SFPD Officers Accused of Beating Man Into Near-Coma After Ignoring Racial Threats

Public defenders say police severely beat a Black man last year and the DA’s office tried to suppress evidence, including footage of the white resident who called SFPD threatening to stab him and using racial slurs in front of officers.

The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office released police body camera footage Thursday showing officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway, and Gabriel Rivera punching 33-year-old Kevon Gibson in the head, pulling his hair, and kneeling on his neck as they struggled to handcuff him in a Sixth Street residential hotel on August 17, 2025, as KQED reports.

Gibson repeatedly begged the officers to listen to him and said he couldn’t breathe. By the end of the encounter, blood was streaming from his forehead.

Gibson was taken to the intensive care unit, where he was intubated and placed in a medically induced coma for several days. He was then transferred to San Francisco County Jail, where he spent a year awaiting trial on felony charges of resisting arrest. According to Mission Local, his public defenders, Bonnie Chan-Silen and John Paul Passaglia, said he was temporarily blind in one eye and continued urinating blood for nearly a year after leaving the hospital.

The confrontation began after a white resident of the building called police, claiming Gibson had threatened him and displayed a gun. But Gibson’s attorneys say the caller had threatened Gibson earlier that morning, and body camera footage shows the man directing the “N-word” at Gibson in front of officers during their first visit to the building.

The man also threatened to stab Gibson, saying he would “stick this knife into his Black ass” and “slice and watch him bleed everywhere.” Per KQED, police did not pursue those threats, according to Gibson’s attorneys.

When officers returned to the apartment building around 1 pm, body camera footage shows them asking Gibson’s roommate to open the door so they could speak with her and her “giant ass boyfriend,” as Mission Local reports. One officer threatened, “Ain’t nobody gonna do shit if I kick this door down,” before officers encountered Gibson as he exited the building’s elevator.

Although they initially told him he was not under arrest, they immediately grabbed him, leading to the violent struggle captured on body and surveillance cameras.

According to KQED, officers subsequently claimed Gibson had bitten and punched them during the arrest and attempted to injure one officer’s thumb. Passaglia said video shown at trial contradicted those accounts. A jury acquitted Gibson of all three felony counts of resisting arrest in August 2026, but convicted him of misdemeanor resisting arrest and being a felon in possession of a firearm.

“The jury knew these were lies because they were shown a volume of various videos that collectively showed unequivocally that not one of those incidents happened,” Passaglia said.

In press release following Gibson’s conviction, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins described him as actively resisting officers who tried to search him for weapons, but made no mention of the beating that left him in a medically induced coma, per KQED. Public Defender Bonnie Chan-Silen said Jenkins “villainized Mr. Gibson as a Black man with a gun.”

Gibson’s attorneys said the gun charge will be appealed because he had only temporarily taken possession of the firearm to protect himself from the man who threatened him, per Mission Local. The public defenders also alleged that prosecutors offered Gibson a plea deal that would have dismissed the felony resisting charges but required him to sign a waiver that could undermine future civil claims against the officers. Gibson rejected the deal and went to trial.

“Prosecutors often charge and overcharge our clients with resisting arrest as leverage to punish our clients and then excuse the police officers’ actions, and then misrepresent the true nature of these incidents,” said Public Defender Mano Raju, per KQED. “All of this is a disservice to our clients, a disservice to the community, and a disservice to the pursuit of justice itself.”

The defense further accused the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office of trying to keep jurors from hearing the full story. According to the public defenders, prosecutors asked the court to exclude the audio from the arrest footage and to prevent jurors from seeing the caller’s threats and racist remarks. As Mission Local reports, they also alleged that investigators interviewed Gibson while he was still recovering from his medically induced coma.

The San Francisco Police Department said its Independent Investigations Bureau determined the officers’ use of force was justified under California law, while an administrative investigation remains underway, according to Mission Local.

The Public Defender’s Office reportedly plans to file a complaint with the San Francisco Department of Police Accountability and ask the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to decertify Caraway, Conway, and Rivera. Raju said the Public Defenders Office was seeking accountability for alleged police violence and prosecutorial misconduct.

The Gibson case comes amid other allegations of excessive force by SFPD. In a separate 2024 incident, the city’s Department of Police Accountability found that officers used excessive force against SF resident Matthew Ludwig after mistakenly identifying his car as stolen because they entered the wrong license plate number, smashing his window and pepper-spraying him before realizing their error. Ludwig later died by apparent suicide after losing his car and RV and becoming homeless following the incident, as SFist reported in August.

SFPD is also facing a federal lawsuit over a raid at a West Oakland affordable housing complex in May, in which more than 20 plainclothes officers smashed through the building’s glass entrance doors with a battering ram. The lawsuit alleges excessive force and other civil rights violations.

Comments