Sacramento police chief tries to find balance after shooting
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Sacramento Police Chief Daniel Hahn had his first major encounter with officers as a kid who witnessed a murder in a tough part of California’s capital city.
His second: as a teenager busted on allegations of assaulting an officer.
“Nobody in my neighbourhood thought about being a police officer,” Hahn said in an interview last week with The Associated Press.
The unlikely officer is now Sacramento’s first African-American police chief, on the job less than a year and at the centre of the nation’s latest upheaval over the fatal police shooting of an unarmed black man. Hahn has received both support and criticism from some community members and black leaders, forcing him walk the line between protecting officers and supporting protesters as he contemplates changes to his department.