Community activists outraged by recent killings by San Francisco police officers say they will take a dramatic step in their efforts to force change: a hunger strike.

Starting Thursday, a small group led by Ilyich Sato, who is also known as the rapper Equipto, plan to stand in front of the Police Department’s Mission Station and refuse to eat until either Police Chief Greg Suhr or Mayor Ed Lee resigns.

Activists have been calling for Suhr’s job since the video-recorded fatal shooting of Mario Woods on Dec. 2 in the Bayview neighborhood. Pointing to the killing of Luis Gongora in the Mission District on April 7 — as well as the killings of Alex Nieto in 2014 on Bernal Hill and Amilcar Perez-Lopez last year in the Mission — Sato said, “drastic measures need to be taken.”

“We can no longer watch our community be targeted and murdered,” he said in a Facebook post. “We can no longer support a department that is wrought with corruption, criminal behavior, racial profiling and murder.”

Suhr and Lee have said they are committed to seeking reforms that reduce police use of force and build police-community relations, though critics want changes to be mandated.

Lee’s spokeswoman, Christine Falvey, said Wednesday that under his direction, the police force and Police Commission “are moving faster and more dramatically to reform the department and its practices than any city in America.”

She said Lee had been meeting with residents in a variety of neighborhoods “to continue the long, hard work of building back community trust.”

Woods’ death thrust San Francisco into the national conversation on law enforcement reform, with the Police Commission moving to revise the department’s use-of-force policies to put an emphasis on de-escalation techniques. The U.S. Department of Justice’s community-policing division is conducting a collaborative review of the department at the behest of the chief and mayor.

These efforts were taking shape when two officers fatally shot Gongora, a homeless man with a knife, near an encampment on Shotwell Street.

A video obtained by The Chronicle, which showed the shooting unfolded in less than 30 seconds, raised questions about why the officers did not appear to employ de-escalation techniques at the heart of the reform discussions. Witnesses came forward to dispute the police account that Gongora charged them with the knife, instead describing Gongora as calm and sitting on the ground.

The shooting happened after at least four officers were implicated last month in allegedly exchanging racist and homophobic text messages — the second set of San Francisco officers to be accused of the behavior.

Sato said all of this contributed to the decision to launch the hunger strike, which will include his mother and a few of his friends.

“It’s time for a change and I want to be a part of that change,” Sato said. “We’re going to stay as long as we can, until we can’t take it and until we get hospitalized. We’ve talked over this and discussed the situations.

“We’re considering our lives but at the same time, I’m considering the families, and that is what is going to get me through. All I can think about is the mother and father of Alex Nieto, of Gwendolyn Woods, Mario Woods’ mother. We’re going to stand out there until we find some kind of justice for them.”