By Ying-sun Ho and Van Jones

SFPD's assault on blacks

IN APRIL, Vilda Curry, a black mother of two in San Francisco, was released from Kaiser Permanente Hospital. After six weeks of in-patient care for a gunshot wound to her stomach, she went home.

Curry's family is grateful she's alive.

But Curry is going home without one of her ovaries. She can't walk and needs a catheter to go to the bathroom. A bullet remains lodged in her pelvis, and she still has an open wound in her chest.

The script is familiar: Curry fell prey to an act of senseless violence. But this was no drive-by shooting. San Francisco police officers shot Curry and turned her life inside out.

Curry is not alone. A recent spike in San Francisco Police Department violence is claiming black victim after black victim. In three separate incidents this year police have killed two African American men, injured and emotionally scarred several black children, and wounded Curry for life.

Police spokespeople have told TV reporters the officers "responded appropriately in dangerous situations." They say the department "does not target black families." The facts belie these claims.

In January, on Martin Luther King Day, a police incident rocked Bayview-Hunters Point. Angry parents have since filed formal charges with the San Francisco Office of Citizen Complaints alleging that numerous police officers abused four black children, ages 12 to 14, in front of a crowd of their parents and neighbors.

The four children were listening to music inside a car near their homes.

According to the complaint, cops surrounded the car, ordered the kids out, and held guns to their heads. Officers then pointed guns at a peaceful crowd of concerned witnesses and family members and viciously beat an unarmed 14-year-old who required stitches. Male officers also groped two girls in a supposed "pat search" that left one girl seriously bruised.

These were unarmed children. Today, Susie McAlister, mother of one of the girls, reports that these kids are afraid to go outside. Some don't eat or sleep or play with their friends.

This was just the first of three recent incidents in which African Americans were shot or beaten by the SFPD. In February, while on a date with his girlfriend, off-duty officer Steve Lee got into a fistfight with Gregory Hooper, a black street vendor. Officer Lee already had a disturbing history of off-duty misconduct.

Eyewitnesses reported that after the fight ended Lee shot the unarmed Hooper four times in the chest at point-blank range. Hooper died. Numerous witnesses told the San Francisco Chronicle that Lee fired not in self-defense but in revenge.

Then, in March, five officers shot Richard Tims to death. Family members say a fellow bus rider attacked the 100-pound, mentally disabled black man. In self-defense, they say, Tims had stabbed his assailant.

According to family members, witnesses observed Tims cowering in an empty bus shelter – terrified, trembling, waiting for help. Frightened, he did not comply with police orders to drop his knife. Police pepper-sprayed him, then opened fire. Police bullets destroyed the bus shelter and riddled the walls behind it with holes.

Tims was too far from any bystanders to hurt anyone. But many passersby were within range of the cops' guns. Vilda Curry was entering a nearby restaurant to have dinner with her daughter when police put a bullet in her stomach.

Five cops should have been able to take Mr. Tims's knife without firing a single bullet. Instead, they shot two people.

Such police violence would be unthinkable in Pacific Heights. But it is happening all too often in San Francisco's black neighborhoods.

Despite this deadly crisis, Mayor Willie Brown's administration has turned a blind and forgiving eye to the SFPD's lethal "shoot first, lie later" policy.

Willie Brown, it's time to show some real leadership. Call for a full-scale criminal investigation. Discipline the rogue officers. Overhaul the SFPD training and disciplinary policies.