So here we go again.
The Sn Francisco police shot and killed another man of color this week, and, just as with the Alex Nieto case, there is no clear video at this point, so any investigation will come down to the word of the police against the words of other witnesses – and they tell dramatically different stories.
And the city, and the district attorney, and the Office of Citizen Complaints, and possibly a jury will have to face the hard facts: Just because a cop says it’s true doesn’t mean it’s true.
In fact, if several other witnesses who have no motivation to lie come forward with radically different accounts (and we don’t know all the details about the witnesses yet), they ought to be treated with just as much credibility as the officers.
(Oh, and while Chief Greg Suhr continues to push to get Tasers for the officers, he hasn’t equipped them with body cameras, which might have shed some light on this scene.)
As we pointed out in during the Nieto trial, the police are, and almost by nature have to be, less than credible sources in a case like this. If they admit to shooting a man who wasn’t a threat, they lose their jobs, their pensions, and maybe face criminal charges.
Without video, which might contradict their accounts, there is absolutely zero motivation for the officers to truthfully report that they killed a man without legal justification. Zero.
The officers were called to the scene because of a report from homeless outreach staffers that a man was waving around a kitchen knife. Let’s assume for a moment that the HOT folks, who typically aren’t about getting homeless people killed, did indeed see 45-year-old Luis Gongora with a knife.
According to Suhr’s account, the officers told Gongora to drop the knife then shot him with bean-bag projectiles. He still didn’t comply. Then the man rushed the officers, who had no choice but to shoot in self-defense.
Set aside the fact that the SFPD doesn’t seem to have trained its officers to use anything but lethal force against a bladed weapon. There are at least three witnesses who say that Gongora wasn’t charging the officers, didn’t have his knife out, and according to one post on NextDoor a neighborhood website, was lying on the ground:
To be clear, the victim was on the ground the entire time, head down, visibly shaking. There was no visible aggressive behavior,” the user wrote.
According to a chilling video on posted on sfgate, the entire incident took place in about 30 seconds, which seems awfully fast: There is no evidence that Gongora was threatening anyone until the cops got there. Homeless people living in encampments often have knives (and forks, and spoons). Gongora didn’t stab another camper, and according to all the public accounts at this point, it was the HOT workers, not someone who claimed to be in fear of death, who called the cops.
And by all accounts, Gongora spoke no English and the officers did not address him in Spanish.
The video shows that there were three police cars on the scene; it doesn’t depict Gongora, who is off screen, but it seems unlikely the man could have escaped. The officers aggressively approached him, instead of forming a perimeter. There is no evidence that Gongora at the time was threatening any of the other campers or passers-by with his knife, and Suhr never suggested that he was doing that.
In other words: We don’t have people on the streets screaming in fear, saying “the guy has a knife and is going to cut me.” We don’t have any reports that he was threatening anyone at the time the officers arrived. If they had stayed in their cars or gotten out more slowly, brought in a crisis training officer, backed off a little, maybe he wouldn’t have threatened the officers, either.
When things happen that fast, eyewitness accounts can be tricky. There are, of course, plenty of people who (sometimes with good reason) don’t trust or have a grudge against the police.
But let’s just say as this goes forward that the motivation of all the witnesses – including the officers – should be taken into account. Chief Suhr, as is common in these things, never shaded his comments or said that “if what I have been told is true …” In his public remarks, he simply said the officers were being honest about what happened.
He has no way to know that. Neither do the rest of us. And if the chief, the DA, and the OCC can’t get their heads around the idea that sometimes cops lie, with impunity, then we are never going to have a serious discussion about improving relations between the police and the community.
(A tip o’ the hat to my friends at Mission Local, who did a great job on this breaking story.)
