SFPD reports declines in violent crime, outlines camera, training and recruitment plans

The San Francisco Police Department reported declines in several categories of violent crime while asking the Police Commission for continued patience as it implements training, technology and staffing changes.

Interim Chief Tony Chaplin said year-to-date homicides were down roughly 9% compared with the same period in 2015, shootings were down about 4% and overall violent crime was down 14%. He summarized a series of recent incidents across neighborhoods, noting victims' conditions and evidence recovered.

The chief then introduced Captain Connolly of the Professional Standards Bureau, who described several policy and training initiatives the department is deploying as it awaits the Department of Justice's collaborative-review report, which the department said is expected within weeks. Connolly said SFPD content appears in four DOJ manuals and that the agency is piloting a DOJ transgender-training video and city-mandated implicit-bias training for command staff.

Connolly also updated the commission on the body-worn camera rollout. He said Bayview and Ingleside stations are nearly complete and that the department expects to expand training and issuance across patrol by late fall, with wider deployment "by the time Thanksgiving happens or even before that." He described technical and staffing work to complete training for officers who are on leave or disability.

On recruitment, the department said it ran recruitment events at colleges, job fairs and cultural festivals, and that mobile advertising now targets candidates on smartphones. Connolly reported several hundred candidates expressed interest in mid-2016 and that six DNA analyst positions had been hired for the crime lab with additional hires pending.

Commissioners focused questions on racial disparities in stops and the mechanics of consent searches. Commissioner Campos De Jesus (identified in the record as Commissioner De Jesus) urged the department to repackage existing stop/search data so the commission and the public can see whether stops are coming primarily from traffic units, undercover operations, station-based personnel or saturation deployments. "If you present the data broken down by unit and by district," she said, "we can decide whether to continue, modify, or ban particular tactics."

Deputy leadership responded that much of the requested analysis is already in the department's internal reports and that a dedicated crime-analysis unit has been ordered to correlate stops with crime trends from January 1, 2016, forward. Captain Connolly also said a smartphone reporting application will be piloted to make demographic reporting easier for officers in the field and to improve timeliness of input.

The department also addressed operational questions about plainclothes officers and body cameras: commanders said plainclothes officers may be issued cameras on an as-needed basis, and supervisors said efforts are underway to train plainclothes personnel where activation is appropriate.

What's next: the commission asked for a more focused presentation that reorganizes stop/search metrics by unit, by station and by district and for a follow-up on whether consent-search forms can be implemented in multiple languages and signed during stops to clarify whether consent was voluntary.

Sources: presentation and discussion at the San Francisco Police Commission meeting, Sept. 21, 2016. The department provided the crime counts and operational updates directly in its oral report to the commission.