Category Archives: Police violence

Police Use of Force Project, Police violence, US Bureau of Justice Statistics, Vallejo CA, Vallejo Police

Vallejo Police Dept participating in national research project on police violence

The Vallejo Police Department is one of 88 different police agencies out of an estimated 18,000 agencies nationwide, voluntarily providing their use of force data to a Seattle based research project.

Experts Track Data to Reduce Police Violence

A five-year research study headed by Seattle University shows that detailed tracking of law enforcement use of force incidents can reduce injuries and racial disparities. However no single federal or state agency tracks all that data.
NBC Bay Area News Investigative Unit, By Stephen Stock, Robert Campos and Michael Horn, June 3, 2020

Some prominent Bay Area law enforcement officials now say that in wake of the tragic death of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, all law enforcement departments nationwide should be required to turn over data showing how often their officers use force to make arrests or otherwise control the public.

Currently no single agency, federal or state, tracks when, where, and how police use force to make arrests or who they use the force on. More than a dozen law enforcement officials agreed with data scientists at Seattle University in telling NBC Bay Area that centralized tracking of police use of force incidents can protect both police officers and the people they serve.

Currently the FBI only collects data on deadly use of force from individual police departments and sheriff’s offices from around the country, some 18,000 different agencies in all. Providing data on the deadly use of force to the FBI is voluntary.

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While some individual agencies do their own analysis of use of force data experts and social scientists say those individual or private analyses can be restrictive because they only have one department’s data and the sample size can be small and therefore the conclusions are non-instructive. In other cases, experts say other law enforcement departments don’t analyze or even collect this specific data at all.

Those experts say that should change.

They say police officials can learn about unrecognized bias and more effective techniques, achieving better, less violent results by precisely tracking each use of force incident.

“It’s one of the most critical pieces of information we can collect about the police,” said Dr. Matthew Hickman, Chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Seattle University. “We really do need systematic data collection to help establish the reality of police use of force.”

“With these data, we can start to understand … how use of force incidents evolve,” said Dr. Hickman. And we can learn “what are the characteristics of those incidents that are more or less likely to lead to injury. And hopefully lead to better policies and training so that we can try to minimize injury.”

Because of that in 2015, Dr. Hickman teamed with a private company, Police Strategies LLC, also based in the Seattle area, to begin tracking data, voluntarily provided by police departments from around the country, showing precisely how, when and where police use force.

“It [use of force data collection] should be nationwide,” said Dr. Hickman. “And that’s really the shame of all this, is that the federal government has been required for 25 years to collect data on the use of excessive force by police and report on it annually. And they’ve never done that.”

According to US Bureau of Justice Statistics an estimated 53.5 million people nationwide had contact with a police officer between 2014 and 2015, events including everything from home welfare checks to emergency calls, from traffic stops to car accidents, from criminal arrests to shootings.

The US Justice Department estimates only a small percentage of those interactions between police and the public involve use of force by the officers, either non-lethal or lethal.

Except for lethal use of force, no one really knows details about exactly how often, what kind of force and who the force is used against.

Dr. Hickman and his team want to change that, but right now, only 88 different police agencies out of an estimated 18,000 agencies nationwide, voluntarily provide their use of force data to this research project. Among those are Bay Area police departments in Daly City, San Jose, Capitola and, most recently, Vallejo.

“There’s no standardization either statewide or certainly not nationally,” said Bob Scales, founding partner and current CEO of Police Strategies LLC. “You can’t have an evidence-based policy or evidence-based training if you have no data to back it up.”

“Many agencies have put their officers through de-escalation training, but without the data to see a ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the training, we don’t know if the training has had any impact on how officers behave and how they use force,” Scales said.

Scales comes from a strong law enforcement background and perspective. He served as a Deputy Prosecuting Attorney for King County, was the Assistant Director for Public Safety for the City of Seattle and was the Director of Government Affairs for the Seattle City Attorney before leaving to build his start-up Police Strategies, LLC.

“What we do is we help agencies essentially unlock all of that data information and then we help, we analyze it and then we provide it back to the departments,” said Scales who also served as the Compliance Coordinator for the Seattle Police Department during its implementation of a Consent Decree with the U.S. Department of Justice to resolve allegations of misuse of force.

