When I was young my father would tell me, “If you want a job where every day is different, become a police officer.” Law enforcement is a job where a morning coffee run can unexpectedly explode into a once-in-a-career, life-or-death situation.
Attack on Law Enforcement Officer
Steve, a San Francisco Park Ranger, chose law enforcement as his career. On an early Sunday morning shift, before churches even opened, Steve was in his patrol vehicle at Octavia and Market Streets. Amani, who historically translated for the military in Afghanistan, chose crime. Amani pulled up next to Steve that Sunday and motioned for him to roll down his window before speeding off onto the Central Freeway.
Steve didn’t have the opportunity to ask if Amani was okay so he loosely followed him. Steve watched Amani crash his vehicle into the center median just shy of the 7th Street offramp. Because the DMV did not yet show the car as stolen, Steve was unaware that Amani had just carjacked the vehicle by threatening the victim with death.
Steve stopped his vehicle to render aid but Amani charged him, discharging his fist into Steve’s face at least ten times. What’s worse is Amani had a boxcutter in his right hand that opened a gash in Steve’s forehead and his left eyebrow, narrowly missing his eye.
Enter Renato, a civilian and a true American. Renato contained Amani with a chokehold—a defensive tactic SFPD is not allowed to employ to defend themselves— and wrapped his legs around Amani’s hips. Seconds later, Steve and Renato could hear the reassuring sounds of the SFPD calvary coming “code three.”
The Chronicle minimized the slashing; alleging it happened and suggesting Steve didn’t need stitches
In December 2019 during the preliminary hearing, Amani’s public defender Scott Grant asked that his client be uncuffed. The San Francisco Sheriffs refused, arguing that Amani had failed to stop acting violently. The preliminary hearing concluded with the judge determing that probable cause existed that Amani had assaulted a law enforcement officer. Both the Sheriffs and Steve were privy to Amani’s violence.
January 2020: enter the newly elected District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who inherited the Amani case. Both the DA’s office and the DA’s Victim Services contacted Steve and told him that his case was weak and that they would have to divert the case to “mental health diversion.” Mental health diversion despite probable cause being found approximately 11 months earlier? Upon completion of the diversion program, all charges related to Amani’s violent assault on Steve would be erased.
Boudin’s Abuse of Mental Health Diversion
California Penal Code Section 1001.36 (F) states that before mental health diversion should be accepted:
“The court may consider the opinions of the district attorney.”
In one of my previous articles, I wrote about a robber that committed 19 takeover robberies of McDonalds restaurants. These were not impulsive actions by a desperate person seeking money to feed his drug addiction. This was a robber that had plenty of time to plan and review his actions on his commute to and from Sacramento. Yet, it was Boudin’s opinion that the robber should be released back into the public and the 19 takeover robberies should be erased from his arrest record because the crimes were attributable to his “mental health disorder” under CPC section 1001.36(b)(1)(A-C).
In another case, on June 7, 2018, Garrett stole a bottle of wine from the North Beach Food Mart—a felony before Prop 47. On his way out the door, Garrett unnecessarily and “violently shoved” the 85-year-old store owner to the ground. The owner died the next day from the “elder abuse.” Under the same penal code section, Garrett was granted mental health diversion because it was Boudin’s opinion that it was Garrett’s “mental health disorder” that caused the homicide to occur. In the court proceedings, which I attended, the assistant district attorney danced around the deceased’s family’s dissatisfaction with Boudin prosecuting elder abuse not homicide. Stating: “They never expressed explicit agreement to this sentence.”
In the Amani case, the judge, the public defender, and the assistant district attorney witnessed a defendant so violent the sheriffs would not remove his handcuffs. Yet again, in Boudin’s opinion, Amani was worthy of mental health diversion and was not a threat to the public.
Then Amani Was Killed
On Friday November 19th, a woman called 9-1-1 from the Covered Wagon Hotel at 917 Folsom Street reporting that Amani had a knife “at her face.” The caller said Amani stated, “I am going to kill you” and was acting “very violent.”
SFPD arrived and tried to negotiate with Amani to no avail. He was eventually shot and killed, knife still in hand. A tragic end for a former Afghanistan interpreter who was fortunate enough to have gained admission to our country while so many of his fellow interpreters were abandoned in our recent clumsy retreat.
Footage of Amani’s death will be analyzed for years. If you were to watch what was captured on the body camera, you’d be hard pressed to identify ways in which an unarmed therapist could have negotiated with Amani’s demons any better but that’s an article for another day.
Prosecutorial Vandalism and its Concealment by Boudin’s Media Allies
Amani may or may not have been an appropriate candidate for mental health diversion but that’s not the point. This case and others presented in this and previous articles demonstrate the repeated failure with Boudin’s opinions as they relate to mental health diversion. The miss and overuse of diversion dilutes the significance of these pleas. The miss and overuse of diversion siphons valuable resources from the most in need, transferring those funds to the numerous ineligibles Boudin seemingly simply wants to keep out of jail.
The Chronicle’s Mallory Moench wrote an article on Amani where her interviewees were limited to a Defund SFPD activist, a tenant activist, and Amani’s public defender, Scott Grant. (Talk about the Chronicle’s confirmation biased selection.) Moench quoted that Grant had lamented Amani did not receive mental health until he ended up in jail but neglected to comment on his “successful” completion of the diversion program prior to the incident at the Covered Wagon Hotel.
Citizens of San Francisco must ask:
· Are the therapists responsible for diversion services not providing them as indicated or are diversion services ineffective for criminals?
· After the Amani failure, should we question whether therapy is a sufficient public safety tool?
· And of course, wouldn’t Amani be alive today had Boudin sought mental health services in custody not in the community?
Boudin has refused interviews from ABC’s Channel 7, NBC, KGO’s John Rothmann, and The Westside Observer. Why not on the local front but yes to CNN? Could one speculate he felt more comfortable with the line of questioning from a CNN host whose recently disgraced brother gave Boudin’s father clemency for his participation in a robbery and triple homicide?
In the CNN interview, Boudin reverted to his go-to misdirects—suggesting he is “charging” at higher rates than his predecessors and other Bay Area DAs. Boudin uses words like “charge/charging” or “filing” to confuse—they mean nothing more than SFPD incident reports were read. “Charging” or “filing” tells us nothing about the adjudication of crime. In Amani’s case filing meant mental health diversion. Which resulted in another article, on another filed case, where Boudin’s biased court opinion ended in another tragic death. His policies are obviously failing.
This might be a dumb question, but why does the MHD allow for the erasure of attributable crimes from an individual's arrest record? Seems like priors-- and the use of the MHD-- would be useful information for officers if/when they engage with individuals like Amani.