Fatal shooting of unarmed black woman by police comes hours before San Francisco chief resigned

The shooting death of an unarmed black woman by San Francisco police Thursday set off a chain of events that ended with San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr stepping down.

The department said that shortly before 10 a.m., two officers spotted a suspected stolen car with a woman in the driver’s seat. When the officers tried to make contact, she drove off but collided with a truck near the end of a dead-end street. As officers tried to take her into custody, the woman attempted to move the vehicle.

One of the officers opened fire, striking the woman. She was later pronounced dead at a hospital, police said.

The woman’s name was not released. She was identified as a 26-year-old African American.

This was the latest of several recent police killings that have raised tensions the city.

“She was entitled to due process and, above all, she was entitled to her life,” said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi in a statement, calling the shooting disturbing.

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U.S. Department of Justice officials were also looking into the shooting.

Surh stepped down Thursday at the request of Mayor Edwin Lee.

The shooting was the latest in a series of scandals that have rocked the department, prompting a federal probe and public demand for reform.

Lee said he met with Suhr and asked for his resignation after learning of the shooting in the Bayview neighborhood earlier in the day.

Lee had previously expressed confidence in Suhr, praising the chief for understanding the need for reform, even as public calls had mounted for his ouster. But the mayor said progress has been too slow.

“These officer-involved shootings, justified or not, have forced our city to open its eyes to questions of when and how police use lethal force,” Lee said in a statement. “The progress we’ve made has been meaningful, but it hasn’t been fast enough. Not for me, not for Greg .... The men and women of SFPD put themselves in harm’s way literally every day. We owe it to them to restore the community’s trust in their work.”

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Toney Chaplin, a 26-year department veteran who previously led the department’s homicide division, was named acting police chief.

For more than a year, San Francisco police have been under scrutiny as several scandals unfolded, with officers accused of violating citizens’ civil rights, exchanging racist text messages and impeding criminal investigations.

Last year, a federal grand jury convicted an officer of violating a citizen’s civil rights while conducting unlawful searches at a downtown hotel that serves the poor.

Public calls for reform escalated after cellphone video recorded five police officers shooting and killing 26-year-old Mario Woods in the same neighborhood where the woman was fatally shot Thursday.

Civil rights activists demanded a federal investigation into the killing of Woods, a black man who was struck by more than 20 bullets. In February, the Department of Justice launched a two-year review of the police department, which Lee requested.

Anger over Woods’ killing was compounded by a judge’s decision that officers who exchanged racist and homophobic text messages could keep their jobs.

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The racist text messages found on officers’ cellphones involved more than a dozen officers and put more than 3,000 criminal cases in jeopardy, including several homicides.

In April, a second text-messaging scandal rocked the department, revealing that officers referred to minorities as “barbarians,” “cockroaches” and other slurs. A former lieutenant was also charged with impeding the investigation of a fellow officer accused of rape.

After the discovery of the racist text messages last year, Suhr and city leaders had pledged to implement a host of reforms to add officer training against implicit bias and increase accountability for officers who don’t report misconduct by their colleagues.

“Some of the reforms underway might have prevented or clarified today’s incident,” Lee said.

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