Call Them by Their True Names

by Rebecca Solnit

  It also brings white newcomers to neighborhoods with nonwhite populations, sometimes with appalling consequences. The East Bay Express reported that in Oakland, recently arrived white people sometimes regard “people of color who are walking, driving, hanging out, or living in the neighborhood” as “criminal suspects.” Some use the website Nextdoor.com to post comments “labeling Black people as suspects simply for walking down the street, driving a car, or knocking on a door.” The same thing happens in the Mission, where people post things on Nextdoor, such as “I called the police a few times when is more then [sic] three kids standing like soldiers in the corner”; chat with each other about homeless people as dangers who need to be removed; justify police killings others see as criminal. What’s clear in the case of Nieto’s death is that a series of white men perceived him as more dangerous than he was, and that he died of it.

  On March 1, 2016, the day the trial began, hundreds of students at San Francisco public schools walked out of class to protest Nieto’s killing. A big demonstration was held in front of the federal courthouse, with drummers, Aztec dancers in feathered regalia, people holding signs, and a TV station interviewing Bac Sierra, dressed in the first of the several suits and ties he’d wear to the trial. Nieto’s face on posters, banners, T-shirts, and murals had become a familiar sight in the Mission; a few videos about the case had been made, demonstrations and memorials had been held. For some, Nieto stood for victims of police brutality and for a Latino community that felt imperiled by gentrification, by the wave of evictions and the people who regarded them as menaces and intruders in their own neighborhood. Many people who cared about the Nietos came to the trial each day, and the courtroom was usually nearly full.

  Trials are theater, and this one had its dramas. Adante Pointer, a Black lawyer with the Oakland firm of John L. Burris, which handles a lot of local police-killing lawsuits, represented Refugio and Elvira Nieto, the plaintiffs. Their star witness, Antonio Theodore, had come forward months after the killing. Theodore is an immigrant from Trinidad, a musician in the band Afrolicious, and a resident of the Bernal area. An elegant man with neat shoulder-length dreads who came to court in a suit, he said he had been on a trail above the road, walking a dog, and that he had seen the whole series of events unfold. He testified that Nieto’s hands were in his pockets; he had not pointed his Taser at the officers; there was no red laser light; the officers had just shouted “stop” and then opened fire.

  When Pointer asked him why he had not come forward earlier, he replied, “Just think: it would be hard to tell an officer that I just saw fellow officers shooting up somebody. I didn’t trust the police.” Theodore testified cogently under questioning from Pointer. But the next morning, when deputy city attorney Margaret Baumgartner, an imposing white woman with a resentful air, questioned him, he fell apart. He contradicted his earlier testimony about where he had been and where the shooting took place, then declared that he was an alcoholic with memory problems. He seemed to be trying to make himself safe by making himself useless. Pointer questioned him again, and he said: “I don’t care to be here right now. I feel threatened.” When witnesses are mistrustful or fearful of police, justice is hard to come by, and Theodore seemed terrified of them.

  The details of what had happened were hotly debated and often contradictory, especially with regard to the Taser. The police had testified as though Nieto had been a superhuman or inhuman opponent, facing them off even as they fired into his body again and again, then dropping to a “tactical sniper posture” on the ground, still holding the Taser with its red laser pointing at them. The city lawyers brought in a Taser expert whose official testimony seemed to favor them, but when he was asked by Pointer to look at the crime scene photos, he said the Taser was off and that it was not something easily or accidentally turned on or off. Was Nieto busy toggling the small on/off switch while also being hammered by the bullets that killed him on the spot? The light is only on when the Taser is on. Officer Morse testified that when he arrived to kick the Taser out of Nieto’s hands there was no red light or wires coming from it. The Taser wires are, however, visible in the police photographs documenting the scene.

