Our firm is involved in matters relating to a San Francisco police officer's use of force which our clients complain was both excessive and completely unwarranted. Late in the afternoon of Feb. 24, 2007, at a spot near the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero, the officer and his partner were arresting a man who had apparently been involved in a fight with a motorist some time earlier and quite a distance from the Ferry Building. In his police report, the officer claimed he handcuffed one of the 18 year old suspect's hands, at which time the suspect pulled his right hand away. The officer, claiming that he feared that the suspect may have been reaching for a weapon, struck the man with his right fist on his lower back. The young man then called out, asking if anyone had seen what the police officer did. Our client, a 34-year-old African American man, was waiting with his wife for their car, and responded that he had seen what happened. His wife wrote in a statement that day that the police officer immediately came over and told her husband to put his hands behind his back. As her husband was being forced to the ground, she asked why the officer was doing this, at which point she was pepper-sprayed in the face by that same officer. Five witnesses wrote statements, included in the police report, that were critical of the police conduct in the incident, and which corroborate the clients' version of the events. Since he joined the department, this particular San Francisco Police Officer has to date been involved in three lawsuits alleging excessive force that cost taxpayers a total of $195,000. The San Francisco Chronicle published a series of articles on the San Francisco Police Department's use of force. For that series, the newspaper created a database of officers' 1996-2004 force reports and identified this police officer as by far the highest reported user of force in the 2,200-member department. In that period, the officer reported using force 57 times, injuring 31 people. His tally of force-involved incidents was 50 percent higher than any other officer. Nine times in that same period, the officer made the "watch list" the department maintains to identify frequent users of force, according to documents provided by the department. Since the use-of-force articles were published, the Chronicle requested copies of the department's watch lists for the years 2005 and 2006. The police department declined to provide the watch lists, maintaining that they were personnel records protected from public inspection by state law. The officer has since been removed from street duty after additional news articles and stories pertaining to this incident and others like it.