In no uncertain terms, SFPD is statistically and categorically failing people who report being a victim of a sexual assault in the City of San Francisco. The police department was summoned to a hearing on Thursday, October 8th to account for their miscarriage of justice, and their answers fell short.
The blond, clean-shaven officer who speaks on his department’s behalf has aggressively parted and slicked hair and bright eyes that glimmer under the yellow lights. He stands at the podium stumbling over the supervisor’s questions like a child caught in a lie, his boyish demeanor no doubt a part of the Police Officer Association’s public relations strategy.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood, donned in somber gray, asks whether any other police department or law enforcement agency in California conducts their investigations in the same way, a way in which one might opine to be painfully slow and ineffective, almost as though it’s meant to discourage victims from coming forward and pursuing justice. The officer, Captain William Toomey, answers, “I know Fort Worth does it.” He names another Texas city.
Those, dear reader, are not in the Golden State whose laws this officer is in charge of enforcing.
“But is there anywhere in California…” Supervisor Mahmood asks again.
Supervisor Bilal Mahmood
“We’ve done it this way for 45 years,” the puerile police officer pleads. He’s talking about the SFPD’s practice of categorizing crimes according to whether they’re considered active.
The numbers are damning. There’s a pattern that is quickly revealed to anyone astute enough to catch a gentle underhand toss, a pattern impossible to sweep under the rug anymore. And it’s revealed in this telling exchange.
It doesn’t have to be this way, and Captain Toomey didn’t need to go to Texas to prove it. Nationally, police clear about 28% of reported rapes. That’s double San Francisco’s 14%. Over the past four years, a rape reported in Denver, Nashville or Milwaukee was more than three times as likely to be cleared as one reported here, and all three cities take more rape reports than we do. Then there’s Philadelphia, which got caught doing exactly what SFPD is doing now. After a 1999 Inquirer series exposed cops burying rape reports, the department started letting advocates from the Women’s Law Project into headquarters once a year to go through closed and shelved sex-crime files and flag the botched ones. Philly’s share of rape complaints tossed as “unfounded” dropped from 18%, the worst of the country’s ten biggest cities, to 4%. In Cleveland, a task force of prosecutors, cops and rape crisis counselors dug through thousands of shelved rape kits and investigated every assault as if a serial rapist might be behind it. By 2020 they’d indicted 809 people, with a 93% conviction rate. SFPD’s answer to all that? A “recurring review” of its own cases, run by SFPD, the DA and “appropriate law enforcement partners.” Cops grading cops.
While the men deliberate over the labeling of cases as active or inactive in a clinical way, the officer in his purple striped tie and the supervisor in his suit, the room is silent. Then Supervisor Mahmood asks, “What evidence do you need to be sufficient beyond a survivor’s account?” There’s scattered clapping.
Assistant Chief Nicole Jones stands up behind, her face contorting. She moves from a seated position to Toomey’s right hand, a frown so deep it’s comical. There is the moment, the one where it is obvious at last that the police have fucked up, and that they’ve been caught.
Captain William Toomey. Assistant Chief Nicole Jones stands behind him.
As they are wont to do, the police turn a spotlight toward their budget and staffing, ever opportunistic for a moment to whine that they don’t have the capacity to do even a small percentage of their jobs. What will they do differently moving forward? What do they need?
Toomey says, “It means having the staffing… to do the extraordinarily difficult work well.” Yes, it is hard… The plight of the officers who have returned to us, the people of San Francisco, a clearance rate of just 14% of rape cases last year, is what should be front and center here. The poor things, with their 14% raises and their clumsy responses and their habits of making survivors feel like the criminals. Won’t someone think of their staffing?
During public comment, a staffer who helps victims of stalking comes forward to the podium. “When I began working with survivors as an attorney, I naively believed that survivors needed support speaking up and coming forward,” she says. “But I now recognize that although sexual assault is underreported, so many do come forward. And it is what happens next that is truly troubling.”
The woman continues, “We don’t hear them. We don’t help them. And we revictimize them.” She takes a breath. “I wish I believed that was an accident.”
The speaker, herself a survivor, stumbles momentarily. “We and you have the power to change that,” she continues. “Survivors deserve better.”
The full hearing is available for your viewing on SFGOV. If, that is, you can stomach it.