  The Taser expert told the court that the Taser’s internal record said the trigger had been pulled three times. The Taser’s internal clock documented these trigger pulls on March 22, after Nieto was dead. The expert witness testified that the clock was set to Greenwich Mean Time, and that he had recalculated the time to place these trigger pulls at 7:14 pm the night Nieto died. The police didn’t have contact with him until 7:18 pm. The Taser expert then created a new theory of “clock drift,” under which Nieto’s Taser fired at exactly the right time to corroborate the police version that the Taser was on and used at the time they shot him. Even if the trigger was pulled, that’s not evidence he was pointing the Taser at them. When a Taser is fired, confetti-like marker tags are ejected; none were found at the scene of the crime. Taser has since negotiated a two-million-dollar contract with the San Francisco Police Department.

  One piece of evidence produced was a fragment of bone found in the pocket of Nieto’s jacket. Some thought this proved that his hands had been in his pockets, as Theodore said. Dr. Amy Hart, the scandal-ridden city coroner, said in the trial on Friday, March 4, that there were no photographs of his red 49ers jacket, which must have been full of bullet holes. The following Monday, an expert witness for the city mentioned the photographs of the jacket that the city had supplied him. The jurors were shown photographs of Nieto’s hat, which had a bullet hole in it that corresponded to the hole in his temple, and of his broken sunglasses lying next to a puddle of blood. The coroner testified to abrasions on Nieto’s face consistent with his wearing glasses.

  Before this evidence was shown, officer Richard Schiff had testified under oath that he made eye contact with Nieto and saw his forehead pucker up in a frown. If the dead man had been wearing a cap and dark glasses, then Schiff could not have seen these things. Finally, how could four police officers fire fifty-nine bullets at someone without noticing that he was not firing back? And what does it mean that they reported “muzzle flash” from an object incapable of producing it?

  When Elvira Nieto testified about her devastation at the death of her son, Pointer asked her about her husband’s feelings as well. “Objection,” shouted Baumgartner, as though what a wife said about her husband’s grief should be disqualified as hearsay. The judge overruled her. At another point, Justin Fritz apologized to the Nietos for the outcome of his 911 call, and appeared distressed. Refugio Nieto allowed Fritz to hug him; his wife did not. “Refugio later said that at that moment he was reminded of Alex’s words,” Adriana told me, “that even with the people that we have conflict with, we need to take the higher ground and show the best of ourselves.”

  Adriana sat with the Nietos every day of the trial, translating for them when the court-appointed translator was off duty. Bac Sierra, in an impeccable suit and tie, was right behind them every day, in the first of three rows of benches usually full of friends and supporters. Nieto’s uncle often attended, as did Ely Flores, a young Latino who was Nieto’s best friend and a fellow Buddhist, who had joined a Buddhist group when he was only eleven. Flores later told me that he and Alex had tried to support each other in living up to their vows and ideals. He said that they wanted to be “pure lotuses” in their communities, a reference to the Buddhist idea of being “a pure lotus in muddy water,” something spiritual that arises but doesn’t separate from the messiness of everyday life.

  Flores had been studying to be a police officer at City College, seeing this as the way he could be of service to his community, but when Nieto was killed, he told me, he realized he could never wear a badge or carry a gun. He abandoned the career he’d worked toward for years and started over, training in a culinary academy as a chef. He suggested that Nieto didn’t see the police as adversaries and thought that he might instead not have understood that they were coming for him when he walked around
the bend in the road that evening. He had perhaps not acted according to the unwritten rules for men of color, who are considered suspects and menaces in everyday life and have to constantly signal their noncriminality through restrictions on dress, movement, and location.

  Another Latino friend of Nieto’s told journalist Sana Saleem that he had warned Nieto that wearing his Taser might endanger him, but said he shrugged off the cautions. You could argue that Alex Nieto died of his confidence in the right to be himself in the park he’d gone to all his life, wearing what he wanted, being who he was without reference to white fear. It had worked in the old Bernal Heights, a diverse neighborhood of people used to coexisting with difference; it did not work when the place changed.

