Disabled Veteran Assaulted by Police (Shattuck Ave, Berkeley) 02/27/18 Wendy M.A.D.
Channel: Wendy M.A.D.
Date: 05/03/2018

This woman was assaulted by police on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley.  She did nothing wrong.  She was amiably asking the policeman a question and then he started acting creepy towards her.  I was standing nearby unlocking my bicycle and watched/heard the entire interaction unfold. 

When I noticed how unfriendly the officer's body language was after the woman started talking with him, I walked up and stood in front of the police car staring at him.  He ignored me--he was gaze-locked on the woman and even though she was being very nice to him, he just... wasn't engaging her at all.  It was as if he was experiencing a failure to understand that the body in front of him was that of a person. 

So I'm watching all this unfold, confused that he is so gaze-locked he doesn't even notice me standing there, and suddenly he opens the door to his police car door and slowly puts on a pair of white gloves.  His body language was really sinister while he did this.  It was as if he was playing a porno movie in his head.  At that point I knew he was planning to assault her (as a woman in my 30s, I've had to develop a 6th sense for this).  At that point, feeling very alarmed, I decided to start filming.  I hid the camera in the crook of my shoulder and walked by them with the camera pointed behind me. 
 
As you can see in the video, she attempts to disengage the policeman and that is when he followers her, grabs her from behind, and assaults her.   His assault included many specific forms of physical violence, including trapping her wrists, pinning her, flipping her body onto the cement, and other forms as well.  As he assaults her, he keeps telling her to relax as she screams.  Wisely, as you can see, she held her arm locked protectively over her genitals for as long as possible.

As I later found out, she was charged with nothing.  Literally nothing.

This was just a completely unwarranted invasion of her life and and assault on her body. 

Q: Why does the woman keep saying "I don't have a search warrant?"

A: When she made contact with the officer, she'd been making a joke about how he was parked illegally in a 3-minute loading zone.  So, when she first encountered him, she said something along the lines of, "ha ha, officer, I'm going to have to give you a ticket for being parked here so long, ha ha, hey so I have some paperwork for my VA benefits that needs to be signed by a police officer and maybe you know how to help me with that?"  And then when he did that creepy thing of putting on those white gloves and I heard her say something like, "Oh hey, you don't need to open your car, ha ha, I don't have a search warrant, I mean, I was just joking about all that, no, I don't have a search warrant, ha ha, I really just want to ask you about this paperwork..."  So that's why, as she disengages, she says the thing about how "I don't have a search warrant"--perhaps because she thinks the reason the officer was motioning towards assaulting her was because of the casual jokes she had made while attempting to good-naturedly ask him for help with her paperwork.

Honestly, I wouldn't have been paying attention at all and this whole thing would have passed by me unnoticed if I hadn't *believed* stories I'd heard from black and brown members of my community about the terrifying double standards with which they are addressed by these public servants.  

Public servants are constantly harassing and assaulting people of color for no reason, simply because these servants have been granted the institutional power and lack of oversight and because they have failed to overcome their reductive mode of reading the signifiers used to determine "race."  I wish that every public servant would read "The Myth of Race" by Robert Sussman, and would likewise work to un-train their unconscious reactions to racial signifiers.  This might mean avoiding movies that use black skin as shorthand for criminality.  

I would like to see things get better.  I would like people of color to have the same ability I do to have a rich and fulfilling public life.  Everyone should be able to walk down Shattuch Avenue in Berkeley chitchatting and joking and holding humanizing space for each other. 

Moments of abuse by public servants like this damage the social fabric and deeply divide communities in unspoken ways.  

If we, as white allies, learn to hold the line and so our part and ensure that those with black bodies may move freely through our public spaces, we will see black minds flourish as their public lives and routes towards happiness are greatly expanded.  This is a project that cannot rest merely on the shoulders of those who are being victimized.  The entire community *especially white people* simply must step up.  If you see something, do something.