Chaplin was put in charge of the city’s 2,100-member police corps on Thursday after his predecessor, Greg Suhr, resigned following the fatal shooting hours earlier of an unarmed 27-year-old black woman suspected of stealing a vehicle.
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San Francisco’s police chief has resigned after a series of scandals and racial incidents.
Retired San Francisco Police Chief Anthony Ribera said Chaplin must also discipline and organize the department across all aspects of police work, not just the use of force, so that no disciplinary cases go unheard. This video was licensed from Grab Networks. “Hopefully, they can bring in someone as chief who understands reform and who can implement the changes that will be necessary to get the department in top shape”.
For the SFPD, Suhr’s resignation may be a start.
Brown had also supported Suhr through the department’s difficulties, and said the police’s problems “are bigger than one man”. The unidentified sergeant and another officer were struggling to pull the woman from the moving auto, which had seconds before slammed into a parked utility truck.
“I respect Mayor Lee’s decision, and want to personally thank Chief Greg Suhr on behalf of all San Franciscans for his decades of service and progressive leadership at the San Francisco Police Department”.
His opponents have held protests and hunger strikes in an effort to force him to resign.
When Mario Woods was killed on December 2, 2015, a coalition of many groups emerged to stop the routine killing of Black and Brown people in San Francisco.
Pressure had been mounting for the resignation of Suhr since December, when five officers fatally shot a young black man carrying a knife.
The Rev. Amos Brown, president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, said he felt Suhr became the “scapegoat” for the department’s difficulties. They stem, in part, from a lack of diversity and unity among the officers, he said.
New disclosures later followed that other police also had sent racist texts.
The woman tried to drive off, crashing into another vehicle fewer than 100 feet away.
Department policy is not to fire into cars unless a life is in danger, SFPD Officer Giselle Talkoff told the Daily News Thursday. Chaplin, a 26-year department veteran who previously led the department’s homicide division, was named acting police chief. It might seem tantalizing for voters to have the power to pick this important position, especially in a city with an engaged voting population like San Francisco – and one that wants a direct say in how policing is carried out – but that oversimplifies the job.
The last straw appeared to have happened hours earlier when a police officer fatally shot a young black woman as he tried to arrest her for allegedly driving a stolen vehicle that had crashed into a parked truck.
Earlier Thursday, Suhr told reporters that the woman had driven away when approached by police, then quickly crashed the vehicle.
Thursday’s resignation was the result of the culmination of several racially charged incidents that occured in the Californian city in the past year. Witnesses captured the shooting on video, which was circulated widely online.
That support ended on Thursday when Lee ask for, and received, Suhr’s resignation.
Mayor Lee broke the news at a press conference Thursday afternoon, the police department confirmed. The city’s public defender has called the shooting “unnecessary”.
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In the 10 years that ended in 2014, a black male in San Francisco was 52 times more likely to die in an intentional shooting than a white, non-Hispanic male in the same city, according to mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