  It was a civil trial, so the standard was not “beyond a reasonable doubt,” just a “preponderance of evidence.” No one was facing prison, but if the city and officers were found liable, there could be a large financial settlement and it could affect the careers of the policemen. The trial was covered by many journalists from local TV stations and newspapers. On Thursday, March 10, 2016, after an afternoon and morning of deliberations, the eight jurors—five white, one Asian woman and two Asian men, none Black, none Latino—unanimously ruled in favor of the police on all counts. Flores wept in the hallway. The American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California published a response to the verdict headlined, “Would Alex Nieto Still Be Alive if He Were White?” Police are now investigating claims that Officer Morse posted a sneering attack on Nieto on a friend’s Facebook page the night of the verdict.

  San Francisco is now a cruel place and a divided one. A month before the trial, the city’s mayor decided to sweep the homeless off the streets for the Super Bowl, even though the game was played forty miles away, at the new 49ers stadium in Silicon Valley. Online rants about the city’s homeless population have become symptomatic of the city’s culture clash. An open letter to the mayor posted on the Internet in February 2016 by Justin Keller, founder of a not very successful startup, was typical in its tone:

  I know people are frustrated about gentrification happening in the city, but the reality is, we live in a free market society. The wealthy working people have earned their right to live in the city. They went out, got an education, work hard, and earned it. I shouldn’t have to worry about being accosted. I shouldn’t have to see the pain, struggle, and despair of homeless people to and from my way to work every day.

  And like Evan Snow, who wanted to blow away Alejandro Nieto after their encounter, Keller got his wish in a way. Pushed out of other areas, hundreds of homeless people began to set up tents under the freeway overpass around Division Street on the edge of the Mission, a gritty industrial area with few residences. The mayor destroyed this rainy-season refuge, too: city workers threw tents and belongings into dump trucks and hounded the newly propertyless onward. An advocate for the homeless photographed the walker relied upon by a disabled man as it was crushed by a garbage truck. One of the purges came before dawn the morning the Nieto trial began.

  When the trial ended with a verdict in favor of the police, 150 or so people gathered inside at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts and outside on rainy Mission Street. People were composed, resolute, disappointed, but far from shocked. It was clear that most of them had never counted on the legal system to validate that what happened to Alex Nieto was wrong. Their sense of principle and history was not going to be swayed by this verdict, even if they were saddened or angered by it. Bac Sierra, out of his courtroom suits and in a T-shirt and cap, spoke passionately, as did Oscar Salinas, who had just posted on Facebook the words: “Alex you will never be forgotten, your parents will always be taken care of by us, the community. As I’ve always said, the unspoken word of La Misión is when someone is hurting, needs help, or passes we come together as a family and take care of them.” The two burly men knelt to steady the chair on which a young woman stood up to speak.

  The Nietos spoke, with Adriana translating for those who did not understand Spanish. And Adriana spoke on her own behalf: “One of the most important changes in my path being involved in the Alex Nieto case has been to learn more about restorative practices, because as someone trained in legal systems, I know that the pain and fear that we are not safe from police in our communities will not go away until there is personal accountability by those who harm us.”

  Adriana, her historian husband, and their friends, including a longtime AIDS activist and a queer choreographer, who all live nearby in a ramshackle old building, had faced their own recent eviction battle, and won. But the community that came together that night was still vulnerable to the economic forces tearing the city apart. Many of these people may have to move on soon; some already have.

