Lawsuit Calls Out San Diego Police Pro-Trump Leanings
Activist attorney Bryan Pease has filed suit against the San Diego Police Department on behalf of two women. They say the city and police violated their constitutional rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and assembly, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and equal rights of citizenship.
The plaintiffs participated in a January 9 counter demonstration in Pacific Beach responding to a “Patriot March” of Trump supporters unable to get over the fact that their candidate lost the election.
From the Union-Tribune:
In the lawsuit filed Friday in San Diego federal court, plaintiffs Mandy Lien and Erin Smith argue that police aggressively dispersed counterprotesters with batons or projectiles at the Jan. 9 demonstration, violating their civil rights and displaying bias in favor of mostly White and male supporters of former President Donald Trump.
The suit says officers “high-fived and chatted it up” with Trump supporters.
“SDPD then declared an ‘unlawful assembly’ against only those on the anti-Trump side, including Plaintiffs, and forced them to disperse under threat of arrest, while allowing the pro-Trump side to continue demonstrating in the exact same area, and to parade down the Pacific Beach boardwalk.”
The Union-Tribune reported that both sides had skirmished during the day, but police spokesman Lt. Shawn Takeuchi acknowledged the order to disperse applied only to counterprotesters, who he said threw bottles, rocks and eggs at officers. He said the behavior of the crowd dictated the officers’ actions. Three counterprotesters were arrested that day: two adults who police said failed to disperse and a juvenile accused of assaulting an officer.
Somehow the SDPD overlooked violence by pro-Trump protestors, including some who carried weapons or pepper-sprayed bystanders.
Kylee Belanger, director of the San Diego National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer Program, who documented Saturday’s police response, said she believes the Police Department showed clear bias. She said the “combat” on both sides of the protests appeared mutual but police didn’t deal with Trump supporters in the same way they policed counterprotesters.
She said Trump supporters walked around a line of officers to the side where counterprotesters were and heckled them. She pointed to an instance in which she said a Trump supporter walked up to a woman writing with chalk on the road in front of a line of officers and pushed her down. Officers “let him go back through their line without repercussions,” Belanger said.
It’s also curious that the SDPD’s claim about a dispersal order being given in response to objects being thrown, when eyewitness reporting says the opposite occurred; the order was given at 2:30. At 2:51 the SDPD Twitter account reported “Officers were just struck with a glass bottle and eggs were being thrown.”
Yeah, yeah, I know. Throwing stuff at police is a bad idea, not far from the mindset of gun nuts who think their possession of weapons protects them against government overreach.
The point is that cops make stuff up to justify their actions and almost never suffer any consequences for doing so.
While the lawsuit asks for damages, the women say the main goal is to enforce fairness in policing. Both plaintiffs say they were hit with police batons and pepperball projectiles as they attempted to disperse.
This lawsuit IS important, even if it goes nowhere in the courts. It’s not just Trump supporters who are getting special treatment by city employees paid for with our tax dollars.
Police in general, and the SDPD in particular, have a historical relationship with right wing and racist ideologues. And those relationships influence their behavior.
Aside from the steadily mounting evidence that the SDPD discriminates against minorities in its enforcement practices, their slow walking of the requirements made under SB 1421, which says law enforcement agencies must make public internal reports about officers investigated for police shootings and use of force, and the $30 million in claims paid out by the city over the past decade related to the police department…
...there was the recent video circulated in the department featuring nazis and a homophobic slur against newly elected mayor Todd Gloria... which I’m sure is still “under investigation.”
Let’s return to Frank Gormlie’s reporting on Trump’s rally at the Convention Center in 2016:
And once the Trump people left the Convention Center, there was no police effort to corral them into a zone away from their opponents. To the contrary, the Trump people were allowed to filter through and file right alongside of or across the street from the anti-Trump demonstrators. This caused a foreseeable friction – and was part of The Plan.
By not keeping separate the two opposing camps, police were able to set up a situation where a few skirmishers did break out. And once the very first nasty incident occurred – where 2 highschoolers were hauled off the fence into the arms and batons of police – police donned their gear.
These very few incidents were enough for police to call the demonstration against one of the major presidential candidates an illegal assembly and threaten mass arrests.
And as, according to The Zimmerman Plan, shoulder-to-shoulder police officers roughly moved the crowd back onto Harbor Drive and then over the bridge to Barrio Logan – with the goal of clearing the GasLamp District of massive numbers of Latinos and others. The final chapter of The Plan was unleashed – mass arrests of mainly young Mexican-Americans and Chicanos out of range and view of the national press.
Was it all a set-up? Was it just The Zimmerman Plan all along?
Clearly, the police manipulated the anti-Trump crowd, allowed for incidents with the Trump people, and finally looked for excuses – which they helped cause – to declare it all unlawful. And then made grabs of sufficient numbers of people to justify all the militarization and all the expenses incurred for The Donald.
Then there’s the bigger picture concerning law enforcement.
From the January 21, 2021 edition of Newsweek:
Police in the United States are three times more likely to use force against left-wing protesters than right-wing protesters, data from a non-profit that monitors political violence has revealed.
Researchers at U.S. Crisis Monitor, a joint project between the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) and Princeton University, garnered data on police responses to more than 13,000 protests across the country since last April. The non-profit also monitors political unrest in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America.
The U.S. data, released this week, showed that police often responded with more force at Black Lives Matter protests compared with pro-Trump or other right-wing demonstrations….
..."The data indicate that police respond much more aggressively to Black Lives Matter and left-wing protests compared to right-wing demonstrations," ACLED's director of research and innovation Dr Roudabeh Kishi told Newsweek.
"This is true even in response to left-wing demonstrations in which protesters do not engage in violent or destructive behavior—suggesting that law enforcement's approach to different types of demonstrations is not merely a response to demonstrator behavior."
Since 2009, according to The Conversation, police officers in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana have been identified as members of white supremacist groups, more than 100 police departments in 49 different states have had to deal with scandals involving racist emails, texts or online comments sent or made by department staff. Recently, a high-ranking officer in the New York Police Department was found to be behind a string of racist posts online.
Moving away from the question of Trump vs anti-Trump, the actions of the SDPD over the past few weeks indicate that there is also the issue of “otherism,” i.e., a cultural disposition toward enforcing what they perceive as norms.
https://twitter.com/objkshn/status/1360977336460451842?s=20
The lawsuit at the heart of this story is but one of numerous warning signs.
Repairing the rifts in society needs to include more than righting the wrongs of particular incidents, whether it be favoritism towards a political grouping or having law enforcement as the front line “defense” against homeless humans.
Taking on the attitudes and lack of empathy baked in to the culture of policing is more that a legal issue; it's ultimately a political question. There needs to an admission that this conduct flows from a perception that this is what is expected of police by society.
Historically, politicians avoid rocking this boat because the consequences outweigh the rewards. Being labeled as 'pro-crime' and 'anti-police' is a non-starter for voters whose privileges' protect them against abuses of power.
The elevation of District Two's Jen Campbell to City Council President is but one example of what the SDPD can do when it (quietly) puts its thumb on the scale. The long slog (which isn't over yet) toward instituting an effective citizen's oversight mechanism of police conduct is another.
Supporting police doesn't mean giving them a blank check to enforce their norms; they work for all citizens, even those who see things differently.
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