Police fatally shoot man with replica gun in South San Francisco
Around 7 p.m., officers were called to the 300 block of Oyster Point Boulevard. Callers told police that a man in his 40s was yelling obscenities and attempting to force entry into a public restroom with a metal object.
When police arrived, the man was seen attempting to break into the restroom. As officers tried to make contact, police said he refused to identify himself and fled on foot with "what appeared to be a firearm in his hand."
Officers followed the suspect along a trail, which had a high amount of pedestrian traffic at the time.
Additional officers from multiple agencies were also called to the scene.
Police said officers attempted to subdue the man with less-lethal force, which proved to be ineffective. The suspect then pointed the object in his hand at officers.
Describing the man's action as an "imminent threat", two South San Francisco police officers and an officer from the San Bruno Police Department opened fire and shot the man.
Following the shooting, medical personnel who were nearby responded. The man was pronounced dead at the scene.
According to a subesequent investigation by police, the object in his possession was a replica firearm.
The man's identity has not been released. No other injuries were reported among officers or members of the public.
Authorities remained on the scene early Thursday as the investigation continues.
In a statement, police said all three officers have been placed on paid administrative leave per protocols. The California Department of Justice is investigating, pursuant to Assembly Bill 1506.
Wednesday's shooting is the second fatal shooting involving South San Francisco officers in less than a month. On April 28, officers shot and killed 60-year-old Brian Joseph Montana following a shootout on Arroyo Drive.
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San Francisco Chronicle
15-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
California police are killing fewer people. The opposite is happening in red states
California law enforcement officers killed fewer people, shot fewer people and used physical force against fewer people in 2024 than in any year since the state began keeping track nine years ago. Red states, meanwhile, are experiencing a reverse trend. According to a Chronicle analysis of statistics compiled by the California Department of Justice from 2016 through 2024, the 117 people killed by officers last year marked a 13% decline from the 134 killings in 2023 and a 32% drop from the 172 slayings in 2017 and again in 2020, which tied for the most recorded by the state. No California officers died as a result of use-of-force encounters last year either, the first time that's happened since at least 2016. 'It's a calmer California,' said Secretary of State Shirley N. Weber, who passed legislation intended to reduce racial profiling and lethal encounters while in the state Assembly. 'There's still so much to do. But I think it indicates in some way that when we make up our mind that we want to bring about change, we can.' Other lethal force databases both confirm and extend California's positive trajectory. A Washington Post database that strictly tracks fatal police shootings — and which was discontinued this year — counted 111 such killings in California in 2024, the lowest since it began counting in 2015, when officers in the state fatally shot 190 people. And the research nonprofit Mapping Police Violence, which includes killings by off-duty officers and intentional vehicle collisions, tallied the fewest police killings in California since its tracking began 13 years ago: It said that officers killed 127 people last year, the lowest figure since at least 2013 and down 36.5% from 2015's high of 200 deaths. Mapping Police Violence and the Washington Post rely on news coverage to compile their totals, which Mapping Police Violence augments with public records requests. The state Justice Department receives its statistics from the law enforcement agencies themselves and 'does not collect the entire universe of' use-of-force incidents, a spokesperson said, statutorily restricted to consider force that results in death or the most serious of injuries. Still, taken together, the different data sources broadly agree that police violence has steadily declined in the nation's most populous state. It's a quiet transformation, backstopped by hard-won legislative victories and occurring with little fanfare, even as California sharpens its contrast with Republican-controlled states where police killings are on the rise, say data scientists, reform advocates and former lawmakers. 'Particularly since 2020 and the murder of George Floyd … there's been a divergence or a gap opening up between more progressive or blue states and red states,' said Samuel Sinyangwe, a Stanford University graduate who founded Mapping Police Violence in 2012. 