Rae shares their story about our local police

Presenter: At a community conversation in the Whitaker’s Scobert Park May 15 convened by Blair Hickok, Jetty Etty, and Tim Lewis, another story from the community about our local police.

Rae: I go by Rae. I wanted to speak because I know that this is not a problem that is unique to Eugene. When I was growing up, I lost my father, the man who raised me, to police violence.

In 2003, he was murdered by the South Lake Tahoe Police Department and no one was fired. We settled out of court and there was a family that no longer had a father because of the egos of police officers.

This is a repeated pattern. We just saw another friend that was arrested from a potluck because we were being harassed by a known local weirdo and and right-wing guy who likes to put people’s identities out online.

We were trying to have a chill family potluck on May 1 and people had escorted him from the park and subsequently we had a friend who was a young trans woman who was picked out of a crowd, surrounded by nearly 20 police officers, and arrested.

Very scary situation. I have had several friends who are transgender who’ve been arrested. They are put in solitary confinement when they are brought to the jail. We didn’t get her out till 11 o’clock at night. And while we were all there to support and everything, I can’t imagine that not being a very traumatic experience.

And this follows a pattern. Same thing happened May Day last year where they isolated a trans woman out of a crowd and drug her aside and arrested her. And it took hours and hours to get her out of jail.

So we’ll be following up with more from that investigation because I can’t imagine the kind of conversations that were being had on bodycam footage prior to deciding to go isolate this person and arrest them.

I think that we’ve known for a very long time, that none of this is new. We had this fight in 2020. And I think our community has a responsibility to protect each other. We protect us. And we’ve been doing that.

And I think that this is an opportunity for people to demand not only the reinstitution of the crisis programs that Eugene led the nation in for decades—and things like CAHOOTS have been modeled in other places—where we want to see more trained crisis workers responding to things instead of people who are showing up armed and ready to be violent.

Eugene has cut a tremendous amount. Nearly all of the crisis programs have been cut down to where now there’s no 24-hour crisis line. There’s no CAHOOTS in Springfield six days a week. And these things are happening while more and more money is going to the police department and these institutions that are not being held accountable for how our community’s resources are being used.

So I hope that together we can help fight not only for the accountability of the police department, but also just a better world where we don’t need cops in our neighborhoods.

Presenter: That was Rae speaking, as local activists request a conversation about our local police.