Justice Department to review San Francisco Police

The U.S. Department of Justice will conduct a comprehensive review of the San Francisco Police Department, which is facing scrutiny over the shooting death of a young black man and the revelation of racist, homophobic text messages exchanged among several officers.

The shooting of 26-year-old San Francisco resident Mario Woods has now sparked a federal investigation into the San Francisco Police Department. The police department has asked officers to pledge to turn in colleagues involved in racist or discriminatory behavior directed at people of color, women, and gay individuals.

“This is a golden opportunity for everyone to take a look at the San Francisco Police Department”, John Burris, the lawyer for Woods’ family, told a news conference in December.

The pledge is part of a broader public relations campaign by the embattled police department to fix frayed relations with minority neighborhoods and community activists. Politically progressive San Francisco is not immune from the unrest.

Police later claimed officers ordered Woods to drop the kitchen knife he was allegedly holding, but Woods refused.

The review by the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services office comes at the request of the city.

The police chief hopes every officer will recite the voluntary pledge every January to help instill a culture of tolerance and accountability. Ms. Williams began work on the pledge after text messages among police officers were released describing her and others with charged racial language. The pledge was endorsed by the local NAACP and police union, and almost all the responses to the announcement on the department’s Facebook page expressed support for the department.

So far, Lee has stood behind Suhr even as a judge ruled that he failed to punish the officers in a timely fashion.

A police department-affiliated website http://notonmywatchsfpd.org/, has created a 10-minute video with the police chief, officers and civic leaders to help people understand how to report their complaints about police.

Join host Joseph Pace and guests tonight as they discuss what is being done to prevent these tragic incidents and what we can learn from other cities’ efforts to introduce change.

The texts were uncovered during a federal corruption in 2014 – with officers making a string of homophobic comments about “f*gs”. “A cop needs to show character and point that out”.