A Judge Just Slammed San Francisco Cops for Racist Policing

A federal judge has ruled that there is "substantial evidence of racially selective [law] enforcement by the San Francisco Police Department." The holding came on Thursday in a drug-related case, and as several SFPD officers are under investigation for allegedly sending racist and homophobic text messages. That's the city's second police texting scandal, and after a record year for fatal police shootings, it serves as more troubling background to the reform efforts following the firing of police chief Greg Suhr.

US District Judge Edward Chen ruled in favor of 12 defendants arrested during Operation Safe Schools, a series of drug stings carried out in San Francisco's Tenderloin neighborhood by the SFPD and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2013 and 2014. All 37 people arrested during the stings were black. The defendants maintained they were the victims of racial policing. Noting that ethnicities of drug dealers in the Tenderloin vary, Chen's ruling signaled he would dismiss all charges if the defendants could prove civil rights violations, and allowed them to seek further information, presumably on the races of arrestees and the agencies' profiling policies, from law enforcement for the next steps of the trial, according to the San Francisco Chronicle....
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/sf-federal-judge