SF police defend their disproportionate beatings of Black people

San Francisco Police Department officials struggled to answer questions from the city’s Police Commission at a Wednesday meeting when asked to explain how, in a city where Black people make up only 5% of the population, they somehow made up 44% of police use-of-force incidents during the first half of the year, far more than any other race or ethnicity.

From January through June of this year, the San Francisco Police Department reported using force against Black people 502 times, compared with 311 times against Hispanic people, 223 against white people and 80 times against Asian people. SFPD categorized 35 incidents as against other racial groups.

According to the Police Department’s report, which cites 2021 population totals by race, officers were 17 times as likely to use force on a Black person in the city as they were to use force against a white person.

The department also reported using force against people experiencing homelessness 144 times and against juveniles 47 times through the first half of 2023.

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The San Francisco Police Officers’ Association is skeptical of the report’s reliability because it compares uses of force to the city’s residential population instead of to criminal suspects, union president Tracy McCray said in a statement. “The report relies solely on the residential population of the various racial categories instead of looking at who the SFPD comes into contact with,” McCray said. If the commission looked at the racial makeup of crime suspects and arrested individuals, the uses of force against Black people would not seem so disproportionate, she said.