Marin, where is the justice?

I didn't watch it until last week, the video of the brutal and bloody arrest of 37-year-old Julio Jimenez Lopez last July in the Canal neighborhood.

I watched it right after San Rafael city officials said they will not release the results of an eight-month internal investigation into the incident yet, if ever, despite numerous rallies and demands for justice.

The video felt all too familiar, just like every other video we've seen in recent years of unnecessarily violent arrests by police of Black people and other people of color, sometimes leading to death—what's been called an “urgent public health crisis” and one that is grossly underreported. It's distressing to see it happening in our own backyard.

We know public intoxication and open alcohol bottles are not unique to one age group, skin color, ethnicity or gender. And yet.

If the story somehow escaped your radar, here's what went down: Jimenez Lopez and two other men were allegedly drinking beer in the street when two police officers approached them. It's illegal to be intoxicated in public in Marin or to have open alcohol containers. Things escalated quickly when Jimenez Lopez was told to sit down but also provide the police with identification, which was in a back pocket. He ended up bloody and bruised and, in according to a claim he filed against the city, with a broken nose and traumatic brain injury.

When I watched the video I couldn't help but be reminded of my first reaction after hearing about the out-of-control party of more than 100 teens in Mill Valley last November, where there was public intoxication and violence against a sheriff's deputy, who was injured after being hit in the head by a can of beer. I remember thinking at the time, what if the party had taken place in other parts of the county, like the Canal or Marin City, and the teens weren't overwhelmingly White? Then I answered myself — I bet it would have ended up with a lot of arrests, perhaps bloody arrests, perhaps worse.

Instead, there was just one citation at the time against the teen who organized the party and who was released to their parents. Since then? Nada, despite a promise by Mill Valley City Manager Todd Cusimano that, “there will be more arrests moving forward.”

True, the two events are not quite the same. Sheriffs and po

lice were overwhelmed by the unruly teens, who were “yelling profanities, trying to instigate them … really in their face, taking an aggressive stance with our officers,” Cusimano said. They did the best they could at the time.

That was not the situation with Jimenez Lopez, who didn't yell, curse, jump on a police vehicle, throw a beer bottle at them or even take an aggressive stance (although the officers have

stated that Jimenez Lopez attempted to put one of them in a chokehold, but that is not visible in the video). He just kept saying, “I not do nothing.” Although he was arrested and charged, the case was dropped after the video emerged. Because it's telling.

It's a reminder that throughout America's history, “police have been used to enforce racist and exploitative social orders that endanger the safety of the most marginalised groups in society” and that continued police violence and racism in policing are “current

manifestations of a system that was built to uphold racial hierarchy for most of the USA's history,” a comprehensive study, “Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980—2019: a network meta-regression,” published in the Lancet finds.

And now here we are — with no answers in Jimenez Lopez's case or in the Mill Valley teen party case.

Just the bitter taste of racial injustice.

We know public intoxication and open alcohol bottles are not unique to one age group, skin color,

ethnicity or gender. And yet.

One protester in support of police transparency in Jimenez Lopez's case told the IJ that she sees parents drinking booze in parks, or tailgating at Little League games, or while trick-ortreating.

For the record, I have, too, and I'll bet many other Marin residents have. “And what protects these people?” she asks. “The color of their skin and the neighborhoods that they live in.”

Maybe that's why we see “Raising the Bar: Keep Youth Events Substance

Free” signs posted on athletic field fences throughout Marin. They're not directed at the kids, FYI.

Shortly after the Mill Valley incident, the

IJ's editorial board applauded Cusimano's stance and demanded accountability. It seemed like we were going to get it.

“Both Mill Valley police and the sheriff's department need to be public in detailing their progress. Making the issuance of citations and arrests public is important in getting the message to local families that, yes, this criminal behavior took place in their town and, yes, there are consequences.”

There are consequences, or at least there should be. And those consequences should be equal no matter the color of one's skin. And there must be transparency.

I wonder when — or should I say if — that will indeed happen.