by Steve Early
In local progressive circles any new respect and compassion for the police was about to be tested—due to an “officer involved shooting,” in the terminology of insiders. In the wake of a tragic incident, the city’s police reform progress would be questioned not only by friends and family of the deceased. They would be joined by local advocates of strengthened civilian oversight in Richmond and by police brutality critics from out of town, who saw little difference between Richmond cops and their counterparts in other cities.
A DEATH AT UNCLE SAM’S
By the summer of 2014, there had not been a fatal shooting of a Richmond resident by the police since 2007. Between 2008 and 2014, despite making thousands of arrests and confiscating, on average, one gun a day, the RPD was recording less than one officer-involved shooting of any kind per year. (Cops in nearby Vallejo, a city only slightly larger than Richmond but with similar problems, managed to kill six Vallejo citizens in 2012 alone.) On September 6, 2014, the Contra Costa Times ran a story, citing these and other favorable comparisons. Its headline: “Use of Deadly Force by Police Disappears on Richmond Streets.”24 Just one week later, however, there was a fatal encounter between Wallace Jensen, a Spanish-speaking officer with seven years of RPD experience, and twenty-four-year-old Richard Pedro Perez III. It took place near midnight, just outside Uncle Sam’s Liquors and Deli, in the middle of a grimy block of one-story retail buildings, between Nancy’s Nail Salon and the Taqueria Chavinda, at the intersection of Cutting Boulevard, Stege Avenue, and South Thirty-Fourth Street.
Perez had been released from detention earlier in the day after a drunk-driving arrest. He was also on probation for firing a gun in a salvage lot a few blocks away, where he lived in a trailer and worked for Perez Brothers Paper Recycling, his family’s firm. When Officer Jensen responded to a complaint about Perez causing a disturbance in Uncle Sam’s, a store with a history of late-night loitering problems, he found the young man to be heavily intoxicated and unsteady on his feet. According to Jensen, Perez did not remain seated on the curb outside the store, as instructed, while his identity was being verified.
This led to physical grappling between the two. An “independent witness” later cited by Magnus reported that Perez “grabbed and held on to one of the officer’s hands while using his other hand to simultaneously go for the officer’s gun.” Defenders of Perez claimed this version of events was contradicted by other unnamed witnesses. His family and friends knew Pedie, as he was called, to be kind, generous, funny, lately depressed but, drunk or sober, no great danger to anyone else.
The RPD was still a few months away from requiring all officers to wear body cameras. So there was no video record of any threatening behavior by Perez before Jensen fired three bullets into him. Surveillance camera footage, obtained from Uncle Sam’s, showed Perez lurching back into the store, collapsing face-down, in the middle of an aisle. “I was afraid he was going to take my gun and kill me,” Jensen told a coroner’s inquest several months later.
The Perez family immediately retained John Burris, a well-known Oakland civil rights attorney, to sue the city. Burris’s most famous previous case involved Oscar Grant, an unarmed twenty-two-year-old Oakland resident who died on a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) platform in 2009. Grant had been shot in the back by a BART police officer while handcuffed and lying face-down. The officer was later convicted of involuntary manslaughter after his lawyer argued, at trial, that his client had used his gun by mistake, instead of his Taser. The BART system agreed to a $2.8 million civil settlement with Grant’s family. The shooter served eleven months in jail. The case became nationally known after release of Fruitvale Station, a Hollywood movie about Grant’s life and death.
Pedie Perez’s aunt invited Chris Magnus to her nephew’s funeral, which Magnus and Deputy Chief Allwyn Brown both attended in civilian clothes. Magnus also deployed his considerable social media skills to disseminate detailed information about how parallel investigations of the shooting would be conducted by the RPD’s Professional Standards Unit and the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office. RPD maintains a website, a Facebook page, and the chief’s own Twitter account to fulfill its organizational “commitment to transparency and openness,” soliciting citizen feedback even if “questioning or critical.” “One of the things we tried to convey is that we have genuine sympathy for the family and acknowledge that the death of this young man is tragic,” Magnus said, noting that the “officer involved had to make a very tough decision in a matter of seconds.”