  The death of Alex Nieto is a story of one young man torn apart by bullets, and of a community coming together to remember him. They pursued more than justice, as the case became a cause, as the expressions became an artistic outpouring in videos, posters, and memorials, and as friendships and alliances were forged and strengthened. In 2015, a year after Nieto’s killing, twenty-one-year-old indigenous immigrant Amilcar Perez-Lopez was shot to death by police who claimed they were defending themselves from a knife attack, though he died of four bullets to his back and one to the side of his head. On April 7, 2016, less than a month after the Nieto trial, the police shot longtime San Franciscan Luis Góngora to death, claiming he was rushing them with a knife. Eyewitnesses from the little homeless community he was part of and from surrounding buildings, as well as a security video, suggested otherwise. People became angrier about the police they saw as part of a city government and economic tsunami together wiping out the Black and Latino communities.

  In late April 2016, five people—a grandmother and four young men of color—went on a hunger strike in front of the Mission police station, fasting for eighteen days in their Hunger for Justice campaign to force the police chief to resign. Conventional wisdom dismissed their perspective and their effort. A few weeks later, on the day that police killed Jessica Nelson Williams, an unarmed, Black, pregnant mother in her twenties, police chief Greg Suhr was forced to resign. At a demonstration that night, at the industrial site where Williams died of a single bullet, two women held a banner that said, “We are the last 3%.” The Black population of San Francisco has plummeted since its peak in the 1970s, when one in six inhabitants was Black. Down the block, tucked under a freeway overpass, gentrifying homes were visible, styled in what you could call fortress modernism. The same day that Suhr resigned and Williams was killed just south of the Mission, a dozen Nextdoor users took to the site’s Mission District forum to praise and express their gratitude to Suhr, who, as chief of police, had justified the San Francisco police shootings, often by lying about the facts in the cases.

  At the gathering after the verdict, on the spring equinox that was also the anniversary of Alex Nieto’s killing, Adriana Camarena told the crowd: “Our victory, as the Nietos said yesterday, is that we are still together.”

  But many forces threaten that togetherness.

  No Way In, No Way Out

  (2016)

  Chances are that you are living the good life, at least in the most fundamental sense. You have the liberty to leave your home and the security of a home you can return to; privacy and protection, on the one hand, and work, pleasure, social encounter, exploration, and engagement, on the other. This is almost a definition of quality of life, the balance of public and private, the confidence that you have a place in the world—or a place and the world.

  In the years since the Reagan Revolution, this basic condition of well-being has become unavailable to millions in the United States: the unhoused and the imprisoned. The former live in an outside without access to the inside that is shelter, home, and stability; the latter live in an inside without access to the outside that is liberty. Both suffer a chronic lack of privacy and agency.

  Their ranks are vast, including 2.2 million prisoners and, at any given time, about h
alf a million people without homes. These people are regarded as disposable; prison and the streets are where they’ve been disposed. Prison and the streets: the two are closely related, and they feed each other in the general manner of vicious circles. Prisoners exit with few resources to integrate themselves back into the world of work and housing, which sometimes leads them straight onto the street. People living on the street are often criminalized for their everyday activities, which can put them in prison.

  In San Francisco, local laws ban sitting or lying down on sidewalks and sleeping in public parks, as well as public urination and defecation—doing the things you do inside your house, the things biology requires that we all do. Many people who lack homes of their own are invisible, living in vehicles, staying overnight in workplaces, riding the night bus, couch surfing, and looking like everyone else. The most devastated and marginalized are the most visible. Even they try to keep a low profile: I walk past the unhoused daily, seeing how they seek to disappear, situating their camps behind big-box stores and alongside industrial sites, where they are less likely to inspire the housed to call for their removal.

  The young can’t remember (and many of their elders hardly recall) that few people were homeless before the 1980s. They don’t grasp that this problem doesn’t have to exist, that we could largely end it, as we could many other social problems, with little more radical a solution than a return to the buffered capitalism of forty years ago, when real wages were higher, responsibility for taxes more equitably distributed, and a far stronger safety net caught more of those who fell. Homelessness has been created by federal, state, and local policies—not just by defunding mental-health programs, which is too often cited as the cause. Perfectly sane people lose access to housing every day, though the resulting ordeal may undermine some of that sanity, as it might yours and mine.