Cleo Moore, wearing a faded T-shirt, answered the door of her Daly City home just south of San Francisco on a recent February afternoon.
The shirt had a screen-print photo of Sean Moore, her deceased youngest son, who is wearing a baseball uniform and posing in a batting stance.
“He’s a human being,” she said. “He wasn’t a dog to be shot down like he was shot down.”
Sean Moore was raised in a family of San Francisco public servants. Cleo, his mother, spent four decades as a nurse at San Francisco General Hospital. His father, the late Loyce Amos Moore, worked for Muni for 30 years. His older half-brother, Kenneth Blackmon, recently retired from the San Francisco Juvenile Probation Department after 20 years.
Cleo said she often worked alongside police officers and sheriff’s deputies at the hospital, and her father and brother were law enforcement officers in Texas.
“I’m not against police officers,” she said. “There’s a need for good police officers.”
But she is glad that over four years after her youngest son was shot by a San Francisco police officer, and a year after he died from complications of the gunshot wound, the officer was recently charged with manslaughter for his death.
“If it had been Sean that had done what this officer did, he wouldn’t see the light of day. He’s no different,” Cleo said.
The charges against San Francisco Police Officer Kenneth Cha for shooting Sean Moore are part of a new wave of police prosecutions in the Bay Area that come during a major shift in police accountability in California and the rest of the country. Before the 2020 public murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin reignited a nationwide protest movement against police violence, it would have been unusual to see even one of these manslaughter cases brought to trial. These recent cases may chart the course for police prosecutions moving forward, setting new guardrails for officer use of force.
The facts of the five Bay Area cases charged since Floyd’s death vary. All concern killings that occurred before Floyd’s death, the earliest reaching back five years. Three of the people killed were Black men.
- San Leandro Police Officer Jason Fletcher tased and then shot Steven Taylor as he held a baseball bat inside a San Leandro Walmart in 2020.
- Sonoma County Sheriff's Deputy Charles Blount choked David Ward through the window of his car after a chase in Sonoma County in 2019.
- Contra Costa County Sheriff's Deputy Andrew Hall shot at Laudemer Arboleda eight times in 2018 as the man drove into a gap between two police cars and Hall ran into the vehicle’s path.
- Rookie San Francisco Police Officer Christopher Samayoa fatally shot Keita O’Neil as he fled after allegedly stealing a lottery van in San Francisco in 2017.
- San Francisco Police Officer Kenneth Cha shot Sean Moore in the stomach and the groin in 2017 after responding to a noise complaint at Moore’s home.
Cristine Soto DeBerry, executive director of the Prosecutors Alliance of California, a group that advocates for progressive criminal justice reforms, said many district attorneys are paying attention to police killings more closely than they ever have before.
“It really was not the central focus of most prosecutors’ offices anywhere to think about, ‘How well am I regulating police excessive use of force?’” DeBerry said. “That was not a commonly held conversation in the profession.”
Now, she says, it is.
Necessary vs. reasonable
Alameda County’s prosecution of San Leandro Police Officer Jason Fletcher is the singular Bay Area case that relies on Assembly Bill 392, a 2020 state law that only justifies the use of deadly force when an officer believes, “based on the totality of the circumstances, that such force is necessary,” as opposed to the previous standard of “reasonable.”
The prosecution is widely seen as a test case for California’s new standard, which is the strictest in the country, and could inspire changes in other states.
On April 18, 2020, Fletcher responded to calls from a Walmart in San Leandro, reporting a man holding a baseball bat. Body camera footage showed the suspect, Steven Taylor, standing by shopping carts near the front of the store, still holding the bat, as Fletcher arrived at the scene, alone. Critically, Fletcher made the decision to move toward the 33-year-old Black man, telling him to “drop the bat,” and then trying to grab it from him.
“You're going to have to, you’re going to have to,” Taylor said, according to a bystander’s cellphone video of the incident.
Fletcher then tased Taylor twice, and then shot him once as he staggered forward.
Under the standard of the new law, a district attorney must consider the “totality of circumstances” leading up to the moment an officer shoots, including decisions the officer makes. Fletcher engaged Taylor without waiting for backup to arrive, and he failed to try to deescalate the situation, according to subsequent criminal and administrative investigations.
“He was comin’ to kill me,” Fletcher said, according to a partial transcript of his interview with criminal investigators that was made public. “He’s not coming to give me a hug. He’s not comin’ to say, ‘Hey, sorry about that.’ He’s got wires in him. I’ve shocked the shit out of him twice. I don’t know if he’s crazy. I don’t know if he’s on drugs. He’s comin’ to kill me. And I’m not gonna die in a fuckin’ Walmart.”
The Alameda County District Attorney’s Office investigation, however, found that Taylor “posed no threat of imminent deadly force or serious bodily injury to defendant Fletcher or anyone else in the store,” it said in a press release, announcing the decision to charge Taylor with voluntary manslaughter.
Fletcher has pleaded not guilty. His lawyer declined to comment for this story. A judge is expected to set a trial date in April.
While none of his deputies are charged, Alameda County Sheriff Greg Ahern said law enforcement leaders like him are paying close attention to the rise in officer prosecutions. He declined to comment directly on Fletcher’s case, but said those in law enforcement often evaluate fatal incidents differently from the public.
“It's difficult to get into that officer's mind unless you've actually been in law enforcement — if you haven't been in those dangers,” he said.
Progressive prosecution
On Nov. 3, 2018, Laudemer Arboleda fled from a traffic stop in the East Bay suburb of Danville. At the end of a low-speed car chase, he steered his car into a gap between two patrol cars. Contra Costa County Sheriff's Deputy Andrew Hall ran around the front of one of the cars, putting himself in the path of Arboleda’s slow-moving vehicle before shooting him nine times, killing him.