Recently, police in Southern California openly defended the Ku Klux Klan as employing “self-defense” in the stabbing of several counter-protesters at a “White Lives Matter” demonstration in Anaheim.
This violent white-supremacist logic is inextricably woven into the fabric of policing in the United States. No matter how many despicable acts of racist police impunity are exposed to the public, even the most “progressive” politicians and officials bend over backwards to channel the righteous anger of the community and oppressed sectors of society into band-aid reform solutions that pose no serious challenge to existing institutions of power and hold no one accountable.
This has been the strategy of San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and police chief Greg Suhr as the string of SFPD murders over the last several years mount into an organized fight-back from below. The movement continues to face an uphill battle to raise consciousness around these cases as mainstream news outlets and other shills and reactionaries operating as journalists and political commentators “objectively” back the narratives coming out of City Hall and police union playbooks.
March 2016 marks two years since 28-year-old Alex Nieto was riddled with 14 bullets at Bernal Heights Park after having a burrito before he went to work. The organizing and dedication of the Justice 4 Alex Nieto Coalition has kept Nieto’s story alive, where it now enters a federal civil trial, Refugio and Elvira Nieto v. SFPD and the City and County of San Francisco. Anticipating the trial, Nieto organizers released “Lowrider Lawyers: Putting a City on Trial,” a half-hour film that was created so that people could “become more conscious regarding the legal issues of the Alex Nieto case and so that we rally during the trial.”
The rally began in the early morning of March 1 in front of the federal courthouse, where the trial is set to take place. A ritual dance and ceremony from members of Alex’s Buddhist group opened the space for speakers to speak truth to power. Ben Bac Sierra, key organizer and MC for the rally, reinforced the evidence behind the Nieto case. He stated: “It will be unreasonable for a jury to vote that this is not an unlawful killing. We will prove by a preponderance of evidence that Alex Nieto was unlawfully killed by the San Francisco Police Department.”
A solidarity statement from the Justice 4 Mario Woods Coalition at the rally stressed the importance of Black and Brown unity, and challenged the attempts of Mayor Lee and Chief Suhr to pacify the struggle with a Department of Justice investigation that is incapable of taking action on the Mario Woods case. Leading coalition member Phelicia Jones said: “The Department of Justice is not here for an independent investigation. No one is correcting the headlines, no one is correcting politicians, no one is correcting the mayor, no one is correcting some of those who look like us but don’t fight on the same side as us, that the Department of Justice is here based upon technical assistance and a review board of policies and procedures of the San Francisco Police Department.”
Coalition forces fighting for justice for native Guatemalan Amilcar Perez-Lopez joined the Nieto and Woods organizers at the rally. February 26 marked the one-year anniversary of undercover SFPD officers pumping six bullets into Amilcar from behind as he ran for his life on Folsom street in the Mission District. A second autopsy just released by the City once again contradicted Chief Suhr’s lie that Amilcar charged officers with a knife, yet Mayor Lee has only doubled-down in his support for Suhr amid demands that he be fired.
After a number of long-time social justice fighters and respected community organizers and activists took the mic, the rally was joined by an impressive contingent of youth and students who had walked out from a number of local high schools, City College of San Francisco, and elsewhere. They refused to hold back their resentment towards SFPD and boldly recalled their own personal experiences.
Cecilia Pena-Govea remembered getting “pulled over by two different cruisers, full of pigs … six cops who sit us on the curb, demean us, degrade us … one of the pigs had the nerve to tell us, “You should be ashamed of yourself, you’re ruining the City.” I said: “You should be ashamed of yourself, being part of a racist, fascist, sexist, f—ed-up institution like the SFPD. You’re ruining our City.”
Javier Virgil of Leadership High School spoke on how he “wanted to come to represent people with mental illnesses, because I feel like we are targeted the most. … He explained: “I had a panic attack. I had about 10 officers storm into the complex that I was in with bean-bag shotguns. They were acting like I was going to kill someone, when the only person I was a danger to was myself. They humiliated me in front of a huge crowd of people.”
Liberation News was present as the high-energy and fearless youth contingent moved the rally into a march onto the steps of City Hall, where police barricaded the doors while students performed a die-in and held their own speak-out.
Lalo Gonzalez of MEChA de CCSF and Save CCSF Coalition offered an insightful analysis and solution to racist police terror: “We must demand political and economic control of our communities. We must demand to take control of our education system. Everyone deserves access to homes, everyone deserves open access to schools. Everyone deserves to live in their communities with dignity. We must also understand the function of the police. The SFPD, just like any police institution, serves the ruling class. It is not the individual police officer that makes the institution rotten. It is the laws that they enforce, the laws they serve are racist as hell. They are specifically made to criminalize us.”
San Francisco is just the opposite of a safe haven from criminalization for Black, Brown, poor, and working-class people. Mario Woods was criminalized by City Attorney Dennis Herrera in 2009 when he added Woods to the gang injunction list. “Gang member” continues to be a term used by police and their reactionary allies to target any congregation of people of color.
Now, a little over six years later, Mario Woods is dead at the hands of the police while Herrera is defending the City and writing off the murder as “lawful.” Whether lying about or criminalizing Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez-Lopez, Mario Woods, or any other victim of state-sponsored murder, the real criminals in San Francisco are exposing themselves as byproducts of a system that rewards racist violence, greed, and fraud while depriving millions of basic human rights. As poor, working and oppressed people form unified organizations and begin to study, embrace and put into action revolutionary politics, the Mayor Lee’s and Chief Suhr’s of the United States will finally reap what they have sown.