'California is leading that trend. … The opposite is happening in Texas.' In California, Sinyangwe pointed to a series of legislative reforms that he and others contend have achieved results greater than the sum of their parts. Assembly Bill 953, the Racial and Identity Profiling Act, or RIPA, passed in 2015, requires law enforcement agencies to produce data on every vehicle and pedestrian stop and every racial profiling complaint to a state advisory board. Assembly Bill 392, passed in 2019, made the deadly force standard a little more restrictive, requiring officers to believe such force was 'necessary' rather than 'reasonable' to protect themselves and others. Senate Bill 230, companion legislation from the same year, standardized minimum use-of-force training requirements around the state. Assembly Bill 1506, passed in 2020, tasked the Attorney General's Office with reviewing officer killings of unarmed civilians and deadly force policies at law enforcement agencies that requested it. And Assembly Bill 2054, also from 2020 and known as the Community Response Initiative to Strengthen Emergency Systems Act, temporarily funded non-law enforcement emergency response teams in four counties. No one bill has changed the paradigm around police violence and some have fallen short of their advertising — AB392 bases its standard on an officer's perception, not the reality of danger; and the Attorney General's Office has declined to prosecute officers in 29 straight cases it's reviewed under AB1506 — but they've had a cumulative, overlapping effect, said Sinyangwe. 'There's been a layered approach that's scaled up over time,' he said. 'These are policies that are in many ways models for the nation.' Many needed multiple attempts — and in some cases, watering down — to overcome grueling opposition from powerful law enforcement unions. Weber, who wrote the RIPA Act and AB392, said she almost gave up on the former. But she received encouragement from an unlikely source — police officials who wanted change and told her not to believe claims that they couldn't collect the kind of data she was seeking. And after leaders from her own party pulled AB392's predecessor in 2018, she returned the following year alongside dozens of civil rights organizations, community activists and people affected by police violence, many of whom held vigils at the state Capitol and confronted lawmakers attempting to duck out of floor votes. 'Listen, I had an army. Literally an army of people who showed up for hearings and spent nights sleeping at the Capitol,' she said. 'The work that they did was just profound, it really was. It made a tremendous difference.' AB392 took effect in 2020, when police killings experienced an upswing as the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a jump in gun sales and a retrenchment of vital programs in vulnerable neighborhoods. But police killings declined steadily from there, a reality that Weber had intuited from a drop in controversy and heartache in her own community. 'I live in the heart of this southeast community,' she said of her San Diego neighborhood. 'And I haven't seen the kind of violence or tremendous number of stops, this and that. … I've seen officers attending a whole lot of different kind of community meetings.' Sacramento Mayor Kevin McCarty, a former Assembly member who wrote AB1506 and two earlier iterations, said he recently went to the scene of a police shooting blocks from City Hall. Police had been called about a man waving a gun in the roadway of North 16th Street. The department said three officers shot and wounded the man after he kept walking toward them and pulled what later turned out to be an imitation gun from his pocket. McCarty said he watched a debriefing and body-camera footage. 'The officers used every possible technique before they had to respond,' McCarty said. Sinyangwe said California can build on its progress by scaling up the things that are working, like expanding the Attorney General's Office's ability to audit agencies' use-of-force procedures, and by making the CRISES Act statewide and permanent. 'These laws can make a difference, but they're often not at the scale of the problem,' he said. Neither the Legislature's Democratic leadership, which exacted the reforms over the objections of law enforcement unions, nor the leaders of those unions have celebrated the downturn in violence or taken credit for it. The California Peace Officers Association, California Police Chiefs Association, Peace Officers Research Association of California Legal Defense Fund, based in Santa Rosa, did not respond to requests for comment. Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose recent swing through South Carolina heightened speculation about a 2028 presidential run, has used his platform to advertise the state's declining crime rate and his administration's efforts to increase law enforcement spending, combat organized retail theft, illicit cannabis grows and intoxicated drivers. 'In the wake of a nationwide spike in crime during the pandemic, California made the choice to invest — not abandon — our communities,' Newsom said in a statement. 