After a Sunday community meeting at City College's Southeast Campus, the local Black Lives Matter movement appears to have officially come up with a list of concrete demands for the SFPD. The meeting, as the Chronicle reports, attracted "at least 100 people," and was organized by 24-year-old Etecia Brown, a fourth-generation resident of Bayview/Hunters Point.
Brown, a graduate student in public policy at NYU, spoke passionately at the gathering, and told the Chron that she wants "the community to develop a self-help philosophy so they can understand that they don’t have to be part of an organization or be college-educated to protect and invest and rebuild their community." But there were speakers at the gathering who expressed cynicism about having attending such meetings and made such demands of the SFPD before, and still it seems as though nothing has changed.
Police chief Greg Suhr and Mayor Ed Lee, to whom the demands were addressed, were not in attendance, but attendees were encouraged to tweet at Suhr in order to be heard.
And, sadly, the meeting occurred just hours before police at Mission Station shot a 32-year-old man who threatened officers with a replica weapon or BB gun, and he died from his injuries.
Among the demands:
- Hire more people of color on the police force.
- Stop arming police with military-grade weapons.
- Record all officer-involved shootings and assign a special prosecutor to each case.
- More sensitivity training for officers
- Agree to meet with the community.
Elsewhere in the city, over the holiday break, teacher librarians at SF public schools have put together an online compilation of resources related to the Black Lives Matter movement to help educate young students about the context and issues behind all the recent protests. As the Examiner reports, the resources can all be found here on the SFUSD's LibGuide, and they include everything from grand jury documents to videos and lesson plans.
