‘Breaking Point’: What emerging Sacramento leaders say about racism, police and COVID-19
Local government leaders and citizens in oversight roles joined a Sacramento Bee-hosted discussion on systemic racism, sharing perspectives on topics from police reform and government accountability to the coronavirus pandemic’s devastation of California’s Latino population.
Sacramento Bee columnist Marcos Bretón hosted five guests for an hour-long “Breaking Point, a video conference Wednesday.
The talk came weeks after the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by Minneapolis police, ignited sweeping, nationwide protests against racism and police violence; and about four months into the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, which has killed more than 7,000 Californians and nearly 100 in Sacramento County while afflicting Black and Latino communities at disproportionate rates.
Here’s what they talked about.
Reform and ‘defunding the police’
The first 30 minutes of Wednesday’s panel talk focused on law enforcement reform, particularly relating to the Sacramento Police Department.
Dr. Flojaune Cofer, chair of Sacramento’s Measure U advisory committee; Kiran Savage-Sangwan, a member of the Sacramento Community Police Review Commission; and Sacramento City Councilwoman-elect Katie Valenzuela joined Bretón.
Asked near the top of the discussion about the phrase “defunding the police,” Cofer said it’s a concept the public should not fear, but rather “embrace.”
“Instead of asking the question of, ‘How do we improve policing? How do we just keep the status quo as is?,’ we should be asking ourselves, ‘What do we know about what makes us safe? What do we know about what our communities need, and are we meeting those needs?’ ”
Cofer, senior director of policy at Davis-based Public Health Advocates, used a medical analogy: “You don’t design a health care system around surgery. You design a health care system around people staying healthy, and you have surgeries to fill in the gap when that doesn’t happen.”
She drew the parallel to policing after discussing how recent Measure U funds have been divided.
The original Measure U passed in 2012 was a half-cent sales tax that sent revenue to the city’s general fund. Voters in November 2018 approved an expansion and extension of the sales tax, increasing it to a full cent.
The Sacramento City Council ultimately decides how those funds are dispersed, but as the city’s website states, residents can offer “significant input” through the Measure U Community Advisory Committee, which Cofer heads.
Cofer said Sacramento’s police and fire departments have received a large majority of Measure U funds since the start of 2019, while “the promise to the community for inclusive economic development of others has not been met.”
According to Cofer, out of $100 million from Measure U in last year’s budget, only $6 million went to economic development, dropping to approximately $4 million in the most recent budget, about 5 percent of the Measure U total. The Sacramento Police Department gets over 50 percent of the city’s Measure U funds, whereas a flat funding model would only give the department about 25 percent, Cofer said.
Valenzuela brought up a potential “people’s budget,” a model aimed at reflecting citizen priorities, including greater allocations to housing, health care, mental health and youth programs. A coalition of local organizations called for a people’s budget and for divestment from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office in a Tuesday news conference, at which Valenzuela also spoke.
“Folks in neighborhoods that I’ve worked in want better transit service, they want better programming for their youth, they want to feel like they have good job opportunities and real opportunities to provide for themselves and for their families and their communities,” Valenzuela said in Wednesday’s talk with The Bee. “I’ve rarely heard somebody say ‘I want a policeman standing in front of my house 24/7.’ That’s not the goal here.”
Savage-Sangwan said that in her experience, City Council members have “largely deferred their oversight responsibility to the police department itself.”
“And, as we know, the police cannot police themselves.”
Last week, state Attorney General Xavier Becerra released a 104-page filled with actions recommended of the Sacramento Police Department. The report came after Police Chief Daniel Hahn, the city’s first Black police chief, asked the AG’s office to investigate his department following the 2018 police killing of Stephon Clark.
Among other recommendations, the AG called for the department to emphasize de-escalation techniques in its use-of-force training and to conduct detailed inquiries into officer conduct in response to the recent Floyd protests. Officers used batons, tear gas, rubber bullets, bean bag guns and other less-lethal weapons during the protests in late May and early June, resulting in at least one lawsuit.
