San Francisco's liberal image marred by scandal-prone police department
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/04/san-francisco-police-department-scandal-racist-texts
A court filing by a US attorney pulled back the curtain of the San Francisco police department in March last year, revealing a shockingly ugly culture in which sworn officers of the law exchanged text messages expressing such sentiments as “All n****rs must fucking hang” and “Cross burning lowers blood pressure”.
The ensuing scandal – which implicated 14 officers and compromised thousands of criminal cases – cast a pall on the police department and shook San Francisco’s faith in itself as a progressive beacon. ...
The revelation last week of that second batch of bigoted text messages has prompted another round of recrimination between city leaders and again raised the question: how can this be happening in liberal San Francisco?...
San Francisco’s population is just 5.8% black, but black adults make up 40% of all arrests in the city and 56% of inmates in the San Francisco county jail. A 2015 study found that black adults were seven times as likely to be arrested as whites, and black women were 13.4 times as likely to be arrested as white women.
