Another Innocent Brutalized in Another Racist Incident with SLPD

 *CONTENT NOTICE/TRIGGER WARNING: this post discussed racist police violence and contains links to images/videos of that content.*

(“Stop Police Brutality” by Icy and Sot)

On November 21, at around 11:10 AM, an unnamed SLPD officer tased an innocent and mentally ill member of our city's unsheltered community in another act of police brutality in our city. This happened within less than 30 seconds from when the officer first made contact with the victim. The officer was ostensibly responding to a complaint from a local business, the Downtown McDonald's, about an allegation of someone "acting crazy" and "throwing punches." However, no one was hurt. No property was destroyed. No one was armed. There was no reason or basis to assume the victim posed a danger to themselves or others. Even worse, despite assertions to the contrary by SLPD, the officer did not engage in deescalation or crisis intervention tactics. There is no evidence that the CATT program was called. Indeed, when the bodyworn camera footage is viewed in its entirety, it appears that this SLPD officer was hunting for the victim and that their actions escalated the situation far beyond what it may have been had the officer never showed up at all. Notably, there is a reason why tasers were reclassified from "nonlethal" to "less lethal," and it needs to be highlighted that SLPD has killed someone before through the improper use of tasers. (Jose Perez in 2005.)

You can view the BWC footage here. You can view the witness footage here. Notably, I actually know the victim.  I regularly see him when walking downtown where I live and he isn't a danger to himself or others. He talks to himself and waves his arms in the air when he gets upset because someone harassed him again instead of trying to actually help.

Even more troublingly, this situation shows many similarities to the murder of Steven Taylor and to other police violence against innocent BIPOC, particularly those with mental illness and/or experiencing homelessness. (E.g. our own Anthony Gomez and Miles Hall in Walnut Creek, both from 2019.) Due to the pandemic shuttering the city's traditional warming shelter, we can only expect that interactions between our unsheltered neighbors and other residents will increase as they seek to protect themselves from dying from exposure. In order to prevent those interactions from turning violent and abusive, we need to take a hard look at what kind of services our police department is providing, is being unfairly expected to provide, and is failing to provide at all. We need to expedite implementation of police oversight, a mental health non-police crisis response team, a release of the name of the officer who tased the victim and the 3 officers who failed to intervene on scene, as well as take disciplinary action that, at the very least, removes this officer from our city streets until the investigation is completed.

I'm grateful to our new Chief, Abdul Pridgen, for sharing further information with the community about the context of the recent incident and I appreciate his commitment to ensuring that appropriate action is taken. I am especially thankful for his responsiveness to community concerns and willingness to engage in dialogue. I also want to push back on his characterization of what happened in his remarks during a recent city council meeting and, more generally, what SLPD reported happened on social media.

Chief Pridgen gave thanks that no one was harmed, but that isn't true. The victim was harmed, physically and mentally. The witnesses were harmed. The community was harmed. Chief Pridgen stated that, based on the current evidence, the officer acted reasonably. If this incident wasn't a violation of SLPD policy, then our policies are immoral and unethical because they legitimize police brutality, much as when segregation legitimized racist oppression. (However, there is significant evidence to believe this was a violation of SLPD policy, Chapter 300, sections 300.1 through 300.5.) If this incident is meant to be an example of the deescalation and crisis intervention training that our officers receive, then that training is a failure because it is unable to meet the minimum standards of other professionals, from nurses to social workers to EMTs who manage to do equally demanding jobs without guns and without tasing people. (For instance, see this slide deck from a licensed clinical social worker in Memphis.) Indeed, they perform under extraordinarily difficult circumstances without automatically assuming BIPOC with mental illnesses and/or homelessness are threats to be contained, as the officer did in this incident.

I want to believe that Chief Pridgen is going to herald some change in how we approach these issues now and in the future, in part because of what I have learned about him as a police officer and public servant, but also because this isn't a problem with a single officer or small group of officers. This is a systemic problem that has existed in policing for generations and it requires equally systemic solutions. It requires us to reimagine public safety that is equitable, just, and that actually makes everyone in our city safer without bankrupting us economically or morally.

We need to take corrective action now before another person is hurt and before another person is killed. Because if we keep going with business as usual, there will be another incident just like this and there will even be another innocent murdered like Steven Taylor. Let's show that we've learned from our mistakes instead of repeating them.

Take note and take care.

P.S. I am pleased to report that after mobilizing activists, advocates, allies, organizers, neighbors, local leaders, city staff, and elected officials, top-ranking sources in SLPD have admitted the attack against the victim was a mistake. Even more importantly, this coalition ensured SLPD dropped the bogus charges, connected the victim to supportive and rehabilitative services, as well as compelled a full investigation into what happened and why it shouldn’t have.