LESSONS FROM A KILLING

Changing News Coverage of Police Brutality in San Francisco

In the fall of 1996, the San Francisco Police Review Commission held
hearings on the death of Aaron Williams, an African-American man suspected
of a $50 pet-store burglary who died in police custody. According to
witnesses and police sources, a team of police led by Officer Marc Andaya
repeatedly kicked Williams in the head and emptied three canisters of
pepper spray into his face. Despite the fact that Williams was having
difficulty breathing, the police finally hog-tied, gagged and left him
unattended in the back of a police van, where he died.

My organization, the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and our project,
Bay Area PoliceWatch, organized around this case for two years. This is our
experience changing news coverage around the case and how it affected our
organizing campaign for justice for Aaron Williams.

In its first set of hearings, the police commission ruled that no
"excessive force" was used, that the cops' role in beating Aaron Williams
was fine. The police commission was able to get away with such a ruling
because of the abysmal media coverage leading up to the initial hearings on
the case.

The few news reports were ridiculously biased. The coverage made it look
like Aaron Williams hadn't been beaten to death, but died because of a
strange new malady, "sudden in-custody death syndrome" That's how the San
Francisco Chronicle (4/8/96), the Bay Area's leading daily newspaper,
described a new phenomenon in which victims
of police beatings inexplicably die, but it's somehow not a result of those
beatings.

As often happens in coverage of police brutality, news reports during the
hearings focused on the background and alleged misdeeds of the victim. In
Williams' case, coverage focused on his alleged drug problem and referred
to him as a parolee.

There was virtually no mention of Andaya's record, which included 3 prior
complaints of police brutality, five lawsuits alleging racism and abuse,
and one other death of an unarmed man of color.

Examining the Message

After we lost the initial hearings, we brought in We Interrupt This
Message, a media activist organization that specializes in working with
groups that face media stereotypes and biased coverage. They asked us to
tell them what our initial media message and organizing goal had been.

Our initial media message had been "the San Francisco police department is
out of control." Not even the progressive press wanted to cover the story
with that message.

The problem was that people had to be completely critical of the San
Francisco police department in order to agree with us that police officers
shouldn't have beaten an unarmed man to death. People in the neighborhoods
with experience with police brutality might agree with that message, but
what about people from communities which rarely suffer from police
brutality?

What we were really asking people to agree with us about was not
particularly radical at all. Most people would agree that cops shouldn't
beat unarmed people to death. So we focused on that. And we had defined our
goal justice for Aaron Williams and his family. As a media message, that
was too vague. When Kim Deterime from Interrupt asked us what "justice for
Aaron" would look like, what we really wanted the police commission to do,
we said, "Fire Marc Andaya." She said, "Say that."

Like most grassroots groups, we knew exactly what our organizing goal
was-wejust didn't think we could say it to the media. We were thinking of
media as separate from, rather than in support of, our organizing effort.

Strategic Challenges

The next step was to look at the strategic media challenges ahead. Given
the biased media coverage so far, the Ella Baker Center faced three
challenges in achieving good coverage for the second round of hearings on
the case We had to rehumanize Aaron Williams, shift the focus from Williams
to Andaya and establish institutional accountability for what had happened.

We had to rehumanize Williams because he had been demonized in the press.
We had to rehumanize Aaron so people who had heard about the case through
the media could see him as something besides some crackhead parolee who
happened to die, and the loss to Aaron's family was felt by the community
as a whole.

Next, we had to shift the frame and the focus of the story from the
background and history of Aaron Williams, the victim, to the past misdeeds
of Marc Andaya, the perpetrator Shifting the focus of coverage to Andaya's
background and record-which is where it should have been in the first place
- - was key to changing public opinion on the case.

Finally, we also had to establish institutional accountability for the
police brutality that was happening in our communities. We had to put a
name and a face to who was responsible for what happened in that
neighborhood. And we needed to turn the tables and hold the police
commission accountable for letting cops get away with murder

Sharpening the Target

We had to find a way to talk about Marc Andaya that let people know he was
a racist cop and a bad apple from the beginning. So we called him a name
that was becoming synonymous. with racist cops: We said, "Marc Andaya is
the Bay Area's Mark Fuhrman."

Since the police commission had the power to fire Andaya and they were
appointed by the mayor, we came up with a much sharper target: Mayor Willie
Brown's police commission. We started putting it in terms of "Willie
Brown's police commission protecting the Bay Area's Mark Fuhrman." "If
Willie Brown's police commission doesn't fire Marc Andaya, Aaron Williams'
blood is on Willie Brown's hands."

Our media strategy became integrated with our organizing campaign. Our
primary tactic was to stop business as usual at the police commission,
bringing 100 to 200 people to every police commission meeting and having
the media there to broadcast it all. This constantly ratcheted up the
pressure on the police commission, and on Mayor Brown to do something about
the commission.

Brown, who had been in the background, was suddenly in the hot seat.
Andaya, who had been presented as this nice police officer who had
unfortunately had somebody die on him with some strange malady, became what
he was, which was a menace and a terror to the African-American community.
And Aaron Williams, who before had been some black crackhead who happened
to die, became a valued member of a community and part of a family that was
devastated by his loss.

Victory for the Community

In a four-week period, we got close to two hours of television coverage.
The story went from being buried to the front page. And it made the front
page repeatedly for several weeks. We also shifted the coverage
dramatically. Both the San Francisco chronicle and the Examiner
editorialized against the police commission for refusing to fire Marc
Andaya. The coverage's focus went from Aaron Williams' background to Marc
Andaya's record to the institutional factors which allow police brutality
to happen-proving that you can use an individual story to talk about
institutional issues.

But more importantly for our communities, we collapsed the police
commission. By the time the campaign was over, all three of the
commissioners who had initially sided with Andaya had been removed or had
quit because of the tidal wave of media and community attention. And as a
result of unprecedented community pressure, Marc Andaya was fired.

On the day that Marc Andaya was finally kicked out of the police
department, the major stations interviewed Williams' aunt, her voice
broke when she said, "Now I can go to my nephew's grave.and tell him we got
some justice for him." For Aaron Williams and the thousands of police
brutality victims across the country, reframing media is a prerequisite to
any kind of coverage is justice.

Van Jones is director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in
Cal46rnia. He recently won the Reebok Human Rights Award for his efforts on
behalf of police brutality victims, including Aaron Williams.

Checked-by: jwjohnson@netmagic.net (Joel W. Johnson)