Berkeley Police Chief Andy Greenwood’s Incendiary Remark About Shooting BLM Protesters
By Paul Lee, member, the Friends of Adeline
On June 9, 2020, during the height of the nationwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minn., Berkeley, Calif., Police Chief Andrew Greenwood appeared before the City Council.
Putting His Gun in His Mouth
Council member Susan Wengraf asked if his department had “any alternative tools” to using teargas if protestors turned violent. Greenwood had mentioned that protesters at a recent Oakland BLM demonstration had thrown incendiary devices at police.
“Firearms,” Greenwood replied, leaning forward with a straight face and without skipping a beat. “We could shoot people.”
Video of the meeting, which has been excerpted on the Friends of Adeline’s YouTube.com channel, shows Wengraf and Mayor Jesse Arreguín shaking their heads, council member Cheryl Davila (who has since lost her seat) saying something inaudible and raising an arm in apparent exasperation and other members, including Ben Bartlett, looking either shocked or stupefied.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apy0zl9kOQM&feature=youtu.be (beginning at 5:02)
You could watch the entire meeting here:
Retreat
Greenwood quickly claims, “I don’t mean to be callous,” and later offered a tearful apology.
“I’m tired,” he said, “as are my people. I should have been more mindful of that, and taken a moment. I should have said: We have nothing else, in the sense that gas and smoke are the last tools, the last resort that we have. There has been so much misinformation propagated today, without challenge, and you heard me answering out of some frustration from that. I apologize for answering that way. I am deeply sorry for the distraction.”
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/06/13/marchers-in-berkeley-demand-resignation-of-police-chief
Too Little, Too Late
But it was too late. The damage was done. The reaction was swift and furious.
At a subsequent council meeting, member Davila charged that Greenwood’s comments were “not merely a gaffe, but inexcusable.” She put forth a no-confidence motion, which was not seconded by any of her colleagues. Speaker after speaker during public comments condemned the council for failing to consider it.
“This is someone who told the residents of Berkeley that he’s literally going to shoot us,” Berkeleyan Mae Massaci said.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/Berkeley-council-bans-police-from-traffic-15410326.php
Rising Demand
On June 9, black Berkeley High School students, already activated by the escalating BLM protests, organized a peaceful march of hundreds of students, parents and community members from San Pablo Park to the high school, where, carrying a large portrait of George Floyd, they painted the words “Black Lives Matter” on a 100-feet long mural on Allston Way.
Four days later, the Rev. Michael McBride, pastor of Berkeley’s progressive The Way church, led a march demanding that the chief resign. The marchers knelt for eight minutes — the time that it took for Floyd to die from mechanical asphyxia — in the middle of the intersection at University Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Way.
They chanted, “Black Lives Matter,” “I can’t breathe” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Chief Greenwood has got to go.” The protesters then clustered in front of police headquarters, where they sang, prayed and demanded that the Berkeley Police Department be defunded. Giving voice to a fast-rising sentiment among Berkeley’s black and brown residents and their allies, McBride declared:
“Andy Greenwood has lost my confidence and I believe the confidence of many, by either jokingly, or out of his exhaustion, sending a message that it is even appropriate to speak about shooting protesters.”
Veteran activist Moni Law, a member of The Way, whose young son had been racially profiled, confessed, “I was stunned” by Greenwood’s comments. “I was crying.”
https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/06/13/marchers-in-berkeley-demand-resignation-of-police-chief
Word of Greenwood’s comments, and the shocking video of him making them, spread throughout Berkeley’s black and brown districts and among their allies, hardening a demand for his resignation into a one for his termination.
Our World
This reaction confused most white Berkelyans, particularly the wealthy, white newcomers, who see the chief and his force as (their) guardians and protectors.
However, the lived experience of black and brown Berkelyans makes them draw the opposite conclusion. Their historic relationship with the police has been one of control and containment — as if they are domestic enemies who need to be subjugated.
Therefore, when Greenwood moaned that he and “my people” — thus explicitly separating his department from the community that it’s supposed to serve and protect — were tired, frustrated and the targets of “misinformation propagated … without challenge,” black and brown Berkelyans, who carry the blood-chilling burden of calibrating their every word and gesture in police encounters to save themselves from being harassed, insulted, arrested, beaten or killed because they’ve been racially stereotyped and profiled, collectively exclaimed: Welcome to our world!