The RPD reported that Jensen, a member of its crisis negotiation team, had received special training in how to handle volatile situations. Pending the outcome of the multiple investigations into his conduct, he was placed on paid administrative leave. The officer’s shooting of Perez spawned a public protest by about forty people at RPD headquarters. Based on the information initially available, other Richmond activists seemed to reserve judgment because, as Mike Parker explained, “people had a lot of confidence that the police would look into it and deal with it.” City council candidates, backed by the RPA, were, at the time, touting improved public safety and better police behavior as grounds for their reelection.
La Voz, a bilingual Richmond newspaper edited by RPA cofounder Juan Reardon, did run an article headlined “Latino Youth Fights with Police Officer and Is Fatally Shot”—although that was definitely not the Perez family’s preferred framing of the incident. Pedie’s parents demanded to know why Jensen didn’t use his nightstick or Taser to subdue their son, although the latter police tool is not always nonlethal, as it is said to be.25 Noting that Richmond had “spent more than $500,000 since 1997 to outfit police officers with Tasers and, in recent years approximately $27,000 on new Tasers and replacement cartridges,” La Voz asked similar questions: “Did the officer have a taser gun available to him? If not, why not? Did he have it and not use it? Why?”
The RPD’s own investigation later confirmed that Jensen was wearing his Taser and a flashlight, which can be used as a baton. After the Contra Costa County DA ruled that Jensen had acted in self-defense, he was returned to duty, even before the RPD completed its own investigation of whether this was “justifiable homicide.” (Jensen later sought and was granted medical disability retirement from the RPD.)
Members of the Oscar Grant Committee Against Police Brutality and State Repression—a group formed after the shooting of Oscar Grant—asked the RPA to host a community forum on the Perez case. RPA coordinators Mike Parker and Marilyn Langlois welcomed these visitors, plus a sprinkling of RPA members, to a Sunday afternoon meeting in late April 2015. Parker criticized the DA’s exoneration of Jensen but disclaimed any RPA interest in becoming “the jury or judge in this case.” As he told the crowd of about forty people, “we’re extremely proud of our police chief and police department.”
That civic pride was not shared by the Grant Committee. One of its Oakland-based leaders told me that any Richmond “socialist who defends Chris Magnus is a betrayer of the working class.” Rather than letting the disturbing details of the Perez case speak for themselves, Grant Committee speakers, like Gerald Smith, framed a general indictment of US policing that largely ignored Richmond’s own hard-won reforms. “There is a system in place to deny these dastardly crimes and cover them up,” asserted Smith. “This murder is a test—this is what determines what kind of city you live in.” Other Oakland visitors trained their fire on the extra layer of legal protection that cops get during investigations that might result in job-related discipline or criminal charges or both. The Grant Committee believes that this “police officer bill of rights,” which applied to Jensen, should be repealed in California (and sixteen other states with similar statutes) although sympathetic legislators in Sacramento have not even been able to amend it.26
The most compelling speakers at the meeting were grief-stricken friends and family of the deceased, who had no political axe to grind. “I just want flat-out justice,” said Rick Perez, a stocky, bearded, red-face
d man wearing a blue work shirt and under it a T-shirt displaying his son’s picture. “If that cop did what I think he did, we don’t need cops like that.” Unlike his family’s out-of-town helpers, Perez acknowledged that Chris Magnus had “done a good job” in Richmond. He described Officer Jensen as “a bad apple on the force, who made a bad decision and needs to be held accountable for it.” Several nights after the Grant Committee presented its case against Jensen, Richmond city councilors held their own inquiry. The subject of their “study session” was RPD methods for avoiding the use of deadly force, and investigating such incidents when they occurred. Chris Magnus was the leadoff witness, flanked by captains and lieutenants involved in both training and upholding professional standards among the department’s 185 sworn officers.