“The report makes absolutely clear that use-of-force in Sacramento is racist, and that how force is applied in the community is completely racially based,” Savage-Sangwan said. “Nearly half of the uses of force were against Black people.”
Systemic racism, Savage-Sangwan said, “is just not part of the conversation at the city level.”
Latinos and coronavirus
Shifting gears, Bretón continued “Breaking Point” with a one-on-one talk with current Sacramento City Councilman Eric Guerra, addressing the ongoing health pandemic.
The COVID-19 crisis has devastated Latino populations in the Sacramento area and across California, as state data and a recently published “COVID-19 Resilience Poll” have shown.
Guerra said deep-rooted issues of inequity have worsened the crisis for the Latino demographic since the outset of the pandemic.
“There was no recognition (initially) that the disease could impact populations differently other than the elderly and those with underlying health conditions. That was the message. They did not see us – Latinos, almost 40 percent of the population – even when we began to discuss and recognize who’s an essential worker, they didn’t see us ...
Government response didn’t acknowledge “existing health disparities and that Latino communities communicate differently,” Guerra said. Some of the most basic information was not getting to Latino populations in a timely fashion.
“When translation was done, sadly, it was done days or weeks later,” he said.
Guerra said Latino and Black communities “are more likely to be uninsured, be working in jobs not amenable to teleworking, or in jobs that no longer exist and they’ve lost all their income and health care.” They’re also more likely to be in living situations that involve multiple generations or families “with very little ability to social distance or self-quarantine.”
“These communities are not on an even playing field from the beginning.”
These economic consequences have not been limited to essential workers, which Guerra listed as including janitors and laborers among others, but to small business owners who often lack the “legal knowledge and awareness of government aid” necessary to access aid because those resources, traditionally, go elsewhere.
“So in a first-come, first-serve system that is supposed to be blind or unbiased – those Latino businesses, say they were on Stockton Boulevard, Northgate or Franklin – they learned about the aid near the very end. By that point, the resources were gone.”
Guerra says government system’s communications amid the COVID-19 crisis “sent the message to the Latino community that it can be considered an expendable workforce.”
Reparations and reversing racist systems
The discussion’s final guest was Jasper James, co-founder of Activism Articulated and author of the Black Bill of Rights. She spoke of “re-imagining our systems” at all levels to combat racism and inequity within them.
“The real fight is with racist systems being run by generally well-intentioned people,” James said.
James also referenced reparations as a “needed” step in reversing systemic racism and inequality, but that it can start “within the system” that already exists. She pointed to the people’s budget mentioned by Valenzuela as a “perfect example” of this, and said public school budgets can also be an avenue for implementing a form of reparations.
“We’re done arguing with people who don’t believe that white supremacy is real, white privilege is real, racism is real – it’s real,” James said. “I think how we undo these things is basically, we need to raise the bar in general, in our communities and in our nations. And if we do that, then we don’t have to have this conversation.”
‘Systemic racism is no longer up for debate’
Bretón explained The Bee’s reasoning for not including a representative of law enforcement in Wednesday’s panel discussion, as well as why the talk was not structured as a debate, near the beginning.
“My friends, systemic racism is no longer up for debate,” he said. “One could argue that we have reached this moment in time because too many have denied what exists in plain sight.”
Cofer addressed this point as well, speaking to the ideas of equity and compromise.
“We can’t pretend as if there are equal stakeholders here when we’re talking about equity. Equity means that we are actually trying to right historic wrongs, and we’re trying to close the power differential.
“... Sometimes we need to look back and say, ‘Is this even moral or ethical to be presenting two sides and to be compromising in this way?’”
This story was originally published July 17, 2020 at 11:59 AM with the headline "‘Breaking Point’: What emerging Sacramento leaders say about racism, police and COVID-19."
