SF Chronicle | Laugh at the viral Taylor Swift video, but problems with Alameda sheriffs are no joke
July 10, 2021
By Cat Brooks
Last week, activists supporting the family of Steven Taylor — who was killed by San Leandro Police on April 18, 2020 — caught Alameda County Sheriff's Sgt. David Shelby openly admitting to blasting a Taylor Swift song in order to stop them from posting an encounter with him online. Shelby hoped YouTube’s terms of service, which don’t allow posts with copyrighted music, would shield him from accountability.
Whoops. The video went viral, instead.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office became a global punchline in the aftermath, but the department’s consistently egregious behavior is no laughing matter. And efforts like Shelby’s to avoid public scrutiny are hardly the worst of it.
The Sheriff’s Office and its deputies run the Santa Rita Jail, located in Dublin, California. With the closure of Oakland’s city jail, Santa Rita is one of the only incarceration facilities in the Bay Area and serves as a holding cell for people awaiting trial - sometimes for years on end. With approximately 2,200 inmates, it is one of the largest jails or prisons in America.
50 people have died at Santa Rita since 2014. For perspective, that gives Santa Rita a higher death rate than Los Angeles County’s infamous jail system, the largest in the country.
The sheriff’s office says the majority of these deaths were suicides or caused by “pre-existing medical conditions.”
The streets have a saying too: “If it happened inside, it wasn’t suicide.”
DuJuan Armstrong was doing “weekend time” at Santa Rita under a court order on a Friday afternoon in 2018. He was due to come home on Sunday, but died of asphyxiation after sheriffs used a spit mask and body restraints on him during a mental health crisis. A district attorney’s official report contradicted the initial story of the sheriffs — including that DuJuan died of a drug overdose. Sheriff’s spokesperson Sgt. Ray Kelly claimed DuJuan was in conflict with the sheriffs at the time he checked in, but the report revealed he did not begin having difficulties until 24 hours later. When Dujuan’s mother, Barbara Doss, finally got access to her son’s body, it demonstrated signs of extreme violence, including inexplicable bruises.
Christian Madrigal was having a mental health crisis. His family wanted him to return to a mental health facility, but he wouldn’t go. So they called the police for help. Instead of a mental health facility, he was taken to Santa Rita Jail, where he was chained to a cell door — in violation of the facility’s restraint policy. The official story was Madrigal strangled himself with the chains the officers used to restrain him. He died later at Eden Medical Center in Hayward. Madrigal had a lacerated spleen and liver and bruising all over his body, signifying he was possibly beaten while in custody.
Candace Steel was incarcerated in Santa Rita jail while she was pregnant with her baby girl. When she went into labor, guards ignored her screams. She gave birth, alone, on a dirty concrete floor with nothing but her jail jumpsuit to wrap her newborn child in.
Fernando Soria was incarcerated in Santa Rita when he apparently angered the guards. They responded by soliciting another incarcerated person to “gas” him, according to a lawsuit. Gassing is the process of spraying another human being with urine and feces. Soria was then not allowed to shower for days. His inmate attacker was rewarded with extra food and special clothes.
In April, the U.S. Department of Justice released a report stating there was “reasonable cause” to believe that conditions at the jail violated both the U.S. Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act. Rather than providing people in crisis with appropriate mental health services, the jail uses solitary confinement (which the United Nations dubs torture), or ships them to other punitive facilities.
Activists and impacted family members have been screaming to no avail that Santa Rita is a torture chamber and needs to be shut down. But the deaths continue, with two suicides already this year.
The department has been allowed to act with impunity under the watch of Sheriff Greg Ahern because no one holds him accountable. The sheriff is an elected position. He isn’t hired and can’t be fired. The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is supposed to watch over his budget — a whopping $500 million — but rather than use those purse strings as a lever for accountability, the supervisors continue to funnel money into a corrupt, violent and often-deadly institution.
The good news is that Ahern is up for election in November of 2022 — and for the first time in decades, he has a challenger. I don’t know much about his opponent JoAnn Walker. This is not an endorsement. But I do know that jail isn’t supposed to be a death sentence. The families of DuJuan Armstrong, Melvin Stubbs Jr., Christian Madrigal, Jessica St. Louis and the dozens of others who have died, been tortured and maimed, deserve justice.
Prior to 1989, any community member could run for sheriff, but for the last 31 years, only individuals with law enforcement experience have been able to seek the seat — effectively locking out community members, reducing or eliminating the number of challengers and gridlocking reform efforts. Senator Scott Weiner is attempting to return qualifications to pre 1989 standards with SB 271 but that legislation has become a two-year bill and won’t return until the next legislative session.
Until then, it seems the best chance for reform is for Ahern to lose a seat he clearly doesn’t deserve to sit in.
Cat Brooks is an award-winning actress, playwright, the executive director of the Justice Teams Network, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and the co-host of UpFront on KPFA.