The Advocate

It happened in San Leandro back in 2011 with Dewayne Stancill . A highly regarded Black police officer forced out because of racism, politics, and corruption. Now, here we are in 2024 having deja vu. Former SLPD Chief Abdul Pridgen has been fired by the city under, to put it mildly, suspicious circumstances without any actual evidence of wrongdoing having been provided with the specter of expensive litigation looming ahead. I guess I'll weigh in on this with what I know, especially now that Pridgen is officially out. What I have learned is based on information from my own sources, some of whom took great risks to reach out to me, so I can't even share all of what they told me, let alone independently verify all of it. At the same time, because the city is point-blank refusing to release responsive records under the California Public Records Act, despite repeated attempts to get them to do so, even what has been shared publicly is difficult to confirm or deny. So, please, like

( View member roster here ) I signed up for the San Leandro Police Chief's Advisory Board to serve my community. I have been working as an advocate, organizer, and activist  here for years, often at the forefront of reimagining public safety and implementing police reform . For my efforts, I've received death threats, racist and antisemitic slurs against my family, having my home and children's daycare doxxed, abusive harassment, swatting attacks, and even attempts to get me fired from my job. Police officers have tried to intimidate me, stalked me outside my home, and attempted to entrap me at community events. So I asked Chief Pridgen why would he want me on the board? His answer was that he wanted to hear from a diverse group of perspectives, that he valued different voices and opinions. He said that he knew how much I cared about San Leandro, that I had a principled and important point of view to share. So, in that spirit of good faith, I accepted his invitation and

 *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 call