At a contentious town hall meeting Tuesday night in the Mission District, communities were shown video footage of a recent police shooting that left a man critically injured.
The graphic footage, captured from nearby surveillance video and a police body camera, and released by the San Francisco Police Department, shows the man — identified as 24-year-old Jamaica Hampton — striking two officers with a glass bottle near the intersection of 23rd and Mission streets on the morning of Dec. 7. The officers shout “Get on the ground now,” as Hampton darts between parked cars. He then appears to charge one of the officers, who fires multiple rounds, hitting Hampton several times. When Hampton attempts to get up, the second officer appears to fire another shot.
Hampton was rushed to Zuckerberg General Hospital and remains in critical condition, according to a hospital spokesperson.
Emotions flared as the packed crowd at Cesar Chavez Elementary School, located just blocks from where the shooting took place, watched the newly released footage.
“You are just hunting him down,” one woman cried out.
San Francisco Police Chief William Scott began the meeting by noting the several ongoing investigations into the incident, and that new information would be made public as it becomes available, in accordance with state law.
“We are releasing video evidence of this stage of the investigation for transparency, not in an effort to make final conclusions,” he said.
SFPD Commander Robert O’Sullivan identified the two officers involved in the shooting â Sterling Hayes and Christopher Flores â who were responding to two 911 calls, also released at the meeting. The first call came from a distraught woman describing a male in his 20s or 30s “who might have been Latino” and who had broken into her home, the second from another woman reporting a Latino man in his mid-30s breaking into multiple cars.
Scott said that an investigation is ongoing into whether Hampton was indeed the perpetrator of the home burglary attempt.
Jamaica Hampton was shot multiple times by San Francisco police officers on December 7, 2019. (Courtesy Vive Church of Oakland)
According to a police summary read to attendees by Commander O’Sullivan, Hayes and Flores were searching the vicinity and found Hampton, who matched a description of the suspect described in the calls.
In the ensuing confrontation, O’Sullivan said that Hampton first assaulted Flores, who was seated in the passenger side of the police car, and then Hayes, who was driving, with a bottle of Grey Goose Vodka, which Scott referred to as “a deadly weapon.”
Police officials showed attendees photos of what appeared to be multiple lacerations to Hayes’ face and head, along with images of the vodka bottle Hampton allegedly used as a weapon.
Scott defended the officers’ actions, noting that they used pepper spray, a baton and issued multiple commands to halt before opening fire. This incident, he added, marks the first SFPD shooting since June 2018.
“These events are very rare,” he said. “Out of almost a million and a half contacts, we had one.”
But that did little to placate many of meeting’s attendees, more than a dozen of whom waited in line to question Scott about the shooting. Some accused the officers of failing to appropriately approach Hampton during the confrontation, and questioned why lethal force was used on someone armed with just a bottle.
Several audience members, including friends and members of Hampton’s foster family, portrayed Hampton as “kind,” “humble” and a “book nerd,” who had aspirations of becoming a social worker as a result of his tough childhood and experiences with foster care and homelessness.
People waited in line for their turn to speak at a town hall meeting called by SFPD to discuss Jamaica Hampton’s shooting by police officers. (Sheraz Sadiq/KQED News)
“He was the kindest to strangers and literally every time we hung out and somebody would ask for money or change, he would give it to them,” Eve Greenberg, a friend of Hampton’s, told Scott, her voice rising with anger. “It’s so disturbing. This is against everything he ever wanted for himself. … He pulled himself from a dark place and was thriving and you tore him down and I’m disgusted.”
Greenberg said one of the last conversations she had with him was about police violence and that “he really felt that he could be a statistic by the way he looked.”
Other speakers, including community activist Gloria La Riva, called the shooting “murder” and demanded police accountability. She referenced previous shootings by San Francisco officers, including the fatal shooting of Amilcar Perez Lopez in 2015.
“How many times do we have to keep coming here?” La Riva asked.
Sarah Ballard-Hanson, an assistant high school principal, said she heard the gunshots outside her apartment that morning and called 911. She criticized the department’s initial characterization of the shooting and accused it of “trying to sway public opinion.”
Eve Greenberg, a friend of Jamaica Hampton, speaks at a community meeting held by SFPD Tuesday night to discuss the Dec. 7 shooting. (Sheraz Sadiq/KQED News)
“I want to trust the police,” she said. “I want to be able to work with you, but when it’s presented like this, it creates mistrust and it creates continued trauma.”
On Monday, the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office filed four charges against Hampton, including two counts of assaulting a police officer with a deadly weapon.
The Independent Investigations Bureau of the DA’s Office is leading the investigation into the shooting, along with separate investigations being conducted by the Department of Police Accountability and the SFPD Internal Affairs Division unit.
Scott said he expects his department’s investigation to be completed within a year.
Copyright 2019 KQED