Hundreds March to Honor Black Lives, Call for Reparations, & Demand the City Get Cops Off the Street
After honoring victims and survivors of police violence, a community procession made its way to Mission Police Station and spelled out their demands to City officials: defund, disarm, and disband SFPD and the Sheriff’s Department.
San Francisco, CA — On Thursday, September 3, 2020, approximately 300 community members gathered at Mission High School to honor Black lives and demand that the City rise to the moment by defunding the San Francisco Police Department and Sheriff’s Department, getting cops off the streets, and refunding the budget savings to the Black community. The rally and procession culminated in a street painting event, during which activists painted “DEFUND SFPD” on the street directly in front of the Mission Police Station.
During the rally, community organizers lambasted the budget approved last week by the Board of Supervisors’ Budget and Appropriations Committee, which would leave the SFPD and the Sheriff’s Department with nearly $1 billion in their total budgets and would not cut a single officer or Sheriff’s deputy. Activists also challenged the Supervisors to ensure that Sheriff’s deputies are removed from City hospitals and that Black communities receive more than the $120 million promised by Mayor London Breed over two fiscal years.
“Every day that the Supervisors refuse to defund SFPD, they are prioritizing police employment over our lives,” Alex Karim, a Defund SFPD Now organizer, told a lively crowd in front of Mission High School. “They have the power to change the system, but instead, they bend over backwards to preserve a system that harms us—a system that protects white property-owning interests at the expense of marginalized people.”
The action was held a week after a Kenosha police officer shot Jacob Blake and only days after the publication of allegations that a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy who fatally shot Andres Guardado in the back was seeking initiation into a murderous Sheriff’s gang. While the SFPD has not recently killed anyone, their own data shows that officers continue using force against people of color at a rate of almost 50 percent. The Sheriff’s Department has also faced accusations that deputies are harassing people of color at City hospitals. Additionally, nearly half of San Francisco’s jail population is Black, despite Black residents totaling less than 6 percent of the City’s population.
About Defund SFPD Now
The Defund SFPD Now campaign is a joint project by the SF Afrosocialists & Socialists of Color Caucus (Afrosoc) and the Justice Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), SF. This campaign is one part of the collective pursuit to defund SFPD into abolition, and ultimately abolish the prison industrial complex in San Francisco and beyond.