Protest at Sacramento jail erupts as officers fire rubber bullets to disperse crowd
Deputies fired what appeared to be pepper spray and rubber bullets into a crowd of protesters during an escalating confrontation in front of the Sacramento County Main Jail late Saturday as a daylong protest against police brutality veered into mayhem.
A confrontation in front of the jail — where protesters had smashed the glass doors hours earlier — turned ugly as several hundred people got into brief altercations with deputies. Deputies used batons to push back on the crowd and fired either tear gas or pepper spray to move the throng away from the jail. By 9 p.m., the deputies had carved the crowd into two halves, separated by about 30 yards on I Street.
Several demonstrators lobbed rocks, glass bottles and eggs at the deputies. The sound of fireworks filled the air and one protester was seen bashing in the windows of a car parked nearby. Someone lit a fire in a trash can about a block away, and a couch that somehow appeared in the middle of 6th Street was set afire, too.
One protester appeared to be hit in the face with a rubber bullet. In graphic videos circulating on social media, the person was scooped up by another protester and carried away as significant blood poured from his face. A Sacramento Bee reporter saw demonstrators load the injured person into a car and drive away.
It was one of many confrontations as hundreds took to the street to protest the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. About an hour earlier about 100 marched from the Capitol to the the I-5 onramp at 3rd Street, where they were met by a phalanx of California Highway Patrol officers.
The officers fired what appeared to be “flash bang” noise-making devices and pepper balls into the crowd, while the marchers hurled water bottles and chanted, “What do we want? Justice.” One young man said he was shot in the knee with a rubber bullet. Earlier in the day a separate group briefly halted traffic on the freeway while another group was rebuffed with batons when it tried to get into the Capital City Freeway.
The standoff at 3rd Street ended and the marchers headed toward the Sacramento County Main Jail, where they’d smashed glass doors earlier in the afternoon. There they found one of the doors covered in plywood and a phalanx of deputies in riot gear. They taunted the deputies and a few threw water bottles in their direction. Along the way, someone broke a window at the Starbucks at the train station near the jail.
In the standoff in front of the jail, protesters cursed at the officers, held their hands up, and chanted, “I can’t breathe.” Someone held up a banner that said, “D.A. Schubert, your hands are bloody too,” a reference to District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert’s refusal to file charges against officers who’ve killed black people.
Following hours of marches that snaked through the downtown area and into West Sacramento, several hundred demonstrators returned to their starting point — the grounds of the Capitol — and engaged in a tense confrontation with California Highway Patrol officers guarding the east side of the building.
Several protesters hurled water bottles at the officers, along with fruit plucked from orange trees on the Capitol grounds and an egg. One protester tried to make his way through a CHP barricade and was engulfed by officers. At least one person was seen taken into custody and hustled inside the Capitol. The CHP parked an armored vehicle in front of the building.
Several demonstrators split off from the main group and began smashing windows of nearby buildings, including the Capitol Mini-Mart on L Street and a Western Union office. One group in ski masks approached the Sacramento County Main Jail and smashed in all four glass doors at the entrance with their feet and a skateboard.
Sheriff’s deputies stood inside and watched. Other demonstrators sprayed anti-police graffiti on jail walls and other downtown buildings. A man who carried an American flag and appeared to be a counter-protester got into an altercation with the demonstrators at the Capitol and wound up with his face bloodied. The man and his girlfriend then fled toward a group of police officers.
And now a couch pic.twitter.com/uysHPgJusJ
— Ryan Sabalow (@RyanSabalow) May 31, 2020
Protests at Capitol most of the day
Tensions boiled over and then subsided. A Sacramento disc jockey named Chris Hopkins arrived at the Capitol with hundreds of dollars worth of pizzas and drinks — food purchased with donations he raised during an event earlier in the day.
“I just believe in what these people all over the country are doing,” he said. The demonstrators “need to eat, they need water,” he said.
A few people who joined the protest tried to pick up the trash littered on the Capitol grounds near east steps. The area around the shoehorn line of officers was littered with water bottles, manure from police horses, and some protest signs.
As the sun set and the lamps on the Capitol grounds were turned on, a few hundred people remained. Some protesters were standing close to the officers yelling at them. One woman said “f— you” repeatedly at the officers. A few others stood 10 to 20 yards away watching the protest.