'While Republicans in Congress pushed a bill that guts law enforcement funding and the President focuses on arresting farmworkers, California is showing what real public safety looks like: serious investments, strong enforcement, and real results.' According to the California Department of Justice, 2024 also marked nine-year lows in the number of officers who admitted using force (1,190), officers who were shot at (155) and civilians who were proven to be armed (280). And though no California officers died at the hands of someone they were trying to arrest, there were six line-of-duty deaths in 2024, according to the nonprofit Officer Down Memorial Page, which, unlike the state, counts federal officers like a Homeland Security agent who died in a helicopter crash during a border patrol mission near San Diego and a federal prison officer who handled a letter allegedly laced with a synthetic cannabinoid. That was the lowest figure in 13 years and down 87% from 2021, when 45 officers died in the state — 30 from COVID-19. 'It is an unfortunate reality that law enforcement is an inherently dangerous profession, but we are grateful that brave officers continue to answer the call every day,' Cory Salzillo, legislative director for the California Sheriffs' Association, said in an email. He did not respond to a question about the drop in use-of-force deaths for both civilians and officers. In California, four of the five law enforcement agencies with the most deadly encounters last year were sheriffs' departments. The Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department tied with 12 civilian deaths each. They were followed by the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department (10), Riverside County Sheriff's Department (7) and Sacramento County Sheriff's Department (6). In the Bay Area, the Alameda Police Department, Antioch Police Department, Berkeley Police Department, Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office, Marin County Sheriff's Department and San Mateo County Sheriff's Department were among dozens of agencies that reported no significant incidents last year. Antioch Police Chief Joe Vigil, appointed on an interim basis to lead a department that emerged in January from a federal civil rights investigation into a racist text-messaging scandal, said low staffing might be a factor, because officers aren't able to respond to high-priority calls as quickly as they should. But he also said the department is working with a police oversight commission to update training procedures and has a crisis team that can respond to mental health calls with or without officers. 'I think that's part of the bigger trend that's happening throughout California,' Vigil said. 'It's too early to say if it's sustainable.' Outside of California and on the other end of the political spectrum, 2024 was the deadliest year in Texas since Mapping Police Violence began keeping track: The 168 police killings last year marked a 113% increase from 2017, when officers killed 79 people, and a 79% increase from 2020, when officers killed 94 people. The rise in police killings coincided with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signing legislation in 2021 that financially penalized cities that decrease their police spending. Similarly, Florida saw an 82% upswing in police killings from 2021, when the Republican-controlled Legislature passed bills making it legally more permissible to hit protesters with cars, to 2024, when Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation blocking civilian oversight of police misconduct. The 98 police killings Mapping Police Violence recorded in Florida last year were the second-most in at least 12 years, below the 100 counted in 2020. Nationwide, Mapping Police Violence says that police killings are trending up in red states, rural and suburban areas, and trending down in blue states and urban areas. The increases have offset the gains in states like California, making 2024 the deadliest year for police violence in Mapping Police Violence's history.
San Francisco Chronicle
03-07-2025
- San Francisco Chronicle
California says crime is down. But officials know the data is flawed
It happened again. The California Department of Justice this week published a major report, and a corresponding press release, touting a drop in violent crime across the state. But the data underlying the report is substantially flawed — thanks to a big mistake that the DOJ was made aware of last year after Chronicle reporting, but did not fix. In last year's Crime in California report, the Chronicle found that Oakland had logged an improbably high violent crime spike in 2023, fueled by a reported 138% jump in aggravated assaults — a number that did not match Oakland's own year-end report. After the Chronicle inquired, Oakland police said the anomaly was due to 'human error.' When the newspaper brought the problem to the head of the DOJ, Attorney General Rob Bonta, a spokesperson pinned the blame on Oakland. The office did not issue any correction to the statewide numbers in the report. This year, the state again used the faulty numbers in its report, despite knowing they were incorrect. The office did not respond to questions about why it did not correct the known error in the data. In the report, it pointed users to Oakland's website, saying to 'use caution' in comparing 2023 numbers to any other year. But the state did not heed that advice in its own press release, citing a 6% decrease in violent crime in the state between 2023 and 2024. Had the state