A national reckoning over race and police violence erupted at BART this week, where the swift fallout from one board director’s comments showed how raw the issue has become — and how much it has haunted the Bay Area transit agency.
It began during a budget discussion at the transit agency’s board meeting Thursday, during which several people called in urging the board to defund its Police Department. Though BART has no such plans, the idea still captivated people, given that it’s catching on with other departments around the country. One commenter decried BART police as murderers, recalling the 2009 fatal shooting of Oscar Grant on the platform of Fruitvale Station.
That rankled Director Debora Allen of Clayton, who called the statements “outrageous and false,” and accused the callers of being politically motivated. “The definition of murder is the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another. It’s just simply a false statement,” she said.
Later in the discussion, Board President Lateefah Simon angrily struck back, characterizing Allen’s comments as “dog whistles,” and calling them “consistent with the political agenda that uplifts structural racism.”
In a tweet, board member Janice Li called Allen’s comments “vicious, toxic, and racist.”
By the end of the day, the directors’ comments had gone viral on Twitter, triggering a backlash so vehement that Allen deleted her Twitter account by Friday afternoon. An impersonator created a parody account with Allen’s picture and a similar handle, using it to denigrate Allen and express support for Black Lives Matter.
These comments from my colleague and fellow BART Board Director Debora Allen are vicious, toxic, and racist.
And as I said, her threat to silence the public is unconscionable.
I reject these comments and call on other BART board directors to do so. https://t.co/BpzJHPirOR
— Janice Li (@JaniceForBART) June 11, 2020
As bystanders continued to weigh in on social media, divisions on the board seemed to harden. Allen defended her own comments Saturday, saying it’s unfair to make sweeping generalizations about an entire department.
“The death of Oscar Grant was a horrible incident that left a big black mark on BART, and BART has been working for a decade to overcome that,” she said. “I won’t allow these types of stereotypes .... imply(ing) that BART police officers individually are all murderers.”
Simon was not impressed.
“I’ve been dealing with her (Allen’s) racism for quite some time,” she said on Saturday. “There are folks who are racist everywhere. But we have a budget to pass.”
The conflict spoke to a deepening conversation about racial injustice and policing — one that’s not just focused on whether officers should be charged, but on the language that politicians and media use to talk about these incidents. Video evidence of racism is toppling celebrities and other powerful figures. Newsrooms are debating whether to capitalize the word “black,” and discarding euphemisms like “racially tinged” when “racist” is more appropriate.
This shift is important to activists like Cat Brooks, founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project in Oakland.
“We have to start calling things what they are and stop trying to downplay,” she said.
For BART, the painful conversations began 11 years ago, when a police officer shot Grant in the back as bystanders watched from a crowded train, filming the incident on cell phones. It was the most seismic moment for police accountability since the 1991 beating of Rodney King. Observers posted the footage of Grant’s death to YouTube, where it went instantly viral — the first in a string of cell phone-recorded police killings that would convulse the nation again and again, leading up to the killing of George Floyd.
Grant’s violent death prompted protests and civil unrest in downtown Oakland, where residents smashed windows and set cars ablaze. But it also led to a series of reforms at BART, including mandatory police body cameras, the creation of a citizen review board to investigate complaints of misconduct, and the hiring of an independent police auditor.
The shooting still shadows BART’s police department. Even as it triggered policy changes, it raised questions over whether the transit agency’s police officers should carry arms at all. And Grant became an enduring symbol, commemorated in the movie Fruitvale Station, a mural painted on the station’s wall and a small strip of road that officials christened Oscar Grant Way.
Over the years Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson, became a familiar presence at BART board meetings.
“My son was killed at BART,” she said. “And I’m forever going to be part of BART.”
The scars run deep, and policing remains a controversial topic at BART as the agency grapples with conflicting public perceptions. Many riders called for more law enforcement after the 2018 stabbing of Nia Wilson, but others saw the police as heavy-handed and racially biased, particularly after a video emerged last year of an officer handcuffing a black man for eating a sandwich.
Before COVID-19 hit the Bay Area, BART intended to beef up its police force, hiring 19 officers a year for five years. The board abandoned those plans as it faced losses of hundreds of millions of dollars. It now has 178 sworn officers and a proposed budget for fiscal 2021 of $91.4 million.
Simon maintains a regular dialogue with Police Chief Ed Alvarez, who has committed to build trust with the public.
Whether the board directors can repair their own differences is another question.
“This is a board with strong tensions,” Director Bevan Dufty acknowledged. “Debora Allen — she always wants to be a contrarian. But there’s a time when it crosses the line.”
Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan
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BART director's defense of police spurs backlash; one board member calls comments racist - San Francisco Chronicle
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