Justice Denied
Kevin J. Mullen
I once mentioned to Police Chief Con Murphy that I had been a police officer in San Francisco in various ranks and positions for over 25 years and I had never quite figured out exactly what it was we were supposed to be doing. Anyone who knows Con Murphy would tell you that he is not one to give himself away by talking too much. But at my comment he did smile knowingly.
On the face of it, the basic job of a police officer seems quite obvious. You are there to enforce the law; if someone commits an act or omission contrary to a law forbidding or commanding it, you are to arrest them “without fear or favor” and bring them before a court at which a determination is made as to their guilt or innocence. At the same time you are to observe the laws and rules governing police conduct which protect the community from oppressive police behavior. It all sounds simple enough and if that was all there was to it, the police job would be an uncomplicated if sometimes onerous task to perform. As it is in the real world, police work gets all tangled up in a complex of political, social, ethnic and organizational complexities which make its proper conduct sometimes impossible.
Sunday evening watches in San Francisco’s outlying police districts are usually pretty quiet. So there was plenty of help on hand to answer a burglary-in-progress call at the Presidio Veterinary Hospital at Sutter and Lyon streets at 10:30 p.m. on June 4, 1995. In a crudely brutal attempt to gain entry, the perpetrator had knocked the front door from its hinges, splintering the door frame in the process. Witnesses described the perpetrator as an African-American male attired in a denim jacket who departed from the scene on foot. Officer Marc Andaya, patrolling alone and in plain clothes, was the first to spot a man fitting the description a few blocks away.
What followed next may in part be explained by Officer Andaya’s introduction to street police work in Oakland 12 years earlier. On May 21, 1983, rookie officer Marc Andaya was dispatched to a disturbance at an Oakland motel. Unknown to the officer, the subject of the complaint had recently been released from Napa State Hospital, over the objections of staff there, after spending ten years there for assaulting his 3-year old daughter and 10 month old son whose testicle he had bitten off in the attack.
Officer Andaya tried to send the man on his way but the man returned, according to the motel manager who called in the complaint. The man knocked the officer down and began to beat him with his own club. In desperation, the officer fired six .357 magnum rounds into his assailant, felling him instantly. But as Andaya pulled himself up, empty pistol in hand, he was horrified to see the man rising as well. The officer ran across a six lane roadway, reloading his weapon as he went. The man followed after him, and on the other side of the street the officer dropped him again, this time for good, with four more rounds from his revolver.
Over the following years Officer Andaya chalked up a record as an aggressive proactive street police officer which earned him the praise of his superiors and a spot on a coveted high risk drug enforcement unit. In 1994 Officer Andaya, a Filipino/American, accepted a lateral transfer to the San Francisco Police Department which was then seeking to increase its minority representation. In light of his experience and apparent ability as a street officer, Andaya was appointed to plainclothes duty in the Richmond District. It was in that capacity he was working on June 4, 1995.
As the officer rolled up on the possible suspect in front of 2763 Bush Street, he immediately recognized the man as Aaron Williams, a violent San Quentin parolee thought to be responsible for many crimes in the neighborhood. Williams, 35, was first committed to San Quentin Prison on a robbery conviction the same year that Officer Andaya had his fatal confrontation in Oakland. Williams’ record thereafter followed a pattern all too familiar among black urban males in the last quarter of the century. Over the next decade he was in and out of prison on drug and parole violations. In between times he stayed in the Bush Street apartment, his family’s home.
In December 1993, on the occasion of one of Williams’ parole violation arrests, deputy sheriffs at the County Jail refused to accept him because of his violent behavior, and required instead that he be taken directly to San Quentin Prison. By mid-1995 Williams was back on the street. For the several months prior to June 4, his neighbors and relatives called police to the Bush Street address frequently to report his outbursts.
On the night of June 4, 1995, Officer Andaya called out to Williams and identified himself as a police officer just as the suspect was buzzed into the building by his sister, Kimberley, with whom he shared the flat. Uniformed Richmond District officers showed up promptly in answer to Officer Andaya’s call for a backup; others would join them soon. Unlike the Sheriff’s officers who had diverted Williams to San Quentin when he was too violent to handle, Officer Andaya and his partners had to deal with the man as they found him on the street that night
It is said about the fire service – and was as was tragically emphasized on 9/11 -- that fire fighters are people who run into a burning building when everyone else is running out. Similarly, police officers are people who must go to a violently demented man when others are free to depart. The officers called from the street for Williams to come down from his residence. At first he refused, but finally, at the urging of his sister, he descended the stairway, babbling incoherently and chanting repetitively in the way of those afflicted with drug induced delirium.
At the street level he tried to bull his way through the waiting officers and the fight was on. Over the next several minutes, the officers were hard pressed to control the powerfully built, violently resisting ex-con. The fight surged across the sidewalk and into the street between two parked cars. The officers pepper sprayed Williams with no apparent effect. All the while Williams struggled violently. He fought and bit and, according to one officer’s later account, tried to seize an officers holstered firearm.
Observers in nearby residences were drawn to the scene by Williams’ screaming and the noise of the struggle. Some said later that, in their opinion, the officers used more force than was necessary. Others said no. Doubtless none of them had the kind of experience with street arrests that Officer Andaya earned a dozen years earlier in Oakland.