One example of data’s impact on public safety: separate research conducted by the “Police Use of Force Project” shows that police departments which ban choke holds as acceptable techniques by their officers show significant reduction the number of use of force incidents that end in death for the public.

“Some agencies train their officers how to use this technique. And you have some agencies that prohibit the technique outright,” Scales said. “So we have this huge gamut of acceptable practices by police departments [around the country] for the same technique.”

“And [for] the agencies that do allow it, [the data shows] it’s a very effective technique,” Scales told NBC Bay Area. “It has risks. It has dangers. The Minneapolis situation was not an acceptable use of that technique.”

“We banned the chokehold … after, you know, after the unfortunate incident in New York with Eric Garner,” said San Jose Police Chief Eddie Garcia.

Chief Garcia says his department began giving Seattle University and Police Strategies, LLC their use of force data in 2015 to better track what his officers were doing right and what they could improve.

“To be able to see a transparent view of ‘this is what your officers are doing.’ ‘This is when they had to use force,’ ‘why they had to use force’ and ‘who they’re using force on.’  I think that’s incredibly important,” Chief Garcia told NBC Bay Area. And, you know, it’s about time that I think (this data collection) is legislated really not just in California, but throughout” the country.

Because of what the historical data showed about using baton and other hard objects to subdue suspect, Chief Garcia and his police training officers began asking his patrol officers to use tasers more frequently to subdue unruly people rather using than batons or nightsticks.

While tasers remain controversial, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area where critics say police officers tend to deploy Tasers too quickly to de-escalate volatile situations, sometimes, with deadly consequences.

But the data collected during the last five years shows clearly that in San Jose, actual injuries to the public are down where tasers replaced batons and nightsticks.

“We’re seeing fewer fractures and serious bodily injuries because they were using the Taser rather than a baton,” said Scales.

The Seattle University/Police Strategies LL” data analysis also shows San Jose Police Department’s saw use of force incidents dropped 13.4% from 2015 to 2019, the time period that the tracking has been taking place.  And some racial disparities appear to be diminishing during the same time period as well.  Five years ago, when San Jose police arrested a Hispanic man, there was an 11% greater chance they would use force than when they arrested a white man. Today that Hispanic person has a 2% lower chance than a white person of seeing force used on him by a police officer.

The same goes for Black and Asian suspects. The percentage who experienced force matched the percentage of their arrest population.

“We have a lot more work to do. But I think the expectation is that we are moving that needle in that, you know, that this tool absolutely helps us do that,” Chief Garcia said.

The Police Use of Force Project, agrees with those numbers, but still gives San Jose an “F” grade for its deadly use of force noting that in 2018 Hispanics were 3.4 times more likely to have deadly force used against them than white people.

Right now, experts say the biggest problem with trying to improve police/public interaction outcomes is that there’s not enough data analytics in enough police departments nationwide to say what works and what techniques are effective.

While some individual agencies do their own analysis of use of force data, Scales and Hickman say those analysis are restrictive because they only have one department’s data and the sample size can be small and non-instructive. Other departments don’t analyze or even collect this specific data at all.

Scales agrees with Chief Garcia in saying that only if law enforcement departments are required to turn over these specific data points tracking details of their officers’ use of force incidents will real police reform take place.

“You shouldn’t implement any reforms if you’re if you’re unable to measure the impacts,” said Scales. “It may be good training. It may be bad training or maybe a waste of money. We don’t know without the data.”

#BlackLivesMatter, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Police violence

Gov. Newsom orders California police to stop using “carotid hold,”and launches Police Reform Task Force

Gov. Newsom Press Release, June 5, 2020

Governor Newsom Announces New Policing and Criminal Justice Reforms

Announcements follow week of conversations with community leaders, activists and law enforcement following killing of George Floyd and demonstrations across the nation

SACRAMENTO – After a week of engagement with civic leaders and law enforcement in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and demonstrations nationwide, Governor Newsom today announced his support for new policing and criminal justice reforms. Governor Newsom will work toward a statewide standard for policing peaceful protests and ending the carotid hold. This announcement follows the work California did last year to enact the nation’s strongest standard for police use of deadly force.

“We have a unique and special responsibility here in California to meet this historic moment head-on,” said Governor Newsom. “We will not sit back passively as a state. I am proud that California has advanced a new conversation about broader criminal justice reform, but we have an extraordinary amount of work left to do to manifest a cultural change and a deeper understanding of what it is that we’re working to advance. We will continue to lead in a direction that does justice to the message heard all across this state and nation.”

