SFPD Brutally Took Down A One-Legged Homeless Man: Demand Body Cameras!

A horrific video reveals a homeless Black man with one leg brutally being taken down by San Francisco police officers on August 4, 2015, in the mid-Market area of San Francisco, just outside Twitter headquarters.

Please sign the petition to urge Mayor Ed Lee to speed up the process of giving all officers body cameras!

Witnesses said someone made a call about someone waving sticks around, but it's unclear who the call came from. The sticks mentioned by the caller are actually the man's crutches, because he has a prosthetic leg.

The video is viewable here. Police brutally pin this man's face into the ground and step on his prosthetic leg for a half an hour. The man is half-naked for much of the time and none of the officers seem to care.

I am a San Francisco resident, and it is unconscionable that the SFPD would treat a disabled person this way. Yet I am unsurprised. Week after week, incidents of police brutality surface on the Web, illustrating a systemic pattern nationwide: state agents routinely brutalize nonviolent and vulnerable citizens, shattering their bodily autonomy, personal agency and integrity. This absolutely cannot continue.

We often only learn about these incidents because bystanders happened to record it. While body cameras on police won't solve all problems, it is the least the SFPD can do to ensure officers are held accountable for their actions.

The SFPD received a $250,000 federal grant that was supposed to fund a pilot program to give 50 plainclothes supervisors body cameras. The pilot program was set to roll out in 2013, but it never happened. Now, Mayor Ed Lee has proposed spending more than $3 million dollars to give every officer a body camera, as part of his 2-year budget.

Please sign the petition to urge Mayor Ed Lee to speed up the process of giving all officers body cameras!