SACRAMENTO, Calif. — In a year marked by global conflict and an imminent re-run of the 2020 presidential election, the likelihood of mass demonstrations remains high in California’s capital city.
Your rights to assemble and voice your opinion are supposed to be guaranteed by the First Amendment, but a pending federal lawsuit asks whether Sacramento police are allowing some groups more of those rights than others.
The lawsuit was filed by six protestors who took to the streets in 2020 in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, committed by a Minneapolis police officer who kneeled on Floyd’s neck until he died.
“We all witnessed it as a country,” said youth organizer Odette Zapata. “Seeing it on our phones live, watching a Black man being murdered by a police officer.”
Zapata was one of thousands who took to the streets to demonstrate for racial justice.
In the past, she even participated in peace walks with Sacramento police officers, but nothing prepared her to see the chaos and violence that erupted on the city’s streets in 2020.
“I remember running away. I remember hearing the sounds of rubber bullets like flying past me,” Zapata said. “I remember being on the ground that night. They shot tear gas at us.”
“It felt as close to a war-torn area as I would ever imagine,” said local business owner Meg White, who also joined the protests. “People who are defenseless, with no weapons, being pelted with rubber bullets.”
Photographs document bruises to White’s body, which she says came from Sacramento police using their city-issued bicycles as blunt weapons to hit her.
“It felt so ironic to be protesting police brutality and be met with police brutality,” White said.
White and Zapata are two of the half-dozen plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by attorneys with the San Francisco chapter of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.
“What [police] can't do is pick and choose which sides they prefer, and engage in different police tactics in that way,” said Andrew Ntim, one of the attorneys representing the protestors who sued.
The lawsuit alleges Sacramento police treated the racial justice protestors harshly in spring 2020, but went easy on demonstrators supporting then-President Donald Trump during the so-called “stop the steal” protests later that year.
“The police were, you know, engaging in these violent tactics, shooting rubber bullets, shooting pepper balls,” Ntim said. “Basically none of that happened during the ‘stop the steal’ protests.”
It’s important to acknowledge the two protest movements didn’t have the same impact on the city.
The George Floyd protests were bigger and more disruptive, shutting down streets and providing an environment for widespread looting and vandalism.
“The people that we're representing, these were not people that were looting, that were throwing objects,” Ntim said. “The problem here is indiscriminate force. There's force being perpetrated against all of the [racial justice] protesters rather than these few kind of bad apples.”
The federal lawsuit points out there were bad apples later that year in the pro-Trump crowd, too.
Yet they were not dealt with harshly, as revealed in police body camera footage obtained by the plaintiffs' attorneys.
One camera captured the arrest of a Black man who’d been beaten by a crowd of pro-Trump demonstrators during the “stop the steal” demonstrations. His face bloodied, and officers appear to be confused about what to do.
“I don’t even know what we’re doing as far as arrests right now,” an officer is heard saying in the footage. “He was the one getting beat up over there.”
“They actually arrested this bystander rather than the Proud Boys and other extreme right-wing demonstrators that were actually perpetrating the violence,” Ntim said.
The body camera captures officers discussing whether the man’s arrest is justified. They decide to make the arrest because a knife was visible poking out of the man’s pocket.
Another clip from the body camera in the same time period shows a pro-Trump demonstrator being let go for the same type of alleged offense. Outside of the state capitol building, an officer spots a concealed knife beneath the protestor’s shirt and decides to let him go with a warning.
“That’s a troublemaker right there,” an officer is heard saying in the footage.
“He’s got like essentially a concealed dagger,” a second officer says.
“It’s a felony. We should have arrested him,” the first officer says.
Chuckling about the encounter, the two officers say they would tell the supervisor “ain’t no independent action, bro” if asked why no arrest was made.
“We think that this is a clear example of the Sacramento Police Department picking and choosing and suppressing a certain type of speech,” Ntim said.
The protestors who sued know officers have discretion, but they want it applied more evenly.
“And ideally, the less brutal,” White said. “I don't want them to start beating up the ‘stop the steal’ protesters too... but either both of us or none of us. Don't be choosing one or the other.”
A mass of evidence including hours of video footage and reams of documents led federal judge John Mendez to allow the lawsuit to go forward against the City of Sacramento.
The judge’s rulings hold the city to answer the accusation: did Sacramento police pick and choose?
Did the police give leniency to one movement and violence to the other?
ABC10 reached out to the Sacramento Police Department for an interview, but the department referred us to City Hall. City officials told ABC10 they can’t comment on the pending lawsuit.
“I don't think they're making it up,” said Attorney Stewart Katz, who specializes in police use-of-force cases.
He’s not connected to this lawsuit but agreed to review it for this story.
“From what I can tell, they are suing to attempt to change policies,” Katz said.
He points out Sacramento police already have written policies and training materials stating protestors should be treated the same, regardless of who’s protesting about what.
“If they actually follow these policies, some of these situations would have been avoided,” Katz said.
He argues it’s a mistake to assume police mean to treat different protests differently, or that they’re even aware of it.
“The people in law enforcement, as a general proposition, tend to be more authority oriented. Which maybe isn't a big surprise, given what their job is,” Katz said.
The protestors behind the lawsuit are in settlement talks with the city, but so far no deal has been reached.
They’re pushing for Sacramento to create more powerful outside monitoring of police tactics when protests happen in the future, also for a stronger policy to encourage de-escalation of street clashes.
If no deal is reached, it could eventually be up to a civil jury to decide whether Sacramento’s treatment of different protest movements was disparate enough to find the city in violation of the First Amendment.
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