Outside Mayor Steinberg’s house, Sacramento ‘die-in’ elevates a powerful call for change
More than 2,000 protesters lay down on the Greenhaven street near the home of Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg on Friday night, giving a movement for social justice – a campaign against police brutality – its moment of clarity and power.
After nearly a week of shouting, raging, hurling plastic bottles and rocks at cops, a message crying to be heard came through in the silence of thousands simulating death in a Sacramento neighborhood.
The protest, perhaps the most profound in Sacramento since people took to the streets to decry the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police on May 25, was as peaceful as it was substantive. We had no violence, no confrontations with law enforcement, no reason to fear the citizens performing a symbolic “die-in.”
Devoid of violent distractions, a message came through loud and clear from people lying on a normally busy Greenhaven Drive. They stayed perfectly still and quiet for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the amount of time a Minneapolis cop’s knee choked the life out of Floyd.
The message: Stop killing us.
Many of the protesters joining organizer Tanya Faison of Black Lives Matter Sacramento were white and young, and many were women. They all symbolized what we can only hope is a growing national consciousness massing to confront the scourge of police brutality.
Echoes of Rodney King
At one point during the silence the thought of Tiananmen Square came to me, invoking the memory of the massacre of Chinese patriots by government troops nearly 31 years ago to the day. I used to think that such brazen examples of despotic might only happened in other countries. How wrong I was – how wrong we have been.
Protesters have staged “die-ins” across the country, from Boston to Tacoma. Now Sacramento’s field of young people lay on the ground before us on this late spring Friday night. It registered as much more than a publicity stunt to those of us lounging in middle class comfort. We saw a silent image of prolonged agony, symbolic and real.
Thinking that how Floyd died is something new, or different, is an insult to victims of police brutality everywhere. We know it’s not new or different.
We know about Stephon Clark, Mikel McIntyre, Joseph Mann and too many other black men unjustly killed by law enforcement in Sacramento – with all of those killings, and more, ruled legal by the local district attorney and then swept under the rug by our subsequent indifference.
I covered the “Rodney King riots” in 1992 for The Bee and Thursday night re-watched “LA 92,” a Netflix documentary about that seminal event of police brutality. It was captured on video and then excused by our criminal justice system. Los Angeles cops beat King like a dog and were exonerated in a jury trial that was followed by civil unrest eerily similar to what we are experiencing now.
As I watched with my children, I was filled with shame by the echoes, the similarities between King and Floyd – and so many other men. All those years, all those deaths, how do we change now?
Faison: ‘They don’t have to be scared of us.’
Faison brought a small army to a Sacramento neighborhood whose residents have no reason to fear police sirens. They have no reason to fear walking outside late at night, driving their nice cars, or their sons leaving the house to go out at night with friends.
The message was clear: This is what we fear. This is what we live. This is how we look when we die in the street.
Faison, so criticized by some local elected officials for being “too confrontational,“ was the one who kept more strident voices from getting out of hand. She implored people, “If you see trash on the street as you are walking to your cars, please pick it up.”
And: “Let’s show Greenhaven they don’t have to be scared of us.”
The demonstration broke up well before 8 p.m. so we could all get to our cars and off the streets before the city’s curfew.
And now we either listen to these messages and confront police brutality with more than just platitudes, or we fail miserably and pay the heavy price for our sins of indifference and racial animus.
A silent call for police reforms
If anything, the protest we saw on Friday night must move beyond Steinberg’s neighborhood. Many people assume because he is so visible that he runs the city, but he does not. According to the city charter, Police Chief Daniel Hahn reports to City Manager Howard Chan.
If we want police reforms in Sacramento, if we want an end to tactics that choke suspects, or if we want a robust citizen’s review panel of police, then Hahn and Chan must directly feel the heat as well.
I interviewed Steinberg on my weekly Facebook Live and I could tell that Hahn is not down with some reforms that need to happen. And Chan? He wields a lot of power behind the scenes. He’s a nice man, does a good job, but I didn’t vote for him. You didn’t vote for him. And yet he is Hahn’s boss.
What happened on Friday near Steinberg’s home was profound and symbolic but it can’t be the end. It must be the beginning. We should focus on Chan and Hahn. Because if Steinberg is going to lead reform with the Sacramento Police he won’t be able to do it alone. He must go through Chan and Hahn first.
If Steinberg fails because Hahn and Chan object, if we don’t heed the public yearning for police reforms now, we will never do it. If we don’t stop worrying about appearances and who gets offended, we will face a grim future of unrest and pain in our streets.
The deaths of future young people won’t be simulated. They will be real and the blood will be on our hands for doing nothing.
