Julia Sherwin is the lawyer representing the family of Mario Gonzalez, a 26-year-old man who died in police custody in Alameda County, California.
“His death was completely avoidable and unnecessary,” she said, adding, “Drunk guy in a park doesn’t equal a capital sentence.”
She’s quite right that his death was completely unavailable and unnecessary. If no one called the police, they wouldn’t have come. If the police ignored the two 911 calls, they would never have encountered Gonzalez. If there was an alternative to the police, such as mental health professionals, and they were dispatched instead, maybe this wouldn’t have happened. Or maybe it would have. Or maybe Gonzalez would have harmed the mental health people, Or maybe not. But there were two 911 calls.
One man says Mr. Gonzalez has been loitering for about a half-hour and appears to be breaking store security tags off alcohol bottles. Another man says Mr. Gonzalez is talking to himself at a fence near the caller’s backyard. “He seems like he’s tweaking, but he’s not doing anything wrong,” he says. “He’s just scaring my wife.”
Police were dispatched and found Gonzalez. They tried to identify him, spoke with him quite gently, but he was less than cooperative, which is no surprise given his mental state. What happened then was sufficient to push a Washington Post crime beat reporter to the edge.
The Mario Gonzales video is horrifying from start to finish. From officers hassling him for … hanging out in a park to trying to id him to do an outstanding warrant search as a pretext for arrest to the five minutes they suffocate him.https://t.co/Cp13wtXtDT
— Tana Ganeva (@TanaGaneva) April 28, 2021
One can debate whether a drunken guy in a park deserved to get hassled. If you want to use that park for your children to play, you might see the drunken guy as a problem that needs fixing. Some people are of the view that parks aren’t built so people have a place to get drunk and hang out. Others may disagree. If you’re considering this only after the drunken guy is dead, you might be a sudden supporter of letting drunken guys do whatever they want without interference.
Officer McKinley sought to identify Gonzalez. He was polite, never once calling him “motherfucker” or threatening to “light him up.”
“Here’s the plan,” the first officer says. “I’ve got to identify you, so I know who I’m talking to — make sure you don’t have any warrants or anything like that. You come up with a plan, let me know you’re not going to be drinking in our parks over here. And then we can be on our merry way.”
“Merry-go-round?” Mr. Gonzalez replies.
The two officers then ask Mr. Gonzalez for identification and tell him to keep his hands out of his pockets before they begin trying to detain him.
“Can you please put your hand behind your back and stop resisting us?” the second officer says after several minutes.
What happens then is a matter of interpretation, whether he fell to the ground and took the cops with him or whether they took him down intentionally.
The officers eventually push Mr. Gonzalez to the ground facedown and handcuff him. “What are we going to do?” the first officer asks. “Just keep him pinned down?”
“It’s OK, Mario,” the officer later says. “We’re going to take care of you.”
Gonzalez was held down, prone, for about four and a half minutes. There was no knee on his neck, the causal contention in the Chauvin trial.
“We have no weight on his chest, nothing,” the second officer observes, pointing to Mr. Gonzalez’s back. As the first officer tries to adjust his position, the second says: “No, no, no. No weight, no weight, no weight.”
Seconds later, the officers notice that Mr. Gonzalez has become unresponsive. They roll him onto his side and then push him onto his back and begin chest compressions after checking for a pulse.
Did any of this have to happen? Of course not. Should it have happened? That’s debatable, but from the perspective of what the police were doing at the moment, not in light of the ultimately outcome since nobody knew beforehand that Gonzalez was about to die. It’s invariably easier to recognize things that could have, should have, been done differently after the fact. Was this outrageous police harassment, excessive force, misconduct at the time it happened?
Many will be unable to look at this, knowing that it ended in death, and assess whether the conduct of the officers was wrong in the moment. Even more will argue that the question isn’t whether their conduct was unlawful, or in conformance with police policy and procedures, but “necessary.” Could they have avoided any physical confrontation at all? Why couldn’t they just leave him alone in the first place. Why is a drunk guy in a park a problem at all? Why did two people call 911 about this guy and bring the police to ultimately end in his death?
And that’s where the second part of Sherwin’s assertion comes into play.
“Drunk guy in a park doesn’t equal a capital sentence.”
As a general concept, this is important to consider. Any time conduct is criminalized, or to be addressed by police, there is a possibility that it will end in the use of force, and that means it could end in the ultimately use of force, execution. But is that what happened here? Clearly, Gonzalez died. Did the cops execute him? Did they impose a capital sentence?
“Alameda police officers murdered my brother,” [Gerardo Gonzalez] said.
There was death. Why is not yet known, though it’s not exactly a huge leap to somehow connect death to the actions of the officers. In the case of George Floyd, the assumption was that Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck was the proximate cause of death, and the medical testimony persuaded the jury of the causal connection beyond a reasonable doubt, while the defense failed to produce evidence of sufficient persuasiveness to counter that conclusion. But that’s not what happened here.
Did this conduct reflect a reckless indifference to human life? Every death in police custody is a problem, as well as a tragedy and a failure of the system somewhere. But even the best cops, the best system, will fail at some point because human beings invariably find a way to push it beyond its limits. There was no need for Mario Gonzalez to die. That doesn’t make this murder. Rest in peace.
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