Sacramento City Council delays controversial vote to ban items at protests

Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan has delayed a controversial City Council vote to ban mace, glass bottles, baseball bats, lanterns and other items that could be used as weapons from protests.

The ordinance, recommended by Deputy Chief of Police Dave Paletta, would have gone into effect immediately, a staff report said. Chan deemed the ordinance an “urgent matter,” so it was not first considered by the council’s Law and Legislation Committee, the staff report said.

After hearing concerns and questions from the public, Chan pulled the item from Tuesday’s council agenda, he announced one hour before the meeting was set to begin.

“Since the posting of this agenda item last week, we have received a lot of feedback and questions from the community,” Chan said in a statement in a city blog post. “It has become clear that this proposed ordinance would benefit from more discussion and community input. It now will be sent to the Law & Legislation Committee for further study before potentially returning to the full Council.”

City officials are preparing for District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert to announce whether she will charge the two officers who fatally shot Stephon Clark in March after they say they mistook his cellphone for a gun.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg expects the DA’s decision to be announced “sometime in the early months of the year,” he told the Bee.

Black Lives Matter Sacramento activists opposed the ordinance and planned to attend the City Council meeting Tuesday night to voice their concerns.

“Some of these these items are necessary for our safety from the threats of our local white supremacists,” a BLM Sacramento Facebook page said.

The organization hosted a series of large protests after Clark’s death, which gained national attention and added to the national conversation about police treatment of African-Americans.

Those protests cost the city roughly $800,000, partly because protesters used improvised weapons to damage city property, according to a staff report.

The American Sikh Public Affairs Association also opposed the ordinance because it would prohibit people from wearing kirpans to protests. Kirpans are generally held with a strap underneath clothing.

“Women and minority communities, especially the Sikh community, have hard-learned lessons regarding the danger of being without means of self defense,” Amar Shergill, of the association, wrote in a letter to council members it posted on its Facebook page. “Disarming protestors is an invitation for bigots, racists, and misogynists to attack without fear of injury.”

Here’s the full list of proposed banned items:

▪ Any length of lumber or wood that is more than a quarter-inch thick or more than 2 inches wide. Both ends must be blunt.

▪ Any length of metal or plastic pipe, hollow or solid, unless it is used to hold a sign. Pipes used to hold signs must be less than three-quarters inches thick, no more than one-eighth of an inch in wall thickness, and not filled with any material. Both ends must be blunt.

▪ All baseball or softball bats of any size, except those made of cloth, cardboard, soft plastic, foam or paper.

▪ Pepper spray, mace, tear gas, aerosol spray or bear repellant.

▪ Any projectile launcher, such as catapults or wrist rockets.

▪ Weapons including firearms, knives, swords, sabers, axes, hatchets, ice picks, razor blades, martial arts weapons, box cutters, pellet or BB guns, tasers or stun guns.

▪ Toy guns, unless they are florescent or transparent.

▪ Chains longer than 20 inches or more than a quarter inch in diameter.

▪ Balloons, bottles, water guns, or water cannons filled with any flammable, biohazard or other noxious matter.

▪ Glass bottles, empty or filled.

▪ Open flame torches and lanterns.

▪ Shields made of metal, wood, or hard plastic.

▪ Bricks, rocks, pieces of asphalt, concrete, pellets of ball bearings.

This story was originally published January 22, 2019 at 4:19 PM.