Social justice organizations on Tuesday hand-delivered letters to the offices of elected officials at San Francisco City Hall, demanding they do more to protect women in city jails.
Last month, 19 women filed a claim with the city alleging that, on May 22, sheriff’s deputies ordered them to undress in front of each other, laughed at them, and filmed the proceedings with their body-worn cameras.
Immediately after Mission Local first reported the allegations on Nov. 20, several members of the Board of Supervisors called for action. Criminal-justice, human-rights, and women’s advocates rallied in front of the jail at 425 Seventh St. the following week.
Now, more than 30 organizations — the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office and Young Women’s Freedom Coalition among them — have co-signed a list of demands to Mayor Daniel Lurie, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Sheriff Paul Miyamoto and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins.
The groups asked for the deputies allegedly involved to be suspended, for the woman to be released from jail and given counseling while they wait for their cases to go to trial, and for strip searches to be conducted only when there is reasonable suspicion of contraband.
“We are specifically troubled by the horrific May 22 mass strip search of women in the jail and the deeply troubling harassment of women that has followed,” the letter reads.
“We are also deeply concerned that the Sheriff’s Office is effectively condoning gendered violence in the jail by failing to take the reports of the mass strip searches seriously and by allowing the supervisors and deputies involved to remain in positions of authority over the impacted women.”
The group also asked the district attorney’s office to consider trauma resulting from the alleged strip searches as mitigating factors in the affected women’s cases. They want Lurie and the Board of Supervisors to fully fund the Sheriff’s Oversight Board, which is currently without an inspector general, to independently review concerns about the jail.
The sheriff’s department had already taken corrective measures and closed an initial investigation into the May 22 incident, said spokesperson Tara Moriarty.
An unknown number of jail supervisors were found to have violated policy after the sheriff’s initial investigation, according to several sources who work in the jail. They said, however, that they were not aware of any deputies who were suspended or reassigned.
This month, the Department of Police Accountability opened a “supplemental investigation” at the sheriff’s request. It had earlier declined to do so because the incident “raised matters outside” its agreement with the sheriff’s department.
Moriarty said she was also unaware of any staffing changes related to “activity from the May 22 searches.”
Meanwhile, Bay Area officials continued to raise concerns about strip searches.
At a Dec. 5 meeting, William Palmer, president of the Sheriff’s Oversight Board, said he was “disappointed” to “have to hear things about the jail from Mission Local” instead of being informed by sheriff’s staff.
At a Dec. 9 meeting, a member of the Santa Clara Commission on the Status of Women, suggested that San Francisco’s counterpart propose policy recommendations to improve women’s conditions at the jail.
And at City Hall on Tuesday, more than a dozen representatives from the public defender’s office and advocacy groups, including Nuestra Causa, the San Francisco Women’s Housing Coalition and the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, walked door to door delivering letters.
Many of them had family members serving time, or had once been incarcerated themselves.
They were mostly met in the hallway by supervisors’ legislative aides, who agreed to pass on the letters.
A couple of these aides had been on a tour of the women’s unit of the county jail on Dec. 8, which included Miyamoto, investigators with the Department of Police Accountability, and members of different city commissions. Several recalled higher-ranking members of the sheriff’s department telling them that grievances aren’t always brought to their attention.
District 11 supervisor Chyanne Chen (who has put a hearing regarding the allegations on the supervisors’ January calendar) and District 10 supervisor Shamann Walton (who created the ballot measure to fund sheriff’s oversight) stepped outside their offices to talk with the people delivering letters.
Without oversight, Walton said, the dynamic between women being held in county jail and the deupties overseeing them is that of “fox guarding the henhouse.”
Veronica Tellez, one of the advocates who speaks only Spanish, was shy when the group began knocking on doors. But when she learned that District 7 supervisor Myrna Melgar was from El Salvador and that Juvenile Hall is in her district, Tellez stepped to the front.
Melgar was unavailable, but her aide, Jennifer Fieber, thanked the group for ensuring “voices hidden from society have a voice out here.”
When the group arrived at Lurie’s office, a receptionist took the list of demands. Then the group moved on toward the sheriff’s office.
They arrived to confusion: “You all are here to deliver a letter?” a deputy asked.
A few minutes later, Moriarty emerged, thanked the group for coming and promised to thoroughly read their demands and relay them to Miyamoto.
Before they left, Julia Arroyo and Foreign Tonga, members of the Young Women’s Freedom Center, described to Moriarty their own experiences; both had been held in the jail, and did not remember it fondly.
“I went through a lot of trauma,” said Tonga. “I just want that to be heard.”
You can tell when political leaders take an issue seriously. When people show up to complain, are they willing to spend a few minutes to talk directly, or do the visitors get a few platitudes from an aide? I’ve noticed more than once that politicians who are uncomfortable addressing an issue will dodge visitors who come to their office. Absent rapid concrete action to prove otherwise, one has to suspect that the sheriff, the mayor, and most of the supervisors all feel like they’ve got better things to do that worry about deputies abusing women. It shouldn’t be hard to say that we need to take crime seriously, and simultaneously we’re uncompromising about requiring law enforcement officers to behave professionally. If a politician cannot bring themselves to do that, I’m not voting for them.
Also, regarding police accountability: I think the platitude that most officers are highly professional and serve for the best of reasons is true. And yet I cannot help but notice that police departments tend to close ranks to protect the few bad apples, and accountability only seems to come when things get so out of hand that the problem can no longer be swept under the rug. Until the day that departments demonstrate that they’re proactive about dealing with problematic officers, a lot of citizens will quite rightly be wary of the police.
Didn’t these deputies, read about what happened in Dublin, a couple of years ago, where one of the deputies were having sex with the female prisoners,and not only was he arrested but that prison was closed, due not just the incident, but all the lawsuits, that followed.
The current sheriff wrote a thank you hire this guy back note to the deputy who gave dept armor to shrimp boy chow.