Governor Newsom today called for the creation of new standards for crowd control and use of force in protests. Governor Newsom committed to working with the Legislature, including the California Legislative Black Caucus, the California Latino Legislative Caucus and other legislative leaders, in consultation with national experts, community leaders, law enforcement and journalists to develop those standards – much like the collaboration that produced AB 392 last year, California’s nation-leading use-of-force bill.

Additionally, he called for the end of the carotid hold and other like techniques in California, directing that the carotid hold be removed from the state police training program and state training materials. He committed to working with the Legislature on a statewide ban that would apply to all police forces across the state.

Criminal justice reform has been a key priority of Governor Newsom’s first year in office. He placed a moratorium on the death penalty, citing racial and economic disparities in how it was applied. He proposed to close the Division of Juvenile Justice and proposed closing two state prisons. In his May Revision budget, Governor Newsom proposed expanding opportunities for rehabilitation and shortening prison time for offenders participating in treatment programs, in education programs and otherwise engaging in good behavior; as well as increasing access to higher education for young people who are incarcerated.

Governor Newsom acknowledged today that more action is needed, and stated that additional reforms around police practices, educational equity, economic justice, health equity and more must be addressed with urgency.

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Police violence, Public protest, Racial justice, Vallejo CA, Vallejo Police

SF resident was kneeling when fatally shot by Vallejo police during civil unrest

Barricades on Amador Street keep traffic away from the Vallejo police station on Wednesday, a day after the shooting. Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed by a Vallejo officer outside a Walgreens early Tuesday.
Barricades on Amador Street keep traffic away from the Vallejo police station on Wednesday, a day after the shooting. Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed by a Vallejo officer outside a Walgreens early Tuesday.  [10 more photos here.]
San Francisco Chronicle, by Megan Cassidy June 3, 2020

The man fatally shot by Vallejo police as the city erupted in chaos Tuesday was kneeling outside a Walgreens and not carrying a firearm when an officer opened fire — sending five bullets through his own windshield.

Sean Monterrosa, 22, of San Francisco died after the shooting at around 12:30 a.m. Tuesday, but police did not tell the public the man was killed — or disclose the circumstances of the shooting — until Wednesday at a news conference outside City Hall, a day after calling in 50 troops from the National Guard to help control protests and rioting sparked by the Minnesota police killing of George Floyd.

In a Wednesday afternoon news conference, Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams said the officer believed he saw the butt of a handgun poking out near Monterrosa’s waist, and opened fire “due to this perceived threat.”

Williams did not say how far the officer, who was still in his vehicle, was from Monterrosa.

“Investigations later revealed that the weapon was a long, 15-inch hammer, tucked into the pocket of a sweatshirt,” Williams said.

The shooting is under investigation by the Vallejo police and the Solano County district attorney’s office. The officer, an 18-year veteran of the force, has been placed on administrative leave.

The killing early Tuesday morning occurred as protests, lootings and civil unrest erupted across the country. That evening in Vallejo, city officials said about 100 people and nearly 40 vehicles “surrounded” the police department, and rocks and bottles were thrown at officers.

The killing of Monterrosa, who was Latino, is almost certain to fan the flames of an already outraged community, after activists here say for years they have run up against a police department that has disproportionately targeted people of color and is rarely held accountable for its actions.

“My brother was murdered out here by a cop, too — they got no justice,” said Alicia Saddler, who is the sister of Angel Ramos, and who attended the press conference. “Now this man was on his knees? Unarmed? A hammer is not a weapon.”

For Ramos, whose 21-year-old brother was shot and killed by Vallejo police after they responded to a fight at a home, Monterrosa’s death was chillingly familiar.

“He should be here. He should be alive,” she said. “This cop needs to be arrested and taken to jail, period.”

The incidents leading to Monterrosa’s shooting began late Monday evening, when police responded to reports of a looting at a Walgreens on Broadway and Redwood Street, Williams said at the news conference.

Looters initially fled the scene, but about 12:15 a.m. looters had returned and were attempting to break into the building, Williams said. The responding unit reported seeing 10 to 12 potential looters in the parking lot, and police also saw a young man dressed in black, who appeared to be armed, in front of the building, Williams said.

As a police vehicle drove into the parking lot, at least one officer reported potential looters inside two vehicles, a black sedan and a silver truck.

