Sacramento leaders blamed recent havoc on outsiders. Nearly all arrests were locals
All of the people arrested since Saturday in connection with widespread damage and theft that followed otherwise peaceful protests are residents of the Sacramento area, contrary to recent suggestions by city leaders that “outsiders” may have come to the city to cause havoc.
Mayor Darrell Steinberg, when asked Sunday about outside provocateurs following a destructive Saturday night, did not take a hard stance but said authorities had “heard all kinds of things — word that some of this is organized from outside Sacramento.”
A day later, during Monday morning’s informal announcement of the curfew order, Steinberg said the city believes much of the vandalism had been a coordinated effort by groups on bicycles, communicating with one another via cellphone. “We don’t know who those people are. We are trying to find out,” the mayor said.
City Councilman Jeff Harris also tiptoed beyond the realm of rumors Monday, saying the city had “intel” to suggest “an organized criminal element is coming into town to create havoc.”
But information provided by city police suggests a significant presence of locals did the damage over the weekend and Monday. If geographic outsiders have been responsible for the havoc, none so far have been arrested.
Of more than 30 suspects arrested Saturday through Monday on charges related to looting, theft or burglary, all but one reside in Sacramento County, according to arrest logs provided to The Sacramento Bee.
Police logs show that 32 were arrested between those three days on suspicion of looting, burglary and/or vandalism. Of those, 24 gave addresses from the city of Sacramento; seven resided elsewhere in the county, coming from Citrus Heights, North Highlands and Rancho Cordova; and the one remaining suspect is from Rocklin in Placer County, about a half-hour drive from the capital.
There were very few outsiders listed all told, including for charges more directly related to the protest demonstrations — things like failure to disperse, resisting arrest and, on Monday night, violation of the curfew that kicked in at 8 p.m. One 34-year-old St. Louis man was booked on a failure to disperse charge Saturday night. A 23-year-old from Anaheim was arrested for curfew violation Monday. A few out past curfew were from the Bay Area.
The Downtown Sacramento Partnership on Monday estimated property damage at $10 million, with about 130 businesses having doors or windows smashed and roughly 300 defaced with graffiti over the course of the weekend.
The chaos followed largely peaceful demonstrations, most near the Capitol grounds and near Cesar E. Chavez Plaza downtown, protesting the Memorial Day police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Mass protests have emerged nationwide centering on racial injustice and alleged police brutality.
Bee reporters at the scene Sunday, which appeared to be the most destructive day, estimated that roughly 200 people broke off from a main group of about 1,000 who had been protesting peacefully near the Capitol grounds downtown around 8:30 p.m., when bands of vandals began smashing windows, ransacking businesses and, in some cases, potentially starting fires in stores and dumpsters. A total of 22 people were arrested for charges related to “looting” that night, Police Department spokesman Officer Karl Chan said.
Morning Star, who runs the healing justice committee at Anti Police-Terror Project Sacramento, on Wednesday disagreed with some activists and the mayor, who had placed blame for the destruction on outsiders.
“We knew that this isn’t outside people, we knew that this isn’t outside agitators. We knew that this is locals,” Star said.
She said it’s primarily angry young people doing the damage. The bulk of those arrested within city limits for looting, burglary and vandalism have been between their late teens and late 20s, with handfuls in their 30s and 40s, arrest logs show.
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to The Bee’s requests for info on weekend arrests by its deputies.
According to the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, prosecutors as of Tuesday had elected to file charges against 11 who were arrested. Those included a Stockton man who was charged with commercial burglary, looting and resisting after being confronted by law enforcement at the Target on Fulton Avenue, north of Arden Way, which is Sheriff’s Office jurisdiction.
The most violent incident described by prosecutors came Friday, when protests began on a smaller scale in the capital than the two following days, and resulted in the arrest of a 23-year-old Clearlake man. Jeremy Isom was charged with felony assault on an officer and rioting “after throwing a large clay pot at them,” the DA news release said.
The alleged assault happened as officers were “rescuing a motorist from her car, which was surrounded by an angry mob who had already slashed her tires and broken her windows.” The DA news release says multiple people in that mob “hurled bricks, bottles and other objects” at officers, but Isom’s arrest was the only noted in the Police Department log for Friday.
Sacramento Superior Court records show minimal prior criminal records for the 11 who face charges so far.
