Palo Alto police suit exposes rift over racial issues
For four months, a vibrant Black Lives Matter mural adorned the pavement outside Palo Alto City Hall, drawing visitors from all parts of the Bay Area. It also caused pain, suffering, fright and shame for five police officers, according to a lawsuit they filed against the city and Police Department on June 4.
News of the lawsuit cast a national spotlight on a Silicon Valley suburb mythologized for garage startups, a prestigious university and Eichler homes on leafy streets. But the police officers’ complaints revealed something that longtime residents already knew: Palo Alto struggled to confront its own racial issues long before the May
2020 murder of George Floyd and the mural that city leaders commissioned as their response.
“The lawsuit didn’t surprise me,” said the Rev. Kaloma Smith, chair of the city’s Human Relations Commission.
Smith said he began noticing undertones soon after he moved to the South Bay from New York eight years ago. Peninsula towns “have a conservative streak,” he told The Chronicle. “There are remarks and statements that people make, particularly to those of us who are African American in the public space ... referring to people as ‘You’re very articulate, you’re very wellspoken, you really have a great grasp on life.’ Like our bona fides aren’t just enough to show up.”
Palo Alto’s attitudes on race took a more public turn last June, when the City Council approved the temporary mural on Hamilton Avenue.
The city spent $20,000 on the artwork, paying 16 artists $700 stipends to each paint one letter in the “Black Lives Matter” slogan. Their 245foot composition included two images that incited the officers’ litigation: a portrait of former Black Liberation Army member Assata Shakur on the second E, and a portion of the New Black Panther Party logo on the R.
The New Black Panther Party, which is not connected to the original Black Panther Party, has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The story surrounding Shakur is more complicated.
Shakur was convicted of killing a state trooper during a 1973 shootout in New Jersey, though questions linger over the degree of her involvement and whether she had surrendered without ever firing a shot.
“When you look at history, Assata Shakur means different things to different people,” Smith said. “Particularly, there’s controversy in the Black community of her being railroaded on the charges she got convicted of. We for years have seen Black and brown individuals railroaded in the courts. It’s one of the biggest challenges around systemic racism.”
Palo Alto’s Police Officers’ Association objected to both images. The five officers claimed in their suit that they were “forced to physically pass and confront the mural and its offensive, discriminatory and harassing iconography every time they entered the Palo Alto Police Department.”
The department sits at the opposite side of the City Hall complex from where the mural was located. It has two vehicle entrances half a block from the artwork.
Palo Alto officials removed the mural in November 2020, noting their obligation to schedule road work before the winter rains and prepare for heavier traffic downtown, which would have damaged the art. In a Nov. 2 staff report to the City Council, City Manager Ed Shikada said the city had shifted focus to a permanent art installation next to City Hall in King Plaza, which would celebrate the city’s dedication to race and equity. The plaza is named for civil rights leaders the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King.
In April, the Public Art Commission delegated $50,000 to the King Plaza installation, and began drafting a call for artists.
The lawsuit, which seeks more than $25,000 in damages, came six months after the mural’s removal. A Los Angeles attorney who represents the officers, Matthew McNichols, said the plaintiffs are not challenging Black Lives Matter as a social movement, but setting limits on iconography that they believe creates a hostile workplace.
But one of the artists and several community leaders who supported the project argued that the Shakur and New Black Panther imagery presented no harm to police.
“It felt like they had a magnifying glass, and they’re looking for something to be triggered by,” Richard Hoffman, one of the mural artists, said of the police officers. Hoffman, a sheet metal journeyman from San Jose, painted the “K.” Within its contours he fit eight blackandwhite images of people killed by police.
To Smith, the pastor and Human Relations Commission chair, the lawsuit seemed tonedeaf, given the uprisings following Floyd’s murder and the mural’s symbolism as a “significant expression” of support for racial justice.
City officials declined to comment, citing active litigation. Others said the dispute reveals an ambivalence around racial and social equity that goes back years.
When LaDoris Cordell was elected to the Palo Alto City Council in 2003, she began pressing for an independent police auditor, contending that the department needed more oversight. Cordell, who is Black, was troubled by what she characterized as a frequent sight: white officers standing over a Black or Latino person whom they had detained at the curb, in a city that is less than 2% Black and 6% Latino.
The year Cordell ran for office, Palo Alto was jolted by an encounter that quickly turned violent: Two police officers stopped a 59yearold Black motorist, pulled him out of his car for not showing his hands, and struck him with batons and doused him with pepper spray. The man was never charged with a crime; the officers pleaded no contest to disturbing the peace, an infraction.
The council voted to create the auditor position in 2006, contracting with a Pasadena firm to do the work and enabling it to review — but not investigate — complaints against the department. But trust in the police began fraying two years later, when thenChief Lynne Johnson made public comments that seemed to encourage racial profiling.
Johnson stepped down amid protests. By 2019, the Police Department was still under scrutiny for its treatment of Black people. In one instance described in the auditor’s report that year, an officer stopped a Black man for riding the wrong way down the street on a bicycle. The officer ultimately Tased the man, a use of force that the auditor found reasonable. However, the report questioned the officer’s repeated use of profanity and the term “bro,” as well as his “puzzling” decision to move closer to the man.
Raven Malone said she encountered the city’s conflicted attitudes about race when she ran for City Council last year, in the heat of the social uprisings. Malone is Black and an engineer, and was narrowly labeled a Black Lives Matter activist by news outlets throughout the campaign. She supports the movement but had a broader platform that emphasized infrastructure and housing for all.
As the race wore on, she endured other forms of derision. A newspaper editorial described her as “articulate.” At one point, someone covered one of her lawn signs with a racist “White Matters” message. Smith condemned it, but Malone said she was disappointed by the muted response from other city officials.
“They just brushed it under the rug,” she said.
After losing the election, Malone moved to Mountain View. “In Palo Alto you can’t have a conversation about the police, and you can’t talk about the racist and segregationist housing policy,” she said, referring to political leaders’ reluctance to build multifamily housing.
One particularly potent symbol of exclusivity was Foothills Park, a 1,400acre expanse of wooded ridges and valleys that was closed to nonresidents for 55 years. It took a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union to pressure the City Council to open it last November. Cordell, who was one of the plaintiffs, saw this as a glimmer of progress.
“This was all in the aftermath of Black Lives Matter,” she said. “Let’s be inclusive; let’s allow people from around to be a part of our community.”
Months later, police officers filed their mural lawsuit, which is now pending in Santa Clara Superior Court. It coincided with another development: the expansion of the auditor’s scope to inspect a broader range of incidents, including any altercation in which an officer draws a gun.
Cordell, a retired superior court judge and former independent police auditor for San Jose, said she’s grown accustomed to her city’s jagged path toward racial progress.
“Palo Alto is fits and starts,” she said.