Francisco is also one of only a few cities to have embraced the eight policies that activists are pushing every city to adopt to reduce police violence:
Ban chokeholds and strangleholds
Require de-escalation
Require warning before shooting
Require exhaustion of all alternatives before shooting
Duty to intervene
Ban shooting at moving vehicles
Have use of force continuum
Require comprehensive reporting
The SFPD is more diverse than ever and better reflects the neighborhoods it serves. The police union is even led by an openly gay man for the first time, and it published a statement condemning the Minneapolis officers who murdered George Floyd.
But when it comes to critical reforms recommended by the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice in 2016, SFPD is still behind.
San Francisco has only implemented 48 of 272 recommendations in areas including bias and use of force, according to an Examiner analysis of a California Department of Justice report. It was noted that “police still disproportionately use force against black and Latino suspects.”
San Francisco must implement all of the suggested reforms now. That also means we need to ensure the SFPD has the resources to do so.
New strategies
Some might worry that adding officers to the city’s force could increase the chance of getting more bad cops. But it could be an opportunity to achieve the opposite. We could start to replenish the force with a new generation of officers who reflect the best of police reforms, who are trained in de-escalation, and who are truly committed to protecting and serving their communities.
Stringent hiring practices along with intensive and ongoing training are essential for creating a police force that fully understands and embraces the need to end systemic racism. That’s why it makes more sense to reinvest the current police budget in training rather than redirect money out of the department to a nonprofit that will do some good but can’t directly affect officer behavior.
Let’s commit to new strategies that will do more than merely give lip service to community-oriented policing and actually take the steps to implement it.
What if we created a small, dedicated corps of officers who wouldn’t carry firearms? Most officers would continue to have a gun but an unarmed subset could handle things like collecting police reports from victims.
In this scenario, the owner of the Turtle Tower restaurant who was robbed didn’t need to speak to an armed officer after the thieves had fled. And she might have been able to see an unarmed officer within 15 minutes instead of waiting two hours.
Unarmed officers could focus on building community trust and solving non-violent crime, leaving the more dangerous police work to armed officers.
Whether armed or not, it’s important that officers are not overstretched. When they are stressed and overworked, it becomes more difficult to make the right decision in a critical moment.
With an understaffed force, there are times when the police chief must request reinforcements from other counties. They are not trained by the same standards and could make a situation worse. It’s better to have enough officers on the force who know San Francisco values.
We should also stop using police officers as our only response to homeless encampments or residents suffering from severe mental illness and drug addiction on our streets. Using officers as social workers needlessly strains police department resources.
As a city, we should prioritize funding more treatment beds and social workers like the under-resourced Homeless Outreach Team. It would reduce costs in the long run and ensure that the right help is available to those in need.
Our mental health crisis will persist, however, until we compel people to get treatment. I’m not suggesting we go back to the awful days of Nurse Ratchet and mental asylums. Yet we’re letting people suffer and die on the street today without any treatment.
Between those two extremes, we should embrace the types of conservatorship laws and facilities that can give people the treatment they need before they become a danger to themselves or others. Absent that, we’re letting jails become de facto mental health facilities. A compassionate society takes the necessary steps to treat the disease. We aren’t doing that in San Francisco yet.
A system that works
City Hall must be committed to ensuring that the criminal justice system works — that police, prosecutors, and judges are doing their jobs.
Everyone involved must commit to naming and ending systemic racism. We must denounce police brutality, racial profiling and excessive force. We must show empathy.
Rehabilitation and diversion programs are preferable to putting people in jail because these programs give people a chance to put their life on the right path. But we also need to protect the public from dangerous criminals and repeat offenders who do not respond to offers of rehabilitation. This starts by having enough compassionate police officers to patrol our streets, enforce the laws, answer our calls, and serve the community with integrity.
Learn more about Joel Engardio’s views on local issues at engardio.com/issues.