In 2014, Magnus reported, the RPD responded to 122,159 calls for service. Nearly 3,000 resulted in somebody being arrested (and 357 guns being confiscated). But only 6 percent of all Richmond arrests required the use of force in some form. In those situations, a Taser was deployed about 25 percent of the time. Seventy of the 182 suspects arrested with the use of force were injured, along with 22 officers involved in detaining them. In 2014 there were 12 investigations related to allegations of excessive force. These cases involved civilian complaints made directly to the RPD or Richmond’s Police Commission, or internal reviews of officer conduct initiated by the department itself.
To aid such probes, all RPD personnel with the rank of sergeant or below are now required to wear body cameras and turn both audio and video on when responding to calls for service. However, if body cam footage or other evidence results in later misconduct accusations, the public’s right to information is not unlimited, Magnus warned.
“I’m a huge advocate for transparency in policing,” the chief told the city council. “But I have to face some realities, as [do] our department and city. Police officers have very specific rights to due process in many different circumstances, including officer-involved shootings and other matters that could lead to disciplinary action. So we have to follow that Police Officers’ Bill of Rights or we can be sued by the officer. . . . That means we’re limited in what kind of information we can release at different stages of an officer-involved-shooting investigation, when that is ongoing.”
Magnus and other presenters also explained how “scenario-based training,” involving frequent role-playing, has augmented shooting range exercises. The RPD’s new approach teaches better firearm decision making. In addition, more than a dozen officers have been trained to respond to crisis situations involving mentally ill people who threaten to harm themselves or others.
“You will see repeatedly that officers are using a wide set of skills, including good verbal, sensitivity, and de-escalation skills to gain people’s cooperation,” Magnus said. “The results clearly speak for themselves. We have had only two fatal officer-involved shootings in a period of ten years . . . despite the fact that we still have a lot of violence in this community. That’s one of the lowest rates of force you’re going to find in any urban police department in this country. And that’s a testament to the kind of patience, empathy, and skill that officers use in doing their job.”
The de-escalation training and alternatives to deadly force that Magnus and his command staff described are designed in part to correct deficiencies in the curricula of many US police academies. There, as the New Yorker has reported, new recruits may be “rigorously trained in firing weapons and apprehending suspects but not in establishing common ground with people who have had different experiences. . . . A recent survey by the Police Executive Research Forum revealed that cadets usually receive fifty-eight hours of training in fire arms, forty-nine in defensive tactics, ten in communication skills, and eight in de-escalation tactics.”27
The RPD’s briefing on its use-of-force protocols got a mixed council meeting reception. Several members of the audience, rallied by the Oscar Grant Committee, questioned the seven-month delay in getting a Professional Standards Unit decision about Officer Jensen’s future. They expressed continuing doubts about the official account of what transpired at Uncle Sam’s on September 14. Other speakers objected to the special treatment of police officers under investigation for alleged misconduct, a statutory constraint acknowledged in the RPD’s presentation.
“That bill of rights has to go,” Rick Perez told the city councilors and assembled RPD brass. “Police are citizens just like us, and if they make bad decisions, they have to be answerable for them, just like we would be. . . . All of these internal investigations you guys got are just among the blue brotherhood. It’s a gang, just like the Hell’s Angels. They’re going to back each other the same way.”
“My trust in the department is definitely broken,” said Carol Johnson, a McLaughlin appointee to the city’s Human Rights Commission. “We have to balance the police officers’ bill of rights with our human rights, because Pedie Perez did not get due process; he just got murdered.”
In their quest for justice, the Perez family also felt thwarted by the Richmond Police Commission (RPC). The commission was created by the city council in 1984 in response to the abuses of the “cowboy” era; even the RPOA agreed that this form of civilian oversight was necessary. The RPC was charged with investigating citizen complaints involving “the use of force or racially abusive treatment.” But, thirty years later, its nine members were operating with limited funds and a part-time staff. Between 2005 and 2015, the commission received only a handful of complaints annually and sustained just one. When Rick Perez learned of the RPC’s existence and objected to Jensen’s use of force there, the RPC’s own investigator (a former police chief in another city) and Richmond city attorney Bruce Goodmiller ruled that his complaint was untimely.
