By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
San Francisco, CA – Attorneys, community members and other leaders gathered for a press conference Wednesday outside of the San Francisco Hall of Justice in protest of DA Brooke Jenkins’ decisions on June 30 to file a motion to dismiss charges against SFPD Office Kenneth Cha, who allegedly shot and killed Sean Moore, an unarmed black man who repeatedly asked officers to leave his property in 2017.
Jenkins, who took over about a year ago as DA, promptly dismissed cases against officers who were involved in other shootings including that of Jamaica Hampton. Rebecca Young, a former deputy public defender and deputy district attorney who is representing Moore’s family, felt that this was the most likely prosecution to stick.
She told the Vanguard they had four independent experts who believed that criminal charges were warranted in this case.
She expressed “disappointment” but “not surprise” that the DA finally dismissed the case.
“Of all the cases that were pending in the District Attorney’s office, none had stronger facts than the case involving the prosecution of Officer Kenneth Cha,” she said during the press conference. “Five different judges in the state of California ruled that the police who were on Sean Moore’s steps and shot him as he stood on his own steps unarmed, that those police officers were not in a place that they lawfully had a right to be.”
She said, “This is a huge, significant legal finding.”
She said, “Thus any violence used against him for police imagined disrespect of their authority, which is really what happened here, was unjustified unreasonable. And under any theory of self-defense that Ms. Jenkins believes in is just not sustainable.”
Young explained, “the undisputed facts of Sean Moore’s shooting are that the police arrived at his home at four in the morning without a warrant. They had no warrant for his arrest. They had no warrant to search his home. And Sean Moore had committed no crime.”
Moore told them to get off his steps, leave his property, “I’m not talking to you anymore.”
She said, “He was doing what any homeowner had the right to do, which is tell a trespasser to leave my property.” She said, “the superior court judge here found that the police were trespassing at the time that they were on his steps and refused to leave. And therefore, because they were trespassers, they were not in the lawful performance of their duties.”
The cops began beating him with a baton and pepper sprayed him, “and when he kicked out to get get Officer Patino back off him, who was batoning him, he got shot.”
Young said, “This is not the kind of justice that we see dispensed by this district attorney’s office to victims of crime who are other than black or brown.”
She added, “We cannot have a district attorney in San Francisco who promises during her campaign to hold police accountable and then does everything opposite of that promise in her first 12 months in office.
“We cannot have a district attorney in San Francisco who refuses to hold police accountable when they break the law. All that we are asking for is that black and brown people who are victims of violence in our city get the same justice as white people and Asian people.”
Kenneth Blackmon, the brother of Sean Moore said, “I spent 20 years of my life working for juvenile probation right here in San Francisco. I know what’s going on in that building. It’s not justice. I’ve never seen anything like this in all my career and dealing with the youth.”
He said, “What I’m seeing now is a miscarriage of justice.”
He said last week, they were in court, “We sat there and watched the, the lawyer Darby Williams, the lawyer for the police, on video. The judge, they all agreed we was going to have a preliminary hearing.”
The next day he said he was home in Elk Grove, where he now lives, “I answered the phone. This is Darby Williams. I just want to let you know I filed a motion today to dismiss the case.”
“This is not justice,” Blackmon said. “Brook Jenkins is picking and choosing which cases she feels is important, whatever’s beneficial they think to their career.”
He said, “When it’s just us, regular, not billionaire people, it’s like it don’t matter.”
James Birch, the Deputy director of the Anti-Police Terror Project said, “I stand before you all today in a space of sadness and anger, sadness because of what the Moore family has been forced to endure since their child was murdered.
“Anger, because all of us here knew that this was the inevitable result following the election of DA Brooke Jenkins, who is Brooke Jenkins. She has a heartless zealot of the Neoliberal Law and Order machine. Come on, employed to shield police from accountability proudly allowing killers to get away with cold-blooded murder.”
He said, “Is San Francisco safer as a result? But people like Brooke Jenkins and London Breed, don’t care about data-informed practices.”
Birch continued, “Let’s turn back to what matters here today. Sean Moore was murdered. We all know this as a fact. And despite the multiple instances of corruption within the DA’s office, despite the presence of bias based on past prosecutions, despite the fact that all of the evidence clearly spells out that Sean Moore was murdered, Brooke Jenkins has dropped the charges.”
Geoffrea Morris, The co-founder of Black Wall Street in San Francisco said, “The unfortunate fact is that Black people in this city, in this country are disposable. You can harm us without recourse.”
She said, “The dismissal of Sean Moore’s case is basically the abrupt end of Black Lives Matter in this city.”
She added, “San Francisco does not care about Black lives.”
Under former DA Chesa Boudin, the case was prosecuted as a manslaughter.
Boudin told the Vanguard in a statement, “It is crystal clear that under Jenkins police can lie, steal or kill with impunity. There is one system of justice for police and another for the rest of us.”
