The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) is touting new enforcement successes enabled by its new squadron of surveillance drones, deeming them a “game changer” in catching scofflaws. At the same time, police watchdogs may still be making it harder for officers to chase down suspects despite voters having their say otherwise. Can SFPD’s high-tech dragnet be an adequate substitute for old-fashioned foot pursuits?
A double-edged dilemma
San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, along with Mayor London Breed and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, celebrated the use of drones in helping in recent incidents to shut down a July 4 sideshow in the Mission and to arrest suspected vehicle burglars and a suspected kidnapper at a press conference held Aug. 6 at SFPD headquarters.
But for some inside the department, it may feel like two steps forward, one step back due to a recently adopted general order regarding foot pursuits, which received a final vote of approval by the Police Commission on March 6, the same week San Francisco voters approved a measure to give cops more leeway in chases.
Proposition E passed with over 54 percent of the vote last March. It amended recently adopted vehicle pursuit rules to allow for an officer’s reasonable suspicion that a felony or violent misdemeanor was being committed and to enable the use of drones in pursuits. The following summer, Gov. Gavin Newsom urged the city of Oakland to ease its police chase policies.
The new general order had been under consideration within the department since 2022, inspired by recent policies adopted in other cities, such as one adopted in Chicago in June of that year after police killed two suspects during foot chases. That new policy came under criticism when, less than a year after its adoption, a Chicago police officer died while chasing a suspect in a domestic dispute.
The experience in Chicago illustrates the double-edged dilemma posed by imposing a policy over events like foot pursuits, which can be fluid and evolve quickly.
“Foot pursuits can be very dynamic; they can change on a dime, “San Francisco Police Officers’ Association President Tracy McCray told The Voice in an interview.” And you’re asking an officer to be able to follow this list of what they want to say, which are supposedly guidelines but are actually rules while they’re chasing after someone. If you don’t do them, then you open yourself up to getting dinged.”
The order was first developed by SFPD’s training division and received input from the Department of Police Accountability (DPA), San Francisco’s police oversight agency, before being initially approved by the Police Commission in October 2023. At the time, hundreds of members of the public, prompted by an appeal by the group Stop Crime SF, wrote to the commission in opposition to the new order.
”When officers are given a list of what they cannot do, they tend to freeze in these rapidly evolving encounters.”
— DPA policy director Janelle Caywood
The DPA contends that the policy is more of a set of guidelines than hard and fast rules to protect officers from injury and reduce use of force incidents. “Instead of a proscriptive policy telling what officers what they ‘shall not’ do, this provides officers with the discretion to chase and reinforces principles taught in SFPD training,” DPA Director Paul Henderson wrote in a statement emailed to The Voice.
“We learned that when officers are given a list of what they cannot do, they tend to freeze in these rapidly evolving encounters,” DPA policy director Janelle Caywood told the Police Commission at the October 2023 meeting. “So we agreed that it would be best for officers just to give them guidance on what they can do and should do and give them tactical instructions on how to conclude foot pursuits as safely as possible for everyone involved.”
In a Sept. 30, 2022 letter to Chief Scott, Henderson also wrote:
“Importantly, this policy tells officers what they can do when faced with a fleeing subject instead of what they cannot, to prevent officers from freezing up in these time-compressed, rapidly evolving situations, with the goal of improving outcomes. However, officers are still required to act reasonably and to balance the necessity of immediate apprehension (including the severity of the crime) against the danger to pursuing officer(s) and the public. This balancing test, with the guardrail of “reasonableness,” provides accountability for officers who engage in unsafe, unwarranted foot pursuits.”
Words matter
But many rank-and-file cops have their doubts. It boils down to language — what words are used and how the policy’s status as a Department General Order (DGO) affects how and where it’s implemented, especially given the often adversarial relationship between SFPD and DPA.
Lou Barberini, a retired 21-year San Francisco police officer who writes for the Westside Observer and his own Substack on public safety policy, says the new policy is “a minefield of opportunity for DPA to ding officers.”
During a discussion at the Oct. 11, 2023, Police Commission meeting, the DPA maintained that the policy should be codified as a general order. Earlier that year, Henderson and Caywood told the commission that SFPD had been allowing outdated general orders “to languish for years” and was “refusing help” from their office. Meanwhile, Chief Scott expressed concern over new policies on police tactics being implemented as general orders rather than as more flexible guidelines that could be more quickly updated based on developments.
“There are a lot of tactics that we rely upon that we need to codify and put it in a better format … some of the things that we do on a day in and day out,” Scott told commissioners at the Oct. 11 meeting. “You’ll find it in probably a PowerPoint or training module somewhere, but you won’t find it in a DGO, and I don’t think that should be in one honestly. So it’s not just this, it’s a bigger issue than this.”
“[Scott] opened the door, and then he couldn’t close the door. He probably should have just issued a department notice [with] guidelines on foot pursuits […] but he didn’t, he opened the door to it becoming a policy,” McCray told The Voice. “I mean, good intentions and all, but DPA is in the business of finding policy violations that officers make, whether they’re of their own making or not.”
Another issue is whether the policy as written meets what is informally described on both sides as the “shall check” — where and when words like “shall” that imply an enforceable rule in the policy as drafted, as opposed to terms like “should,” “may” or “can,” which not likely to deem an officer “out of policy” depending upon what actions they take. The word “shall” appears in the policy 12 times.
As an example, McCray offered up the example of where the order states an officer initiating a foot pursuit shall get on the radio and broadcast six specific items: a Code 33 (a request to clear that radio channel of nonemergency transmissions); the officer’s unit identifier; location and direction of travel; reason for the pursuit; number and description of the suspects; and whether any of them are armed — all during the chase while wearing a duty belt that weighs over 20 pounds. According to a study by the Illinois Law Enforcement and Training Standards Board, the average foot pursuit lasts a little over four minutes.
“He’s trying to get all this out while trying to chase someone? If you get five out of the six and someone wants to make a complaint, do you get dinged?” McCray adds.
Meanwhile, Chief Scott remains hopeful that drones can help alleviate concerns about the tighter rules. Asked at the Aug. 6 press conference, he told The Voice, “It’ll be helpful for sure […] What happens when you don’t have that type of support? You’re much quicker to go into an apprehension mode; you try to chase the person until you catch them. When you have the luxury of aerial support, you can slow things down a bit; it’s safer all the way around, and it’s more effective. So, yeah, it’s a big deal, and we believe it will enhance our foot policy.”
