Alicia Saddler couldn’t contain her anger.
“What are you going to do?” she shouted as Vallejo Police Chief Shawny Williams attempted on Wednesday to answer questions about the fatal shooting of 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa.
According to police, Monterrosa was allegedly looting a Walgreens when he was shot early Tuesday morning.
It’s not a story Saddler believes.
“They don’t care,” Saddler told me, referring to the Vallejo Police Department. “They don’t care.”
Angel Ramos, Saddler’s brother, would've turned 25 Wednesday if he was still alive. Ramos was fatally shot by a Vallejo police officer in January 2017 at the home he shared with his family. According to police, Ramos hovered over another person with a large kitchen knife in his hand. Zachary Jacobsen, the officer who shot Ramos, claims he saw Ramos making stabbing motions.
No knife was found near Ramos’ body.
George Floyd’s death in police custody in Minneapolis sparked an uprising in this country, as people have marched in the streets to demand, among other things, accountability for police brutality. To understand why the protests are necessary, look no further than Vallejo.
In one of the Bay Area’s most racially diverse cities — 30% white, 25% Asian, 22% black and 20% Latino — Vallejo’s victims of police violence are often black or brown. Since 2010, more than 40 Vallejo police officers have been involved in at least one shooting, and 14 have participated in multiple shootings.
The names of people who’ve been fatally shot by police — Willie McCoy, Ronell Foster and Eric Reason — are shouted at protests because Vallejo’s residents don’t want them forgotten. They feel the city has ignored their pleas to address police violence in the city, but at a Tuesday news conference in which they did not name Monterrosa, city officials said they were now listening in the wake of Floyd’s death.
That made some residents I’ve spoken to angrier.
“This stuff was happening in our own community and nobody was doing anything about it,” said Askari Sowonde, an events coordinator. “We have been talking about police accountability. We have been talking about all of this stuff for years. Now they hear us?”
She’s felt dismissed at Vallejo City Council meetings when she’s implored officials to address police brutality.
“You don’t hear us and you don’t see us. No matter what we say, you continue to do what you want to do,” she said, referring to City Council members. “You don’t hear police accountability. What you see is confrontational people. You don’t hear the fact that we’re telling you that we're tired of being murdered by the police. Now you hear it?
“I’m tired of our people being murdered.”
Five National Guard vehicles carrying 50 troopers rolled into Vallejo on Tuesday night to assist officers as the city braced for another night of protests. Sharmell Mitchell told me she was shot with a rubber bullet while protesting that night. She’s McCoy’s sister. He was shot in February 2019 as he slept in a Taco Bell drive-through lane.
“This ain't nothing new for us,” Mitchell said about this week’s fatal shooting by police. “They’re not killing because they’re scared. They’re doing it because they can and they’re getting away with it, and they’re going to keep getting away with it until we stand up like we’re doing now.”
Two months after McCoy’s death, his 20-year-old niece, Deyana Jenkins of Hercules, was driving in Vallejo with three friends when they passed two Vallejo officers who had another motorist pulled over. Jenkins was pulled over, and after she was dragged from the car, Jenkins said, two officers pinned her to the ground with their knees in her back.
Vallejo residents have accused police of intimidation tactics like driving past their homes and shining spotlights in windows. In October, civil rights attorney Melissa Nold, who has represented Jenkins and others in claims and lawsuits against the city, filed a “cease-and-desist” request with the city. In it she claims the police union has made posts about her on its Facebook page, and that a union official videotaped her during a City Council meeting in what she saw as “retaliation and intimidation” related to her defense work.
“Now it’s fashionable to be concerned about dead black and brown bodies,” Nold said. “If you actually cared, you would’ve been listening to the actual impacted black and brown people in your community.”
I wonder, why have city officials been so slow to hear what the black and brown community has been telling them for years? I reached out to Erin Kerrison, a UC Berkeley professor of social welfare, for an answer.
“The entire American project is one that’s built on the backs of people who’ve been racially othered,” she said. “We rely on this otherness so we can then determine who has and who doesn’t, and we justify it based on those constructions of other.
“We always had police to control the people who are other. And the other is not a property-owning, white, Christian man.”
Saddler’s commitment to police accountability remains steadfast. She’s not only protesting for Ramos, but she’s doing it for her 12-year-old son, Giovanni.
“You just have to look at it like if you don’t, then who will,” she said. “And that’s my attitude every day. If I don’t, who will?”
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. appears Mondays and Thursdays. Email: otaylor@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @otisrtaylorjr
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