Why I Got Arrested For Eric Garner and Michael Brown

The following is a guest post from my son, Dayton Thorpe, a PhD candidate studying at UC Berkeley.

On Tuesday December 9th, I was released from the Alameda County Jail charged with being a public nuisance for the previous night’s protest in Berkeley, California. Spurred by the recent police killings of unarmed black men and the choice of grand juries not to hold trials, Americans of all colors have realized that full equality won’t come just with the passage of time. Activists in Ferguson, New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley, and elsewhere have taken to the streets in protest. In Berkeley, after two days of protests that were mostly peaceful but marred by roughly ten mask-wearing looters, I worried the energy would be lost. On the third night, I was elated and proud to find the largest crowd yet – 2,000 peaceful protesters. The Berkeley Police Department later confirmed there were no instances of looting or property damage. Starting at the police headquarters downtown, we marched all over Berkeley, eventually flooding onto I-80 to block ten lanes of traffic.

For their part, the Berkeley Police Department and the California Highway Patrol did an excellent job. They maintained public safety while letting the protesters exercise their rights to free speech and association. In tense moments, they avoided escalation. However, this was no party. Many people were hit with batons and several were hit with rubber bullets. 223 people were put in jail, roughly eight of whom ended up in solitary confinement. We were held outside for five hours, handcuffed for about four hours, and transported on buses with boarded up windows without being told where we were going. Several people wet themselves since we were not allowed to go to the bathroom. We were also not allowed to contact anyone once on the bus and not told when we would be let out until the moment it happened. I participated in these protests with confidence that I would be safe from excessive police force and that the justice system would levy a fair punishment for non-violent civil disobedience. My experience matched my expectations, but I believe that was in large part a privilege I enjoy as a white male. I found jail to be somewhat frightening and demeaning. Others found it to be far worse than I. If I weren’t white and if I hadn’t been arrested with 222 other non-violent people, I’m sure I would have been terrified.

While nearly all cops are good cops, some are not. The unethical behavior of those bad cops falls disproportionately on young black men. A study by ProPublica found young black men are 21 times more likely to be killed by police than are young white men. This is obscene. It can’t possibly be explained by anything but deeply engrained institutional racism. The confluence of the subconscious racism we all share, immigration and drug laws that arguably are overtly racist, and a collection of seemingly innocuous policies that collectively disfavor minorities maintains an unequal society that has not yet fully achieved the dream of the Civil Rights Movement. The killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner are not isolated incidents; they’re examples of an ongoing national tragedy.

Besides attitudinal change, there are policy changes we can demand. We can ask that police wear body cameras, that the Department of Justice do more to root out systematic civil rights violations by police departments, and that investigations into police killings be led by special prosecutors and not by District Attorneys. The fight for civil rights is far from over.

Note that Dayton took these photos with his iPhone after being handcuffed.

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