LOS ANGELES _ Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief William "Bill" Scott, the department's highest-ranking African-American officer, has been appointed chief of the San Francisco Police Department following recent scandals involving racist texting among Bay Area officers.
Scott, who oversees LAPD's South Bureau, was selected by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee to lead the embattled department.
"It's an honor and I am humbled," Scott said in a brief message. "I have a lot of people to give thanks to."
Scott's was one of three names sent by the police commission to Lee. Scott will replace acting Police Chief Toney Chaplin, a 26-year department veteran who previously led the department's homicide division.
Scott's hiring comes after a six-month study by the U.S. Justice Department found that the San Francisco Police Department disproportionately used force on people of color, and stopped and searched them more often than it did white people.
During the study, federal officials reviewed 548 use-of-force cases between May 2013 and May 2016. The Justice Department found 37 percent of the people whom city police used force against were African-American, a larger percentage than for any other ethnic group. Nine of the 11 people who were killed during use-of-force incidents in that time frame were people of color.
Lee requested the report after Mario Woods, a black man suspected of assault, was shot at least 21 times by police in 2015 while holding a knife.
Former Police Chief Greg Suhr stepped down in May at the request of the mayor following a series of scandals that rocked the department.
For more than a year, San Francisco police have faced intense scrutiny due in part to the disclosure of dozens of racist text messages among officers.
Last year, a federal grand jury convicted an officer of violating a person's civil rights while conducting unlawful searches at a downtown hotel that serves the poor.
Scott joined the LAPD in 1989, working his way up the ranks. He was a young officer in the San Fernando Valley on the day the 1992 riots broke out and was immediately sent to South L.A., where he previously worked.
Scott, who has family in the U.S. Army, grew up in several cities before his family settled in Birmingham, Ala. Scott attended the University of Alabama.
Scott is known as an advocate of community policing and has said policing has changed dramatically for the better since his days as a rookie.
Officers, he said, need to think of themselves as guardians watching over communities _ not warriors cracking down on them.
"That means if we've got to take somebody to jail, we'll take them to jail," Scott said last year. "But when we need to be empathetic and we need to be human, we've got to do that too."