The demonstrations — the second in two days in Sacramento — were called to protest the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died while he was being pinned to the ground by police in Minneapolis on Monday. Floyd’s death has ignited protests across the country, with police cars burned, windows shattered and protesters pelted with rubber bullets.
The Sacramento protesters also chanted the name of Stephon Clark, the unarmed black man who was shot to death by Sacramento police in 2018, touching off days of intense protests. Clark’s brother Stevante marched with the demonstrators Friday night and Saturday.
Earlier in the day, the protesters in Sacramento scuffled with police at various locations. CHP officers used batons to keep one group from entering the Capital City Freeway in West Sacramento, although another group was briefly able to halt traffic on I-5 in Sacramento.
Friday night’s protest at a police substation in Sacramento ended with nine law enforcement officers slightly injured and two protesters under arrest. That resulted from a confrontation as the protest was winding down and about 75 stragglers stationed themselves on the Highway 99 overpass on 12th Avenue, about a mile from the police substation.
They refused orders to leave and briefly swarmed a group of police officers who approached them. The confrontation ended shortly afterward.
Berry Accius, a community activist who has protested local police actions in the past, said there’s a reason the George Floyd incident in Minneapolis has resonated. Protests are being held in Atlanta, Louisville and Oakland, among other cities, because the concerns have not been addressed about racism and police accountability, he said.
Accius, who participated in the Stephon Clark protests, likened it to a cancer. That’s why, he said, after attending town halls and meetings with chiefs of police people are still protesting.
“When we keep putting bandaids to a cancer without getting the cause what does cancer do? It spreads,” Accius said. “Here we are six years later from Eric Garner being choked and we right back.”
Buildings defaced with BLM, anti-police graffiti
The Capitol grounds and downtown buildings, meanwhile, were filling with graffiti on Saturday.
Someone sprayed “I can’t breathe #BLM” on a manhole cover, a reference to Floyd’s plea to the police officers and protest organizer Black Lives Matter.
A sign by the Capitol was defaced with the words “KKK office” and an arrow pointing toward the building. Outside the Sacramento Main Jail, someone wrote “KILL ALL PIGS,” and, “There is no such thing as a good cop.”
Other graffiti included the reemergence of the acronym ACAB, which stands for “All cops are bastards,” a term made popular in England in the 1970s, as well as “I can’t breathe.” At one point, a woman spray-painted “f--k 12” — an anti-cop phrase — in red paint on the sidewalk.
A protester sprayed black paint on the face of a marble statue in front of the California State Library. The 1924 statue, “Floral Wealth,” by Edward Field Sanford, Jr., guards the entrance of the ornate building across the street from the Capitol.
Meanwhile, Davis police said the front of their building was defaced with “anti-police sentiment” Friday night. “We can clean up the paint, but it is disheartening that someone would feel that is the most productive way to express themselves,” the department said in a Facebook post.
Protests near Arden and Fulton
Different protests popped up around the region. Shortly after 7 p.m., about 100 people blocked the busy intersection of Arden Way and Fulton Avenue, in a heavily commercial section of Sacramento County, forcing motorists to use alternate routes.
“There’s a reason that young black boys in America are afraid of police — and young black girls, too,” a young man who identified himself as Jay shouted into a microphone. “To a young black girl and boy in America, the police is not identified as protect and serve.”
Deputies from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office blocked traffic leading to the intersection and a helicopter flew overhead.
Chloe Eagan, 20, a college student from Woodland, heard about the protest on social media. Furloughed from her restaurant job, Eagan, who is white, said there was no reason not to come.
“I don’t feel like posting things is going to do as much as what you can do physically out here,” Eagan said. “We need to take more steps to make sure we’re heard and seen and show that we care.”
The protest was more personal for Daniel Morales, 25, who came with Eagen from Woodland. He works in the local library now but he can still remember the first time he encountered police at age 13 in downtown Los Angeles.
As Morales tells it, he and an 11-year-old cousin were 5 minutes away from his grandmother’s house when a police car approached. He was quickly handcuffed until the person who called the police interceded because Morales was the wrong guy.
“I’ve never felt or been disrespected like (that). I didn’t know anything about rights, anything about being brown or of color in America,” Morales said. “I learned really early on that that shit could happen to me again. ... I’m here and I can relate that’s all I have to say.”
Sacramento Bee reporter Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.
