Guest Opinion | Dr. Jane Ward: It’s Time For the City of Pasadena to Hold A Town Hall Meeting on Police Violence

One of the first things I teach my sociology students to do is develop critical thinking skills, to break the habit of black and white, and either/or thinking. But this kind of simplistic thinking was on full display at this week’s Pasadena City Council, when Mayor Victor Gordo demonstrated that he could not distinguish between two different issues of great relevance to the community. One is the issue of police violence. This is when publicly funded law enforcement officers turn against the community they are supposed to keep safe, and instead they harass, beat, shoot, and kill their own residents. A second and distinct issue is violence among residents of a community, or among residents across communities. This is also a crucial issue, but it is a different issue, because when the state turns against its citizens—like the Pasadena police did against Anthony McClain—this means that all community members are implicated. We are electing and paying for the very people who claim to keep us safe to actually hurt us, with impunity.

Mayor Gordo stated at the meeting that if anti-police violence activists were sincere in our efforts, we all would have attended the City’s recent meeting—a meeting also attended by the police—about community-based violence in Robinson Park. Setting aside the fact that many of us did attend virtually but were not given the opportunity to speak, these are two different issues that can and must be addressed differently because they have different causes, effects, and histories. Just as it would be callous to hold a meeting about fighting pancreatic cancer and then question the sincerity of breast cancer activists for not attending, to question racial justice activists for being persistent in our efforts to address the City’s own violence is unconscionable. The City would prefer that we focus solely on community violence, and stop talking about its own violent police who shot and killed Anthony McClain, Kendrec McDade, and JR Thomas. We applaud our neighbors who are working together to address violence in our communities. And, we also need the City to hold a Town Hall meeting on the topic they have been desperately avoiding, which is the violence that Pasadena’s Black residents have experienced at the hands of the City’s police. I urge the City to hold that meeting. We will come. Hold that meeting.

This week, Mayor Gordo told racial justice advocates that we are outsiders who do not represent the community he serves. This leaves us to wonder: Did he pay any attention to the enormous crowds of neighbors who assembled in La Pintoresca Park after Anthony McClain’s murder? Does he think someone bussed all of those Black and Brown folks in from Sierra Madre to protest? Does he think the filmmakers of Thorns on the Rose—a new documentary film about 40 years of anti-Black violence in Pasadena—are actually residents of Silverlake? Does he not know that a racial justice coalition representing dozens of Pasadena-based organizations meets at Harambee Ministries, the Flintridge Center, and other places in our neighborhoods to talk and strategize about the state violence that the City refuses to address? Of course, these are Pasadena residents who also care about gang violence and all forms of violence (sexual assault, intimate partner violence, and so on). But the City of Pasadena has more than one type of violence it needs to address, and it’s time the City addresses what it has too long ignored.

I now live down the street from where Pasadena Police beat Chris Ballew, though before that I lived in a rental house in the 900 block of Worcester Ave in Pasadena. We had to move because we couldn’t afford to buy a house in Pasadena. Now, our street in West Altadena is heavily patrolled by police. There have been two shootings directly in front of my house, with bullets ricocheting off our next-door neighbor’s front porch and my wife and I ducking below our window to make sure we weren’t hit. We have an 11-year-old son, and of course we’d like our family, our street, our neighborhood to be free of gun violence. But one thing we all know – my family, my Black neighbor whose house was hit, and my Black neighbor who was shot at and ran from the gunfire—is that the sheriff and the Pasadena PD do not protect us from gunfire. They come after the guns have already been fired, and they later ask to increase their budgets so they can buy more military-grade weapons and surveillance technology, and then they subsequently ramp up their harassment of Black men in the neighborhood. They use community-based violence on my street as justification for their expansion, when what we actually need are community-based resources and unarmed crisis response teams.

It is time for the City of Pasadena to hold the Town Hall meeting on police violence, to address the issue we are actually raising. I look forward to being there.

Professor Jane Ward, PhD
Co-Founder, Showing Up for Racial Justice – Altadena