Click here if you are having trouble viewing the slideshow on a mobile device.
Holly Tillman, one of just a few dozen black residents in the small East Bay town of Clayton, watched what had been a peaceful June 2 protest over the killing of George Floyd dissolve into chaos as police unleashed an arsenal on a gathering of mostly young people.
Officers, some summoned from outside the 12,000-person town, saw a small group defying a hastily instituted 6 p.m. curfew, and tossed a flash-bang grenade to move them. Other protesters, already heading home, heard that and ran back over, and officers responded by lobbing tear gas at them.
“I was appalled they began tear-gassing what I saw as a group of young adults,” Tillman said.
Mayor Julie Pierce was similarly horrified. The next day, she huddled with her 11-officer police department and agreed that Clayton had badly missed the mark, particularly with the early curfew instituted in response to looting in the region.
“The curfew we thought we were putting in place to protect the town,” Pierce said, “actually created an artificial restraint on what could have been a peaceful protest.”
Three days later, with another demonstration expected, not only did Pierce and police ensure officers stayed out of the way, but the town threw the protesters a picnic, welcoming them with drinks and sandwiches.
“It does feel like this is different, with more people open to understanding what Black Lives Matter means,” she said. “We still have a long way to go. It’s 2020, and civil rights (movement) was in the ’60s. We need to keep having these uncomfortable conversations.”
All over the Bay Area, police and elected officials are hustling to respond to the backlash over the use of rubber bullets, tear gas, flash-bang grenades, dogs and batons against protesters. Police in cities including San Jose, Oakland and Walnut Creek are trying to show residents they are learning from the outcry.
But it remains to be seen whether the changes will go far enough — or last long enough — to satisfy a Bay Area community frustrated like many across the country with heavy-handed police tactics. Many residents have lost faith in law enforcement altogether, leading to calls to defund police departments, but most, though not all, local leaders are resisting that degree of change.
In San Jose, after hearing from people injured when police shot them with rubber bullets — victims who detailed serious eye and knee trauma and, in one case, a potentially sterilizing groin injury — police prohibited their general use for crowd control. The City Council has taken the issue further by proposing a municipal code change that would amount to an airtight ban of the use of rubber bullets in crowds, driven by concern about ricochet and collateral injuries.
San Jose police, either directly or through the city’s independent police auditor, have received over 1,500 formal complaints about their protest response; officials say a large majority are related to the viral video of Officer Jared Yuen yelling profanities at protesters that has become a searing image of police aggression.
Oakland interim Police Chief Susan Manheimer issued an open letter in which she promised a full review of the projectiles and other methods used by officers in the demonstrations’ most intense days two weekends ago. Mayor Libby Schaaf called the use of tear gas “disturbing and unfortunate.” A civil lawsuit from the National Lawyers Guild is demanding a ban on those crowd-dispersal methods after they were used against a youth-led march.
Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas has filed a resolution for Tuesday’s council meeting that would “immediately halt” tear gas from being used during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Part of building public trust is having a clear, strong response when the community has identified a problem,” she said. “We should not be using this. We’re in a respiratory pandemic.”
Contra Costa’s Central County SWAT Team has said it will no longer send police K-9s to protests, after the unit came under criticism for using dogs, tear gas and rubber bullets to break up a group of protesters, many of them teenagers, who had shut down Interstate 680 in Walnut Creek. At least one protester was bitten.
The use of K-9s drew comparisons to the iconic scenes of Southern police dogs attacking civil-rights protesters in the 1960s. The multi-city SWAT team’s commander had defended the use of police dogs at the June 1 demonstration. But Martinez police Capt. Beth Johnson said the unit’s board has since decided it will not deploy the team’s K-9s at protests.
“It can be seen as a further agitator, and the historical perspective on it is something we need to be sensitive to,” she said.
In San Francisco, Mayor London Breed on Thursday directed her city’s police department to ban “the use of military-grade weapons against unarmed civilians. This includes, but is not limited to, chemical weapons such as tear gas, bayonets, and tanks,” according to a city release. It was part of proposed reforms that include replacing officers with trained but unarmed professionals to respond to nonviolent and noncriminal incidents such as mental-health crises, homeless issues, truancy and neighbor disputes.
Breed also is pursuing the diversion of a portion of the police budget toward city services in a nod to calls all over the country for cities to “defund the police.”
Fortunato Bas is pushing for a similar redistribution in Oakland.
“The community grief and response around the killing of George Floyd, and protests nationally, have shown that we really have to act now for police accountability, and investments get at the root of community safety,” she said.
Police unions in San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles are responding with contrition unthinkable a few months ago. In an ad running Sunday, the police unions throw their support behind use-of-force accountability policies and measures to keep officers fired for misconduct from getting police work elsewhere.
“Police officers come from and reflect our communities. Unfortunately, there is racism in our communities and that means across our country that there are some racist police officers,” reads a statement from the San Jose and San Francisco police officers associations and Los Angeles Police Protective League. “Police unions must root out racism wherever it rears its ugly head and root out any racist individual from our profession. Period.”
Still, calls for defunding have dominated hours of public meetings on the protest responses during an Oakland town hall meeting this week and in San Jose, with hundreds of public comments at City Council sessions making those demands. Mayor Sam Liccardo so far has resisted the defunding concept, saying he prefers bolstering police reform and oversight.
Aric Floyd, a member of the Black Student Union at Stanford University, told the council Friday that their energies need to be focused less on protests and more toward the root issues behind them.
“We demand you capitalize on this unprecedented national moment,” Floyd said, “to move us toward a world where we don’t need to demonstrate.”
Staff writer Nico Savidge contributed to this story.
