Jetty Etty shares her story about our local police

Presenter: Jetty Etty knows a few things about corruption in the police department. At a press conference last Friday, Jetty Etty:

Jetty Etty: First time I ever got in trouble in the city of Eugene, I had like 260 days (I’m not going to get the numbers right), there were like 27 court appearances, 10 rescheduled jury trials, and I essentially won that case.

I had to plead guilty to one charge. That was when I disrupted the City Council meeting because I’ve talked to the city, I’ve emailed these people, I’ve emailed the police, explaining to them the cruelty that I’ve experienced and witnessed out on the streets while doing homeless advocacy work, and no one took me serious, they just kept criminalizing me over and over.

And it’s just, you know, I’m glad this footage came out because now people are like, ‘Oh, wait, maybe Jetty isn’t just this crazy lady constantly yelling about the corrupt Eugene Police Department.’ Like, I’m not crazy, you guys. Like, I am fun crazy, but I’m not, like, crazy crazy. I don’t know. I don’t know where I’m going with this. 

But I’m just saying that, you know, EPD, I’ve been here for four years. I’ve never experienced a police force like this. My dad was a police officer. I grew up, he was a detective. He was on K-9 squad (dog for the bomb squad), he was retired as a sergeant after 30 years. My dad was a bad cop and I grew up watching police brutality. 

And I know all about these guys. I know how they work. I know their games. They don’t work on me, which I think is probably one of the reasons they dislike me so much.

I wouldn’t take a plea deal. I said ‘No, okay take me to trial.’ And they said, ‘If you do not take this plea deal we are going to add on two more charges because you (they said this to me) you yelled down the tracks to people to run because the police were there.’

And I said, ‘I would never tell people to run from the police. I know what you guys do.’ And I kept saying this over and over. They tacked on the two charges and then there was a Brady issue because they didn’t actually review the bodycam footage until I went and sat in the judge’s chamber with my lawyer and we reviewed it together and sure as —, I did not tell anybody to run. 

So this is a common thing in at least the municipal courts where that prosecutor does not review the footage. Be smart. Make sure you review your stuff. Get your discovery. Shut up and fight it. Don’t ever say, don’t ever plead guilty. Say ‘Not guilty!’ Get your discovery. And who knows how things are going to go? 

Presenter: Release of the bodycam video could have far-reaching legal effects. Jetty Etty:

Jetty Etty: All the people of color who have been arrested by this officer, Officer Martin Siller, they should have the information, the footage released to them and any, like, for their cases. So I think it should be put out to the public. 

I think that we need to have a lot of community input in our policing. I think police need to be trained by Black anti-racist trainers and people of color, they need to do more training with hands-on with the people who are being affected in that community. That’s where the training needs to come from.

Let’s go out and feed some homeless people, boys—because I could teach you guys a lot of stuff and train you on a lot of things that’s appropriate and what’s not. You know, there are people who have this hands-on experience and we should have a say in who we’re paying to do stuff in our community. So that’s what I think we should do. 

But I think this is a bigger conversation and there’s a lot more people that should be involved in it. Anyone who wants to bring their voice to the table should, and they should feel safe doing so.

You know, we’ve been criminalized over and over in the city for doing their job, for doing the police job, for doing what the city should be funding and that’s taking care of people, right? 

As far as EPD and ICE working together, there are multiple people out doing Migra Watch and doing Cop Watch and doing all kinds of things to help keep our immigrant and migrant neighbors safe and keep our eyes on them because a lot of people disappear. 

So we’ve caught EPD working closely with FPS, SRT, ICE, all of the above, all of these people who land under the umbrella of the Homeland Security Department, right? Which is essentially who’s kidnapping our neighbors.

We’ve caught EPD and ICE discussing police work in the department, the Eugene Police Department’s parking space.  We’ve watched, we’ve had EPD come out and violently push us back so that they can escort DHS with a little ICE truck in the middle of them getting them out. Do we know if somebody was in that vehicle? We don’t. Not yet. We’re waiting for the reports to come back, but we will find out.

We have a lot of video footage watching the two departments really work together. And also SPD—Springfield Police Department—they love getting in on this s—. They love using their tools. They love getting involved. They like to be in the action. Yeah, they work together. 

Presenter: She was at the Federal Building the night Tim Lewis was arrested. Jetty Etty:

Jetty Etty:  So on Jan. 27, down at the old Federal Building, there was an (Oregon) Nurses Association vigil for Alex Pretti, the man who was shot in the streets and killed by ICE. 

The mayor came. I went up to her. I said, ‘Hey, Mayor, you know, be careful. Do you see all of this white powder on the ground? This is from pepper ball bullets they’ve been shooting at us all day. And in fact, Mayor, where you’re standing is apparently trespassing because they’ve arrested people. So you might kind of move off this part of land.

‘And I would ask you to stick around after this vigil and see what they do, what kind of force that we see here tonight, not just with FPS, not just with the federal government, but with our local police department because they love helping each other even though they say they don’t. They do.’