Williams said officers in a second unit saw a single male dressed in black outside the Walgreens, “holding what appeared to be a weapon.”

“This individual appeared to be running toward the black sedan but suddenly stopped, taking a kneeling position, and placing his hands above his waist, revealing what appeared to be the butt of a handgun,” Williams said.

The officer in the second unit opened fire, striking Monterrosa once.

In police scanner traffic of the incident, an officer can be heard saying, “wearing all black, looks like they’re armed—possibly armed.”

“We got shots fired,” an officer is heard saying 22 seconds later.

After the shooting, police scanner traffic captured the ensuing scene, which Williams talked about at the press conference: The black sedan rammed one of the police vehicles, Williams said, which set off the airbag and injured an officer.

The two suspect vehicles fled the scene, prompting a chase into Contra Costa County, where the driver of the silver truck was apprehended, Williams said.

Civil rights attorney John Burris, who is representing Monterrosa’s family, said he was “troubled” by the shooting.

“Notwithstanding what he’s accused of doing, you don’t kill people because they’re looters,” he said.

Burris said he’s awaiting more information on the case, including police body camera footage of the incident.

At the press conference, Williams declined to answer reporters’ and advocates’ questions on whether he believed the officer’s use of force was excessive, but said policy doesn’t preclude police from firing through windshields.

“I would like to say since I’ve been here in the city of Vallejo, we have made many changes in terms of our de-escalation policy, in terms of our body-worn camera policy,” he said. “So there are there are big positive things that are happening.”

When a reporter asked asked how de-escalation was used in this case, Williams said the officers’ intent was to stop and arrest the perpetrators in the Walgreens area.

“The officers reacted to a perceived threat,” he said.

When asked why police waited so long to announce that the shooting was fatal, Williams said he didn’t yet have the information that Monterrosa had died. Williams said on Wednesday he was unaware of the time of Monterrosa’s death, and denied the suggestion that police waited until after the Tuesday evening protest to release the information.

Williams vowed to release body camera footage as soon as possible, prior to the required 45-day legal deadline, in the name of “rapid transparency.”

Looting, Police violence, Vallejo CA, Vallejo Police

Vallejo police shot, killed 22-year-old on his knees after mistaking hammer for gun

ABC7 News, June 3, 2020

At the time he was shot, Monterrosa was on his knees, the police chief said.

VALLEJO, Calif. (KGO) — The Vallejo Police Department gave details Wednesday on an officer-involved shooting that left one person dead on Tuesday morning at 12:30 a.m.

22-year-old Sean Monterrosa was shot and killed by an unnamed officer. Chief Shawny Williams said the officer believed Monterrosa had a gun in his pocket, but it ended up being a 15-inch hammer.

At the time he was shot, Monterrosa was on his knees, Williams said.

The incident started at a Walgreens where officers say they saw two carloads of suspected looters who drove away from the scene. Officers chased the two cars. When they came across Monterrosa, they believed he was trying to get into one of the suspect vehicles.

The officer fired his weapon five times through the windshield of his patrol car. One round hit Monterrosa, killing him.

The department hasn’t released body camera or dash camera footage.

RELATED: Fatal Vallejo officer-involved shooting following Monday night looting

Chief Williams said Monterrosa was a San Francisco resident with a criminal record.

I-TEAM reporter Melanie Woodrow spoke with the victim’s family late Tuesday night who confirmed their son was shot and killed.

“I know this person was transported to the hospital but I don’t know this person’s condition,” said Vallejo Mayor Bob Sampayan. “I want our residents to know that whatever happened will be reported that it will be open and transparent.”

The city of Vallejo has since implemented an 8 p.m. curfew after Monday night’s looting, officer-involved shooting and someone setting fire inside City Hall.

In a Tuesday press conference addressing the fire that caused City Hall to close, Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams said he’s never experienced something like this before.

“In 27 years of service I’ve never experienced anything like what I experienced last night in the city of Vallejo,” said Chief Williams.

“This was a coordinated attack by organized individuals seeking to cause destruction and harm to our community,” he continued.

“I understand and I believe in the public’s right of protest of expressing your first amendment rights about the heinous murder of George Floyd but when it comes to the destruction of private and public property I don’t understand how that brings about the change people are asking for,” said Mayor Bob Sampayan.