UPDATE: On Friday, San Francisco Mayor London Breed told KQED she had seen the video of shooting incident and said it “was a hard video to watch” and “a bizarre situation.” She also criticized the Board of Supervisors for removing funding for Tasers, which she claims she had sought and which “would have definitely, in this particular case, been a better option.”
At an emotionally charged community meeting Tuesday night in the Mission District, attendees 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, around 8:34 a.m. 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 Cmdr. Robert O'Sullivan identified the two officers involved in the shooting — Sterling Hayes and Christopher Flores — 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.
According to a police summary read to attendees by 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, Hampton first assaulted Flores, who was seated in the passenger side of the police car, and then Hayes, who was driving, with a Grey Goose Vodka bottle, 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 the 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.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The following contains audio of two 911 calls as well as footage from surveillance video and a police body camera, all recorded on Dec. 7, 2019, and released this week by the San Francisco Police Department. VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED — the video component, which begins at about 9:00, contains graphic footage of a shooting incident.
"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.