The California Highway Patrol also provided arrest info for Friday through Sunday to The Bee, but the agency did not make any arrests for charges related to property damage or theft. The CHP’s Valley Division arrested six Sacramento County residents for threats, resistance and battery against peace officers, one of them a 16-year-old from Rancho Cordova arrested on all three of those charges. Valley Division officers arrested one 22-year-old from San Francisco for resisting arrest and threatening a peace officer.
Six more locals — five from the city of Sacramento, one from Elk Grove — were arrested by CHP’s Capitol Protection Section between Saturday and Sunday, on charges related to resisting officers, disturbing the peace and trespassing on state property. A 30-year-old Sacramento woman also faced an indecent exposure charge.
Three suspects from Rancho Cordova arrested for looting — identified as Elizabeth Jan Fallis, Ronald Terrance Silva and Leonard Pablojesus Torres — were initially also arrested on charges of conspiracy after being found with items stolen from Break Time Mini Mart downtown, according to the Sacramento Police Department. But the DA’s office decided to pursue looting, commercial burglary and receipt of stolen property, and not the conspiracy charges.
‘Outside agitators’: What does the phrase mean?
The use of the phrase “outside agitator” often carries differing meanings when used by activists as opposed to law enforcement officials and politicians and other groups.
While some activists in Sacramento initially blamed the weekend destruction on people from outside the area – or with connections to the antifa movement – others have used the term to describe “agitators” taking part in demonstrations who are not interested in advocacy.
That was the case Monday when Stevante Clark – whose brother, Stephon Clark was shot and killed by Sacramento police in 2018 – yelled at a young man who jumped on a National Guard Humvee during a march.
“We need to know when to separate from those who are not there for the movement and are just there for Instagram, for social media, for women or to capitalize on the legacy of our individuals that we lost to an unjust system,” Clark told The Bee’s editorial board.
In a Monday news conference, Gov. Gavin Newsom echoed the idea that organized groups that are mostly separate from those gathering for peaceful protest, potentially extremist groups, were responsible for the weekend’s damage. He said those groups are “well-defined” but declined to name them.
“Many come from other parts, other parts of the country,” Newsom said. But, he added, many are “homegrown.”
U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr said in a recent statement that “outside radicals and agitators” were exploiting the protests “to pursue their own separate and violent agenda.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz last week estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage as protests first erupted in the Minneapolis area were from out-of-state. St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter claimed no one arrested in his city Friday night lived in the state, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey claimed, “The people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents.”
As reported in an investigation by USA Today, Minneapolis and St. Paul police logs showed that an overwhelming majority of those arrested in each city were, in fact, local to the area, forcing the governor to walk back his claim.
Activists nationwide in some instances have used it to refer to anyone not associated with the primary protesting group taking advantage of the situation to cause problems. In a piece published Wednesday morning by Vox, journalist Li Zhou described “outside agitators” as “a statement that activists have heard before, used throughout history to undermine the legitimacy of protests.”
“By framing protests as the result of ‘outside’ influence, lawmakers are able to undercut the validity of the protest itself and question activists’ capacity for organizing such a large-scale movement,” Zhou wrote in the lead-up to a Q&A with Howard University law professor Justin Hansford.
David Carter, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University who has studied responses to protests, defined four broad groups that show up to these types of demonstrations.
Carter said the first group includes those who “truly believe in the issues.” The second involves those with “an ideological agenda,” which Carter says includes both the “extreme right and extreme left,” which appears to be the type being referenced by Barr, Newsom and some other state and local leaders.
The third is “criminal opportunists,” who “seek to loot, steal and cause property damage and use the demonstrations as an excuse and for ‘cover’ knowing the police will be occupied and can’t catch everyone.” The fourth group is made up of bystanders simply watching events unfold.
“The second and third groups tend to be somewhat calculating in their actions, and many in the second group are very well organized,” Carter told The Bee in an email. “These two will often listen to police scanners and have some type of plan — albeit sometimes a crude plan in the case of opportunists — to accomplish their goals.”
As arrest logs reflect in Sacramento and near Minneapolis have to this point reflected, the vast majority of criminal opportunists usually reside in the same area where those crimes take place.
While leaders like Stevante Clark have urged protesters to stay peaceful, Star, from the local Anti Police-Terror Project chapter, said “there’s a lot of youth who are righteously angry.”
“We respect a diversity of tactics. That’s not encouraging violence.”
This story was originally published June 3, 2020 at 2:41 PM.