Finally, Williams was subdued, hand cuffed, hobbled, and placed in a patrol wagon for transport to Richmond Station. At that point, Aaron Williams’ arrest -- though more violent than most -- was not a great deal different from many urban arrests. But what happened next put it in a small select group of cases which have served to define relations between police officers and young African Americans males in inner city America at the century’s turn.
On the way to the Richmond Station in the back of the wagon, Aaron Williams stopped breathing. The transporting officer called for an ambulance and began to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Paramedics arrived and took over, but all their attempts came to nothing. Aaron Williams had died.
The official investigative mechanism for in-custody deaths was implemented immediately. Homicide detectives arrived on the scene to take witness statements. A representative of the District Attorney’s office also showed up. The Medical Examiner’s Office took charge of the remains and proceeded with its own investigation.
In another time –- or perhaps in another place -- that might have been the end of it. But not now. Not here. In the last few decades, and particularly since the Rodney King case in 1992 which saw Los Angeles go up in flames when the “wrong” verdict was rendered in the case of the officers charged with beating him, there has been a pronounced interest in contacts between police officers and African-American males. Complicating matters was a spate of in-custody deaths from cocaine induced delirium which, when connected with positional asphyxia from the way arrestees are placed in patrol wagons, can result in death.
In the Williams case, the reaction wasn’t long in coming. There were immediate calls for an FBI investigation. The family contracted with an attorney who filed lawsuits totaling $20million. Kimberly Williams, who, it was reported, had removed her children from the house four days earlier and hid all the kitchen knives when Aaron began a cocaine binge-- and who immediately after the incident stated that Aaron had attacked the officers in a fit of rage -- now said that the officers had coerced the story out of her, saying they would take her children away from her unless she cooperated.
Members of the African American community, stoked by the rhetoric of Oakland based Bay Area Police Practices Committee and other community “leaders,” mau maued the Police Commission at its next public meeting, charging a coverup and demanding the dismissal of the officers involved. Not trusting the Medical Examiner’s integrity, the family hired its own pathologist to conduct a parallel post mortem examination.
The FBI saw no reason to intervene after its investigation. The Medical Examiner determined that the trauma suffered by Williams in the struggle were superficial and that the cause of his death was excited delirium from the effects of physical exertion while under the effects of cocaine. The pathologists hired by the family concurred that Williams’ injuries were superficial.
Nevertheless, confronted with a constant barrage of sensationalist rhetoric by those supporting the prosecution of the officers, the police department brought a charge of excessive force against Officer Andaya before the police commission. A dozen Richmond station officers were also brought up for post-arrest neglect of duty.
A year later, after an acrimonious trial before the commission, Officer Andaya was found not guilty of using excessive force. Significantly, the two commission members who were roundly castigated by the “community” for failing to find him guilty happened also to be practicing attorneys.
The commission then proceeded with the trial of Officer Andaya and a number of other officers for neglect of duty for failing to seek medical attention quickly enough and a number of technical violations of obscure departmental procedures. A number of guilty judgments were rendered against several of the officers including Officer Andaya.
Instead of ordering Anaya’s dismissal, however, as recommended by the department, the Commission ordered Andaya suspended for ninety days. The group of commissioners who voted against dismissal included the same two who had voted against a finding of guilty on the earlier charge of excessive force, Commission President John Keker and Commissioner Clothilde Hewlett. Again the “community” erupted and rancorously harangued the commissioners for failure to act as they wanted. Calls were made for further prosecution. “The witch hunt has got to stop on this guy, “remarked Andaya’s attorney, Jim Collins. “How many times can he be exonerated and then they come after him again?”
It is important to note that both commissioners who voted against the charge of excessive force were attorneys and the same two voted not to dismiss Andaya on the other charges. It is fashionable these days to characterize attorneys as unprincipled money grubbing advocates who will do or say anything to advance the cause of their clients. There is something to that characterization in some cases, but at bottom – as the actions of Commissioner Hewlett and Keker demonstrate—most attorneys take their oath to uphold the law seriously. The evidence wasn’t there and they would not be a party to a wrongful conviction.
Both Commissioners resigned in the face of the continuing excoriation. Andaya was retried by a reconstituted commission and dismissed for not making complete statements on his application to the police department. He was fired for not reporting a default judgment by an oversight committee in Oakland which didn’t have the legal authority to command his presence at its hearing, and which the Oakland Police Department reportedly didn’t include in his background package. If there was any real fault in that matter it was best laid at the door of the department background investigation process.
In the end, the city settled the two $20million worth of lawsuits for $98,000, about enough to make sure that the plaintiff’s attorneys were paid something for their time. The Bay Area Police Practices Committee had its scalp and the security of the city was diminished by the presence of one hard-working police officer. What neighbors on Bush Street thought about the relative peacefulness occasioned by Aaron Williams’ departure from the scene, if anything at all, has not been widely publicized.
Now it looks as though we are going to go down that same road again. Watch the players and see what they all do. Maybe we will find out what police officers are supposed to do when confronted with violence which would send most of their accusers scurrying for cover.