The mayor left and FPS and SRT—FPS is Federal Protective Services and SRT is Special Response Team, aka ICE—and they came out and they started gassing nurses, doctors, civilians, people there mourning the loss of another nurse in our country, a person in our country who was killed by these fascist ICE police or whatever they want to call themselves. 

There was somebody, I found a 911 call that was put in that night. Somebody was hit down at the old Federal Building because when they start gassing they push people from the courtyard from the Federal Building into 7th Street and they don’t redirect traffic.

So on Jan. 30 I started seeing this again and I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want somebody to get hit again and so what did I do? I started flagging down police officers that were driving around the the block over and over and asking them, ‘Please, please do something to redirect traffic.’ They literally wouldn’t acknowledge my existence. 

So I called the nonemergency police line and I said, ‘Hey, can you guys please redirect traffic so nobody gets hit? So civilians who are driving their cars on 7th Street, who have nothing to do with the protest, don’t have the trauma of hitting somebody and killing them or being gassed in their car, possibly with their children in it.’ Then I got told, ‘We don’t have resources for that.’

So I called my lawyer at the CLDC and I said, ‘What’s going to happen if I take this into my hands and I block traffic?’ Because—think about me—I don’t break the law. My dad was a cop. I have anxiety about that. I’m not, I’m not a criminal on purpose, I just get in trouble for doing good s—. I guess I’m notorious for it.

So I went around and I started looking for cones. I started looking for anything I could to block the traffic to keep the people in this community safe because the police once again has failed. And they’re failing us. And I was willing to take that risk because I thought, you know, I’d rather get in trouble than watch somebody get hit and killed or, you know, whatever else could happen.

So I couldn’t find any cones that weren’t like actually being used and I’m not going to take things that are like there for important reasons because that’s how I am. So I called Tim (Lewis) who lives in the Whiteaker and if anyone’s been down here much, you know what they got all over the place. And I thought, that is the place to grab some barricade stuff. 

So Tim and Ben, these local heroes, grabbed some stuff to bring down so that I could block you know traffic and keep people safe. And EPD caught them with the dang drones and loading the stuff or whatever they did. And essentially it led to us getting this bodycam footage. 

And it’s like, ‘Oh, you guys are criminalizing us, and it sure did turn around on you, didn’t it? Wow, karma. Thank you, bro.’

I don’t know. I just, I think there’s so many conversations. We can look into so many of the police officers that I personally have experience with. There are multiple officers that I can name. I can tell you all about them. I could show you videos, because I record everything.

This is not new. And Chief Skinner’s aware of the bad apples because I report them all of the time. I’ve put five reports in with the auditors or the civilian board or whatever it is. And they say, ‘Oh yeah, there’s problems here. Let’s forward it.’ Well, guess who it gets forwarded to? EPD. And EPD’s like, ‘There’s nothing happening here. Everything’s cool, dude.’ That’s BS.

They are always covering each other’s tracks because they don’t want to look bad. They think they’re the good guys, right? But they’re not. They’re the bad guys. They are helping kidnap our neighbors. They are breaking sanctuary laws. We could keep going about all of the abuses and things that we see, right? 

And so I just think like, ‘Hey Chief Skinner, you want to sit here and act like (former EPD Officer) Siller was never a bad guy—he went seven years with not a single complaint, he didn’t do anything wrong. 

Why don’t you release all of his record? Like, let us know if people made reports about him. Let us know if he got in trouble. Prove that. Maybe that’s the first step of getting the community to actually start to believe the BS that you’re trying to put out here with your tears crying all night last night. Bro, that was like manipulation crying.

I don’t know. We have seen how many different communities that this video has affected and so for the last few days I have been reaching out to different community members: Black community members, LatinX community members, LBGTQIA community members, the unhoused community members, just as many people as I can think of that are normally affected by the police. 

And I had a pretty large list of people who said, ‘Yeah, we want to come down and speak.’ But over the last 24 hours, they’ve said, ‘Listen, I just don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe coming out and speaking.’ And so a lot of them didn’t. And I just think that’s just an example of and proof of how scary this police department is, that these people know how dangerous these guys are and and the corrupt things that they will do to them.

And so I’m proud of them for speaking. I hope that we can create more conversations and feel safer with each other and not fear the men and women that we pay to serve and protect us. So, that’s all.

Presenter: Members of the media asked about the police auditor and Civilian Review Board.

Jetty Etty: Because they’re not an independent auditor from the Eugene Police Department, it needs to be reformulated, refigured, and maybe having no EPD to make the final decision on these reports that are getting investigated. And maybe having people who are out on the streets experiencing this on the review board. Also, checking this stuff out might be a good idea. It needs to be truly independent.

Presenter: Jetty Etty shares her stories about the Eugene Police Department as activists seek to build a movement for change. Share your stories by emailing news@kepw.org.