DANVILLE — Dozens of people gathered Monday outside the home of Contra Costa County Sheriff David Livingston to call for changes in police practices and to criticize a recommended budget that calls for spending millions more dollars on the sheriff’s office.
The group convened at a Safeway parking lot in the afternoon and drove to the sheriff’s neighborhood, honking and displaying signs that read “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace.” Other signs included specific calls to action, such as to “defund the sheriff” and redirect the money to mental health, health care and other services instead. Tamisha Walker, an Antioch resident who founded the nonprofit Safe Return Project and is a member of the Contra Costa County Racial Justice Coalition, said it was important to her that the community come to meet Livingston in his own neighborhood.
“Historically, the sheriff has refused to come to the people, so the people are coming to him,” she said just before the car caravan left for his house.
Video: Protesters drive past the home of Contra Costa County Sheriff David Livingston in Danville. CLICK HERE if you’re having trouble viewing media on a mobile device.
No one came out of the house that, according to online record databases and activists, Livingston lives in. There were also no marked sheriff or police patrol cars at the scene. Walker said it didn’t really matter whether Livingston was home. Residents just wanted to send a message after what they say has been years of being ignored.
The demonstration was among the latest wave of protests around the country in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes as he struggled to breathe and begged for his life. Apparently addressing the sheriff and his supporters, Walker declared outside the house, “if we don’t get to be comfortable, you don’t get to be comfortable.”
Jimmy Lee, a sheriff’s office spokesman, criticized the caravan, calling it “inappropriate” and “offensive” for people to demonstrate outside the sheriff’s home rather than his workplace. But the Rev. Leslie Takahashi with the Mount Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church said at the rally that racial justice advocates have pleaded with the sheriff for years at his workplace to enact reforms, without much success.
“I cannot count the number of times we’ve been in the sheriff’s workplace … at the table … and we have been ignored,” Takahashi said.
Advocates are calling on the county to direct funding from the sheriff’s office to other services, such as health care, mental health, job training and social programs in an effort to prevent and reduce crime. According to county documents, the recommended budget calls for a $7.2 million increase in sheriff’s office expenditures, or 2.9% more than allocated in the current 2019-20 budget. It estimates a $4.4 million increase in revenue, for a net spending hike of $2.8 million for the sheriff’s budget. That increase is mostly due to salary and benefit increases as well as adding 25 deputies, according to county budget documents.
Lee said the call to “defund police” is “something that law enforcement is listening to and wants to be part of that.” Unlike the sheriff’s office, some county agencies are facing cuts. The Board of Supervisors on Tuesday is scheduled to consider laying off some library workers because of reduced hours, as well as 16 employees in the Department of Child Support Services, for example.
Other demonstrators on Monday criticized the sheriff’s jail record, noting that 12 people have died in custody in the last two years and pointing to a report by the California Attorney General that found detainees in the West County Detention Facility were kept confined for long periods of time and denied access to thorough medical care. Melvin Willis, a Richmond City Council member, told the crowd he often hears people ask how the public will be safe if police are defunded.
“But when police or the sheriff are the ones there committing the crime, who is there to keep us safe?” he asked. “Who do we call when law enforcement is the one hurting us?”
