After the Shooting: A Year of Reaction to the S.F. Police Killing of Mario Woods

A barrage of gunfire, at least 21 bullets shot by five San Francisco police officers, ended Mario Woods' life one year ago.

Those moments of gunfire also started something, shaking the city to its core and thrusting its leadership, police department and public into a year of anger, division and the beginnings of change.

"I remember thinking, you know this is San Francisco’s Ferguson," Police Commissioner Joe Marshall said about reaction to one of several cellphone videos of the killing. Woods' death had irrevocably thrust the city into a raging national firestorm surrounding police killings of black men.

"This is San Francisco’s Eric Garner, and later on it became Philando Castile, and all those other incidents," Marshall said. "A lot of people would not believe that something like that could happen in San Francisco."

Woods was a suspect in a stabbing earlier in the day when a large group of police officers caught up to him after 4 p.m. on Dec. 2, 2015. He was holding a knife. In the videos, he appears dazed -- after officers had used pepper spray and bean-bag rounds in attempts to subdue him. He started to walk away from the group, but a single officer circles around him and steps into his path. Woods kept walking, and the shooting started.

To Marshall and many others who watched the videos, the shooting "didn't make sense." The response didn't appear to match the threat.

And another thing, Marshall began saying in the days following the shooting: "If what I saw, this shooting, was in policy, then the policy needs to change."

The Police Commission launched a top-to-bottom revision of SFPD use-of-force policies. The U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services agreed to review the department, eventually issuing a scathing review. Five activists held a 17-day hunger strike, and the sustained protest movement led to former Police Chief Greg Suhr's eventual resignation.

A year later, the impact of the shooting is far from over, and changes it inspired are far from complete.

"I think the legacy of Mario Woods is still something that’s being written," said civil rights attorney Adante Pointer, who represents Woods' mother, Gwendolyn Woods, in a federal lawsuit against San Francisco. "There’s much more work to do."

Reflecting on the year since the shooting, Marshall said something similar.

"The reform movement went into full effect and it has yet to be realized," he said. "Closure will not be complete until the reforms are put in place, to do everything that we can from a citizen and a department’s and a commission’s standpoint to greatly decrease the chance of something like this happening again."