Goodmiller also warned RPC members like Felix Hunziker not to discuss the Perez case publicly, citing the pending lawsuit filed by Burris. In an online response titled “Justice Denied in Richmond,” Hunziker questioned both of Goodmiller’s actions. He argued that the commission needed greater resources and a rewrite of its authorizing ordinance to permit truly independent reviews of police misconduct in the future. Magnus favored a different and rather unusual structural reform: putting RPD internal affairs investigations under the control of a civilian. In Richmond, such probes are now handled by an Office of Professional Accountability, located in city hall rather than within the department; the OPA’s first director has been previously employed as a police officer, lawyer, and judge.
Magnus remained skeptical of what even a revamped RPC could accomplish, given the constraints of existing California law. “If you have the right chief, you’re going to get better results,” he told me.28 In early 2016, however, a city council majority sided with advocates of strengthened civilian oversight through the RPC. The council voted to extend its complaint filing period to 120 days from 45. The commission is now required to investigate every officer-involved civilian fatality or serious injury (that results in hospitalization for more than three days), even without a triggering complaint. The RPC has been renamed the Citizens’ Police Review Commission (CPRC). With the help of its own professional investigator, who can subpoena officers and question them under oath, the CPRC was authorized to conduct its own belated probe of the Perez case. As these changes made their way through the process of city council approval, Allwyn Brown, RPD deputy chief under Magnus (and later his successor), told the East Bay Express that he wasn’t worried about having “another pair of eyes and ears for checks and balances.”29
The city council also approved a settlement of the lawsuit filed by Burris. The Perez family received a payment of $850,000, and the city admitted no liability in the case. The Oscar Grant Committee explained that its continuing advocacy of “an independent investigation” of any police officers “inflicting harm on other community members” did not reflect “antipathy towards the RPD, but merely an effort to hold them accountable.” The committee even applauded “the fine job that the majority of officers are do
ing” and acknowledged, belatedly, that “many of the reforms implemented by Richmond have been helpful, contributing to better police-community relationships.”
CEASE-FIRE—ALIVE AND FREE?
Though Officer Jensen’s shooting of Pedie Perez was an understandable preoccupation of his grieving friends and family, almost all young people of color who die from gun violence in Richmond are killed by each other. At a candlelight memorial service for one such victim, a popular sixteen-year-old basketball player shot in his own driveway, Magnus questioned Richmond’s ability to maintain peace by making more arrests. “There are way too many illegal guns out there—and too much access to them,” he said. “We need to be moved to action. Violent crime is an outcome we can all influence.”
One Richmond civic network founded on that premise is Richmond Ceasefire. It includes the RPD, local churches, community groups, and concerned individuals seeking to reduce Richmond’s declining but still appalling rate of violent deaths. Ceasefire sponsors periodic nighttime walks through different parts of the city, with highly visible participation from pastors and members of religious congregations like the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church, in North Richmond, and the Reverend Alvin Bernstine’s Bethlehem Missionary Baptist Church at the other end of town.
The act of walking, collectively and peacefully, along a route from Bernstine’s church, through nearby Richmond neighborhoods like Crescent Park and on to North Richmond or back is symbolic and significant. Much gunplay by local gang members is turf-related, involving tit-for-tat shootings and other dangerous forays into enemy territory. When there is a cycle of retaliatory violence underway, daily life in affected neighborhoods or particular low-income apartment complexes becomes even more claustrophobic, not to mention dangerous, for bystanders of all ages.
Some Ceasefire volunteers, like Valerie Duncan, have no shortage of street cred. “I’ve carried pistols. I’ve ducked lead and bullet fire. Sold dope. I’ve done all of that,” Duncan told the Richmond Confidential, a community news service operated by the UC-Berkeley Journalism School. As a church member, Duncan joined the collective effort to identify younger people most at risk of committing violent crimes and help them find a different path. In one of his quarterly RPD Updates, Chief Magnus described the available options in tough-love fashion: “Ceasefire involves doing call-ins or making home visits to active shooters. The called in individuals are then given a choice: accept support and services to get out of the gang life (including job training, anger management counseling, substance abuse services, etc.) or expect tougher police scrutiny and consequences associated with any criminal behavior.”30
