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ALAMEDA — Public anger over Alameda police detaining a black man as a suspicious person because he was dancing in the street continued to simmer Thursday afternoon, when protesters demanded that city funds get shifted from the police department and into social service programs.
About 250 people gathered outside the red-brick police station at Oak Street and Lincoln Avenue, many of them teenagers who sat on the sidewalk, chanted and listened to brief speeches calling for changes in how police interact with people of color.
Others stood across Oak Street outside the main branch of the Alameda Free Library, temporarily closed during the shelter in place.
Many held up homemade signs. Some read “Black Lives Matter.” One read, “The law is lawless,” while another, “No justice, no peace.”
“Our primary goal today is to defund the police,” said Nairobi Taylor, 15, a ninth-grader at Alameda’s Encinal Junior & Senior High School, who helped organize the peaceful protest with friends on social media. “We want change to happen.”
There was no visible police presence at the demonstration. Passing vehicles tooted horns in solidarity as they went through the downtown intersection, as people spoke on the steps of the police department.
City officials had installed a temporary fence around a memorial to fallen Alameda police officers, located outside the building, apparently to stop graffiti or vandalism.
“We are calling for a redirection of funds (from police budgets),” said Javi De Leon, 25, an Oakland resident and student at San Francisco State University. The money, he said, should go toward programs that support the homeless, health care and education.
Thursday’s demonstration came after a cellphone video of a May 23 encounter in the 2000 block of Central Avenue between Alameda police officers and Mali Watkins, who is black, went viral.
A woman called police about the man because he was dancing in the street. “Obviously something is very wrong,” the woman told a dispatcher. “I am just worried, that’s all.”
“I’m getting my exercise,” the man told one officer who asked him if everything was OK, according to one body-worn camera recording. “Is there a problem? This is where I live.”
The officer asked the man: “Do you feel like hurting yourself today?”
The man told the officers to have a good day and indicated that he wished to move on, but one officer replied, “No. Listen, at this point, you’re detained.”
When the man tried to walk toward the center of the street, officers grabbed him by his wrists, moved him to the side of the road and eventually forced him to the ground. He was handcuffed and placed in a patrol car.
The 44-year-old man was cited for misdemeanor resisting arrest, according to City Manager Eric Levitt.
Nearby residents, who were outside and watched the encounter, shouted to police to leave the man alone, saying he lived in the area and was just working out. An officer told them police were responding to “a call for service.”
“It is in defunding the police that we can invest in true community safety,” the Rev. Emily Lin of Alameda’s Twin Towers United Methodist Church, located just blocks from the police station, told those gathered for Thursday’s protest.