San Francisco police chief says he is the one to lead reforms

San Francisco Police Greg Suhr said Tuesday he has “no intention” of stepping down amid growing criticism of his five-year tenure, asserting that no one is in a better position than he is to oversee reforms to a city force under fire over recent shootings and racist behavior by some officers.

Suhr’s critics, including the four most progressive members of the Board of Supervisors and a group of activists who waged a 17-day hunger strike to try to force his ouster, believe the city needs a new chief at a time when the U.S. Department of Justice division in charge of police-community relations is studying the San Francisco force and drawing up recommendations for changes.

[...] Suhr said he was committed to weathering the public outcry and was buoyed by supporters’ insistence that he stay.

Suhr said he had worked hard for years to improve the department — including in the way it uses technology, treats the mentally ill and handles street protests — and had gotten rid of many problem officers.

Suhr said his priorities include putting in place new use-of-force policies currently being debated before the Police Commission and equipping his officers with body-worn cameras that have become common in other cities.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Suhr said he was, like many members of the public, shocked when he watched the video-recorded killing of Woods — though he maintained that he thought officers did their best in a tough situation.

Officers are now trained to fire and then reassess, rather than fire in rapid succession until the threat is stopped, and in some cases to aim not for the center of a person’s chest but for the pelvic area, which may stop him without killing him.

[...] these shifts were under way last month when police officers in the Mission District killed a homeless man they say charged them with a knife.

Video showed they fired at Luis Gongora within 30 seconds of exiting their patrol vehicles, and Suhr said afterward that the officers did not appear to try to de-escalate the encounter.

The department, he said, is now working to implement a team-oriented response to dealing with people in a mental health crisis.

Suhr made it clear there had been no mending of the relationship between him and District Attorney George Gascón, who assembled a blue-ribbon panel of judges to investigate bias in the police force following the emergence of an earlier set of racist and homophobic text messages exchanged among officers.

The blue-ribbon panel’s full report hasn’t been released, but it found the Police Department has outdated policies, engages in “stop and frisk” tactics that have come under fire in other cities and does a poor job tracking officers’ conduct so it can root out problems.