corrected the 2023 numbers using the Oakland police data that it linked to, violent crime statewide would have decreased by 2%, according to a Chronicle analysis. The error distracts from what are otherwise promising long-term trends in California crime rates. Even after correcting for the flaw, levels of both reported violent and property crime are well below the historic highs of the 1980s and 90s, and continued to trend downwards in 2024. Homicides across the state have come back down from pandemic-era surges and have continued to decline this year, according to the Real-Time Crime Index, which compiles data from local agencies. San Francisco reported a 60-year low in killings last year. Asked last year whether the state checks to ensure the accuracy of data in its reports, the attorney general's office said staff members ask local police departments about anomalous data if they notice it, but that they do not have the responsibility to do so. 'The onus is on every police department to report accurate data. Our role is to publish a comprehensive report based on what each of the 500+ agencies are responsible for reporting to us,' a spokesperson said in an email last year. 'Any discrepancy is the responsibility of the local agency.' But on the fourth page of the report, the DOJ notes that the role of the Criminal Justice Statistics Center, which compiles the report, is to 'collect, analyze, and report statistical data that provide valid measures of crime, to 'examine these data on an ongoing basis to better describe crime' and to 'promote the responsible presentation and use of crime statistics.' Researchers and advocates rely on the state's crime data reports to analyze trends, measure the impact of policy changes and make criminal justice recommendations. In the press release that came alongside the reports, Bonta's office pointed to them as 'vital' information that can be used to 'support informed policy choices.' Magnus Lofstrom, the criminal justice policy director at the Public Policy Institute of California, said that the flawed report 'is of concern.' But he noted that the DOJ provided several caveats with the data, which included this year's note cautioning people against using 2023 as a comparison. Lofstrom said that, in addition to the Oakland mistake, the number of agencies that reported incomplete data was 'unusually high' in 2023. What that means is that, for every report based on the state data, Lofstrom and his team must manually correct several of the numbers on the individual agency level in its analyses, substituting in estimates based on the averages and shares of crimes in other months.
Yahoo
06-06-2025
- Yahoo
State authorities to investigate fatal shooting by LAPD of man officers say had gun
The California Department of Justice will investigate a fatal shooting by Los Angeles Police Department officers under a law that empowers the state attorney general to probe police shootings of unarmed people — despite the LAPD saying the man killed Tuesday was holding a gun. At 10 p.m. Tuesday, officers responded to a reported shooting in an apartment building in the 1000 block of Ardmore Avenue in Koreatown, LAPD officials said in an unsigned statement. As they entered the building, Ronald Gainer Jr. exited an apartment holding a handgun, officials said. The officers fired at Gainer, who retreated into the apartment. The officers entered the unit and took Gainer into custody, according to the LAPD. Gainer, 35, died at a hospital, according to the L.A. County Medical Examiner's office. Officers found a handgun and discharged cartridge casings "at scene," the LAPD said, along with a second gun and ammunition inside the apartment. Read more: 'A night of tragedy': A young officer who loved Dodgers, snowboarding killed in Baldwin Park shootout According to the police statement, Gainer was involved earlier that evening in a "domestic violence incident" with his girlfriend. After she fled, Gainer allegedly fired a gun into the air and toward a building, prompting the response by the officers who shot him, the LAPD said. The LAPD's Force Investigation Division was already probing the shooting — standard protocol for all uses of force by officers — when on Wednesday California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced his office was investigating as well. In a press release, Bonta cited Assembly Bill 1506, which requires the state's Department of Justice to investigate police shootings of unarmed people. Alexandra Duquet, a spokeswoman for Bonta, said state prosecutors will investigate cases when it isn't immediately clear whether the person killed had control of a weapon. Assembly Bill 1506 defines "possession" of a weapon as being "under the civilian's dominion and control at the time of the shooting." Agents from the Department of Justice's Division of Law Enforcement will conduct an investigation separate from the LAPD's and present their findings to prosecutors in Bonta's office, who will make a decision to bring criminal charges. If no case is filed, state prosecutors must release a report detailing the evidence and the legal reasoning for why charges were not warranted. Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
