Former Oceanside city attorney recalls own wrongful arrest

“The first thing I said to myself is that I might die tonight.”

Duane Bennett, former Oceanside city attorney, was explaining to an online audience for Miracosta College recently what it was like facing six armed police officers — two pointing shotguns and four aiming revolvers at him.

Bennett’s presentation attended by about four dozen people was part of the college’s observance of Black History Month, which concludes today.

“WHO I was did not matter,” Bennett, who considered himself part of law enforcement as deputy district attorney in Riverside County at the time, said in a later interview. “WHAT I was (a Black man) mattered,” he said.

And that’s why Bennett accepts opportunities to speak on “Black Lives Matter.”

He also agrees that “all lives matter” and not only condemns wrongful police action but has worked with police departments in a half-dozen counties to up their training so such incidents as his don’t continue to occur.

It’s why — on his own time while in Oceanside — he worked with the legal team making a civil rights case against officers who beat Rodney King in 1991, the best-known police brutality incident of its era.

Now, Bennett can reel off the names of so many others: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner.

In his instance, in 1985 — two years after he had passed the California Bar and become an attorney — Bennett was driving from a Bible studies class in his native Los Angeles to his mother’s home near the University of

Southern California.

He wondered why a patrol vehicle was following him and then all of a sudden police cars, lights ablaze, forced him to stop.

Bennett couldn’t imagine why — he’d been obeying traffic rules and speed limits, no loud music was playing and all he had in his car were his Bible and a candy bar. But he was told to get out of the car, handcuffed and shoved to the pavement face-first.

And there were all those guns trained on him.

He figures whomever the police were looking for had been found because he was released after being arrested. No one had heeded his request to check his identification and find out “here I was a criminal prosecutor — on their side.”

Bennett filed a claim against the Los Angeles Police Department, which denied it. No one ever apologized for the incident, he said.

He became Oceanside assistant city attorney in 1992 and city attorney in 1998.

Bennett left the city job in 2003 to become general counsel for the Port of San Diego, a position from which he retired in 2012.

However, the word “retire” definitely is relative here.

Bennett’s never ceased his private practice. He has taught at the California Western School of Law and also teaches at the University of California San Diego.

When his Miracosta audience asked what can be done to change things, Bennett responded by telling it to “recognize that we are not without power,” especially at the local level, and that power, he said, involves going before such entities as the city council and the county Board of Supervisors.

“As a former city attorney,” Bennett said, “I can tell you that the council does listen.”

“I encourage, implore people to know what their rights are” and to file complaints, he said.

“America is a great idea,” Bennett said, but “when did it ever achieve what it is supposed to?” and he answered those who would espouse to “make America great again” by asking when Jim Crow segregation laws in the South ever were so great.

“The criminal justice system has never worked consistently for Black people,” Bennett said, but “still, we cannot quit trying to seek justice.”

He advised “to keep the dialogue going.”

An audience member said he liked Bennett’s “not-too-political” approach, not asking for defunding or doing away with the police.

“Black Lives Matter . ... All lives should matter, it just does not seem as though they do,” Bennett said.