Homicide rewards not working to solve murders

Joshua Sabatini, The Examiner


SAN FRANCISCO - Mayor Gavin Newsom has acknowledged that offering $100,000 rewards to help solve homicide cases has failed and represents an unsuccessful attempt in trying to reduce San Francisco’s high homicide rate.

As San Francisco was experiencing its third consecutive year of a historic number of killings and community members were calling on city officials for relief, Newsom announced in September 2006 that he had put up $100,000 rewards in 15 unsolved homicide cases, 10 times the usual reward amount offered.

“I won’t say that this was one of the success stories of the year,” Newsom said Tuesday. It was hoped that the sizable reward bounty would produce leads in the murders and arrests of killers on city streets.

Newsom said he did not regret the effort and he is willing to try a variety of strategies to help reduce the number of killings. The City tallied decade-high homicide rates in recent years, with 88 in 2004, 96 in 2005 and 85 last year.

Newsom, who was thumbing through the $100,000 reward bulletins Tuesday, said there have been no significant leads or captures resulting from the reward money.

“That continues to be somewhat frustrating,” said Allan Nance, the acting director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice.

The fact that the $100,000 rewards have not yielded results highlights the Police Department’s challenge of getting witnesses to talk.

“The reality is we have known for quite a while now that the community has been somewhat reluctant to come forward with information,” Nance said. Fear of retaliation and “mistrust of the system” are two leading factors that keep witnesses silent, according to Nance.

Last year’s fatal shooting in the Bayview district of a primary eyewitness to a gang shooting does not help the situation, Nance said. “That doesn’t encourage people to come forward when they see an incident like that,” he added.

But the $100,000 amount was expected to have results. It was enough money that a witness could “start a new life, move out of the neighborhood,” Nance said.

“It’s somewhat perplexing that even at $100,000, it’s not resulted in significant arrests,” Nance said.

The Police Department’s Web site lists 15 homicide cases where a $100,000 reward is being offered for the arrest and conviction of the offender. Nance said an award was offered in these cases because the “trail has gotten cold.”

“Inspectors have gotten to the point when they really don’t have any leads in the cases and the community is frustrated that these cases have not been solved,” Nance said.

The cases range from the 2002 killing of a 24-year-old pregnant woman, Evelyn Hernandez, whose remains were found floating in the Bay near the Embarcadero and Folsom Street, to the 2005 shooting of popular tattoo artist Brian Marquez, who was killed near the corner of 24th and Alabama streets.

Police Department spokesman Sgt. Neville Gittens said he would not call the $100,000 rewards unsuccessful.

“When we issue rewards like that, we do generally get calls and they are helpful,” Gittens said. “There’s a whole lot happening in between an arrest and information coming in.”

The reasons witnesses refuse to come forward “need to be explored and we need to find ways to counter that,” Nance said.