Over the past week I have found myself asking variations of the same question over and over again.
Does San Diego and its residents truly care about the most vulnerable in our community?
After last week’s incident in La Jolla I’m not sure how anyone can honestly and wholeheartedly answer that question with a “yes.”
San Diego made national news Wednesday after a video of San Diego police officers arresting Jesse Evans, a Black homeless man, went viral.
In the more than four minute video taken Wednesday morning by La Jolla resident Nicole Bansal, officers are seen repeatedly punching Evans in the face, head and leg after tackling him to the ground in La Jolla.
Police say the incident began after officers approached Evans about allegedly urinating in public and Evans ignored them. They say Evans “resisted arrest” and booked him on suspicion of three felony counts of resisting an officer, three misdemeanor counts of battery on a police officer and a misdemeanor count related to throwing a police radio.
In the video, Evans does take a radio off of an officer’s belt and throws it into the street, and he does appear to punch or swipe at the face of the officer who punched him. However, that only occurred after an officer struck him.
The way officers handled the incident has received significant criticism from local and national homeless advocates, San Diego racial justice advocates and some elected officials.
The U-T’s Alex Riggins reported that Jim Vargas, president and CEO at Father Joe’s Villages, said the video is “a clear illustration of several broken systems and a stark and distressing reminder of the insufficient resources available to those on our streets.”
He also called for an investigation and said the video displays the “failure to provide the basic dignity of public restrooms (and) the urgent need for a more comionate, effective, and comprehensive response to those suffering from mental illness.”
On Friday a group of activists — among them President of the People’s Association of Justice Advocates Shane Harris, homeless advocate Michael McConnell and Senior Pastor of Charity Apostolic Church Bishop Cornelius Bowser — appeared alongside Evans at a news conference calling for greater transparency and for SDPD to release footage from the body camera worn by the officers. They also are seeking information about the original call reportedly made by a citizen and what the dispatcher radioed to the officers.
An SDPD spokesperson has said the department’s internal affairs unit is investigating the incident, including reviewing body-worn camera footage. It remains to be seen when that footage will be released.
Unsurprisingly just as there are advocates calling for change and advocating for Evans, others have quickly taken to blaming the victim.
Take a look at the comments section of the U-T’s original story about the incident and you’ll find no shortage of angry, unsympathetic people complaining about city efforts to help vulnerable citizens, defending the violence perpetrated by officers and decrying Evans as a “vagrant,” “bum,” and “transient,” who apparently had it coming.
“The City fills the San Diego streets with homeless by offering all kinds of freebees and complain when they break laws requiring the attention of law enforcement,” wrote a commenter. “I don’t care what happens to them.”
Putting aside the fact that the comments to stories often are, well, terrible, I think these attitudes are informative. Comments like those, along with what happened to Evans, reflect how our community treats our most vulnerable residents daily and reflect a deeper disturbing truth about San Diego.
We have failed our most vulnerable residents, and instead of owning up to that and going the extra mile to help them now, too many of us would rather complain about how their basic existence and pain impact us.
When I look at what happened to Evans I think of it it in a broader context.
I think about the way we’ve criminalized things homeless people regularly have to do to survive — from making it illegal to pitch a tent on public property or sleep on the sidewalk, to punishing people for living in a vehicle parked on a street or for violating a San Diego law against encroaching on a public right-of-way with their possessions.
I think about the pushback that regularly occurs whenever county and city officials from throughout San Diego County adopt new ways to house people within our communities, be it by approving a new housing project in certain neighborhoods or sheltering people in hotels.
Just last week Coast News published a story recounting how some Carlsbad residents were angry with the Carlsbad City Council for recently approving a $3.2 million pilot program that would provide hotel vouchers to homeless individuals. As of May 11, Coast News reported that no hotels had even opted to the program. Even if they do, the participating hotels would have to be a certain distance away from schools and neighborhoods.
Still, here are residents bemoaning the city offering aid to human beings in need.
I also think of how for nearly 25 years San Diego County owned the embarrassing distinction of being the only county in the entire United States to have a no-exception home search policy for people who applied for public benefits.
Last week the U-T’s Greg Moran published an excellent in-depth piece on the county’s recently defunct Project 100% program, which for decades tortured and humiliated vulnerable individuals and families by having the act of applying for benefits trigger an unannounced home search that didn’t require a search warrant, oversight by a judge, or even suspicion of any wrongdoing.
Critics railed against the program for years, saying it deters needy people from applying for benefits instead of catching fraud, yet county officials constantly defended the program and sought to take it statewide. They even continued the program despite a 2014 study revealing the county had been inflating how much fraud the program had actually caught, and it was apparently costing taxpayers more than it was allegedly preventing.
So when I look at Evans, I’m once again embarrassed by how our city and county has treated yet another vulnerable person in need. And I’m wondering at what point will all of us be ashamed enough to own up to our failures and really question why we can’t do better than this?
Because we sure as hell should be able to.