Where most white Berkeleyans saw an unfortunate slip of the tongue, black and brown Berkeleyans and their allies saw a conscious, consistent and disturbing pattern of statements (and lack of statements) and comments (and lack of comments) through which Greenwood has telegraphed messages that make them feel less rather than more secure, more rather than less vulnerable and a commander who talks at or about rather than with them.
https://www.friendsofadeline.org/chief-greenwood-its-time-to-go/
A Forensic Examination
To them, Greenwood’s City Council comments alone justify his resignation or termination. Black and brown Berkelyans and their allies noted the following:
1) His use of the phrases “this side” (1:24) and “our people (4:53), clearly meaning his side of the “thin blue line,” which again demonstrates his us-versus-them mentality.
2) His description of the Oakland protests at which incendiary devices were hurled at police by a handful of demonstrators as “riots” (1:54), which is a term that’s been anathema to black and brown people and their allies since the 1960s because it suggests violence without reason or justification.
Since that time, advances in social science have documented the fact that the violence of poverty, substandard education, economic exploitation, political marginalization, social ostracism, police abuse and the countless micro-aggressions experienced by black and brown people every day breed eruptions of violence — usually directed against themselves.
The term “riot” also removes their lived experience from the oppressive political context in which such “sociological explosions,” as Malcolm X perceptively described them, occur. Thus, black and brown people, understanding what motivates such disorders, long ago reclaimed the dignity of fighting back by calling the one at Watts in 1965 the “Revolt,” the one at San Francisco’s Bayview-Hunters Point and Fillmore District in 1966 the “Uprising” and the ones at Newark and Detroit in 1967 the “Rebellions.”
It’s likely that Greenwood would not have used the term “riot” to describe the use of incendiary devices by white European demonstrators fighting against totalitarianism. His comments make it clear that, despite his education and high-minded rhetoric, he has no comprehension of the fact that the mistreatment of black and brown Berkeleyans makes them feel that they’re also living in a police state.
3) His use of the term “forces” (2:10) to describe other police departments and the phrase “ced[ing]” ground (4:45), which suggests a military mindset.
4) His remark that teargas was used at the Oakland demonstration to “drive people back to push them out of the range of fire of throwing things” (2:45), which utterly fails to distinguish between the majority of protestors, who were peaceful, and the small number of those who were not, although most black and brown people believe that the distinction between “good” and “bad actors” is merely used to divide the antiracist movement.
Greenwood made no mention of using de-escalation tactics or of opening up lines of communication with the peaceful protesters, who, in point of fact, often point out and attempt to isolate those who use violence, whether they are genuinely outraged or are opportunistic right-wing instigators.
But this was impossible because Oakland’s and Berkeley’s police department have never made any good faith, sustained efforts to cultivate trust in black and brown communities. If they had, they would’ve removed most of the reasons for the demonstrations and, even if they did occur, the police would have at least some allies rather than just adversaries.
5) His broad description of the Oakland protestors as “a large, hostile crowd, where malicious actors are hijacking a demonstration, are committing acts of violence against the police by throwing things,” including, he alleged, Molotov cocktails (3:17), which casts all demonstrators as deserving of whatever force that the police might use against them.
6) His false description of Molotov cocktails as being “lethal force” (3:41), which, if anything, is more incendiary than the devices themselves and is cruelly absurd when one remembers who has guns that they’re legally empowered to use in any way that they see fit and are rarely held accountable for.
7) His description of teargas as “non-lethal force” (3:49), which ignores that the fact that it’s often used, including in the Oakland demonstrations, as a tool of terror and could also cause lasting physical damage.
8) His snooty objection to the “narrative” that the Berkeley Police Department was used to disperse peaceful protestors with teargas as being “absolutely, unequivocally not true” (4:09), which is starkly revealing about his blindness to the real victims of false narratives — narratives that are often used by the police to abuse, beat and kill them.
9) His after-the-fact apology for sounding “callous” (5:26) and “overly dramatic” (5:40), which suggests that he knew that his words were threatening — something that black and brown Berkeleyans have taken note of during his entire tenure.
To fair-minded people, what more evidence is needed that Greenwood is out of touch, is ignorant of the social dynamics that are a tinderbox waiting to explode, is protecting his turf rather than the communities that have historically been targeted by his department and that he needs to go — now?
Watch for yourself Greenwood’s full exchange with the City Council, then you decide. Given his statements and actions, and the racist culture of the department that he’s upholding and defending rather than uprooting and recreating, was he serious when he mused about using lethal force against protestors, then or in the future?
If, in fact, he was joking, who did he imagine would find threatening the use of lethal force against protestors funny?