PD Editorial: Justice isn’t found in violent protests

When a New York grand jury exonerated a police officer in the choking death of Eric Garner, whose offense was selling loose cigarettes, demonstrations erupted across the country - from Manhattan to San Francisco, in the streets and even in NBA arenas and NFL stadiums.

The anger isn’t surprising, nor are reservations about the use of deadly force by peace officers - not after Cleveland and Ferguson, Mo. and a long list of other incidents, including Moorland Avenue here in Santa Rosa.

But if the point of these demonstrations is to get police to adopt less lethal tactics, it’s getting lost in the associated violence: a commercial block burned in Ferguson last month, vandalism and looting in San Francisco and Berkeley this past week.

If mayhem becomes the message, an opportunity will be lost.

The challenge for the demonstrators, in the Bay Area and elsewhere, is to engage with policymakers and, yes, law enforcement, to prevent the next Eric Garner or Andy Lopez case before it happens.

Sonoma County started down that path with the Community and Local Law Enforcement Task Force.

For much of the past year, the task force has looked for ways to build trust and improve oversight. The results of that process are beginning to take shape, with the first of three task force subcommittees releasing its draft recommendations for public review.

The first set of recommendations involve community policing and can be found at http://sonomacounty.ca.gov/Community-and-Local-Law-Enforcement-Task-Force. Still to come are reports on community engagement and law enforcement accountability.

Many of the community policing subcommittee’s recommendations are familiar and have broad support among law enforcement professionals who believe greater familiarity and more interaction between police and the public reduces crime and enhances safety. The biggest obstacle may be financial resources.

Sheriff Steve Freitas and his recent predecessors have adopted various community policing principles, then shifted away due to budget constraints. That’s likely to be a challenge as Freitas and the Board of Supervisors consider recommendations such as assigning two deputies on a full-time basis to the neighborhood where Andy Lopez was shot. The five-year pilot program would be a good test of community policing if it doesn’t stretch resources too thin in other parts of the county.

Other subcommittee recommendations could be implemented without significant expenditures. Among them are hiring more local residents as deputies, actively recruiting minorities as well as veteran officers with community policing experience and factoring the ability to engage with the community and defuse tense situations into promotions.

Of particular concern is the composition of the sheriff’s patrol division - the front-line deputies who have the most interaction with the public. Almost a third of Sonoma County residents are Latinos, but the figure for patrol deputies is just 9.5 percent.

A county diversity report shows that, in some law enforcement classifications, 23 percent of employees are Latino, so there may be opportunities to increase the numbers in the patrol division by encouraging transfers within the Sheriff’s Office. The same approach could improve the number of female patrol deputies.

Sonoma County’s Community and Local Law Enforcement Task Force was formed after a series of public demonstrations that, fortunately, didn’t turn violent. Other communities would do well to adopt this approach. But they won’t get there by tossing bricks through windows or setting fires.