Latinos shot by police at high rates locally. Fresno police say they don’t discriminate
The video of a police officer pressing down on the neck of an unarmed Black man for nearly nine minutes brought Roger Centeno to tears. It hit too close to home for the 56-year-old Fresno man.
It’s been nearly five years since a Fresno police officer shot and killed his mentally-ill brother, Freddy, in their southeast Fresno neighborhood on a sweltering September afternoon.
The 12-second body camera footage shows Officer Zebulon Price firing multiple rounds at the 40-year-old man walking down Orange Avenue, unarmed and shirtless, over what he thought was a gun in Centeno’s pocket that turned out to be a black spray nozzle.
He was shot seven times and died 23 days later.
“The first time I saw my brother’s video, I had a nervous breakdown, and I cried every day for months,” Centeno said. “Every time that I watch the video, it just kills me.”
Since 2015, 22 people have been killed by law enforcement in Fresno County. Half were Latino, according to data from the state’s Department of Justice.
While none of the officer-involved deaths triggered national outcry like George Floyd’s death, many local police reform advocates say Fresno’s Latino and Black residents have faced the same systemic challenges for decades.
While some Fresno police leaders have pushed back against the idea that the department has a history of discrimination, they say they are open to community-involved discussions about police reform.
Still, critics say sweeping changes within local law enforcement are long overdue and hope the city’s newly appointed police reform commission will reshape policing and force the institutional changes they say other efforts failed to address.
Latino, Black people shot disproportionately
As protesters call for an end to systemic racism, Centeno and other Latino residents in Fresno hope the renewed attention shines a light on what they believe are discriminatory tactics and violent practices used by law enforcement to target Latinos.
Though Latinos make up 39% of California’s population, between 2016 and 2018, they accounted for 46% of fatal police encounters in the state — just slightly behind the rate at which Black Californians were killed by police per capita, according to an analysis by CalMatters.
In Fresno, the deaths of several unarmed Latinos made local and regional headlines in recent years, as men like Centeno’s brother and others such as 16-year-old Isiah Murrietta-Golding sparked outrage from advocates.
The Fresno Police Department has accounted for more than half of all officer-involved deaths for the last five years in Fresno County. For 15 years between 2001 and 2016, according to an ACLU report from 2017, the Fresno County District Attorney’s Office did not file criminal charges against an officer involved in a shooting among the 146 recorded.
“The challenge for persons of color goes hand-in-hand between communities that identify as brown or Latino and Black because the problems that impact Black residents also impact brown residents — it just may look a little bit different,” said Sandra Celedon, president and CEO for Fresno Building Healthy Communities.
In many ways, local law enforcement agencies have enforced practices that are used against Latinos, Celedon said, pointing out the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office’s partnership with Immigration Customs Enforcement and the local police department’s disproportionate number of arrests of Latino residents.
From 2005 and 2014, Latinos accounted for 51% of felony arrests in Fresno, while Black residents accounted for 20%, according to the civil rights organization the Advancement Project California.
Celedon said racial disparities in policing reflect national trends, with Black and brown residents facing a more significant percentage of fatal encounters.
“All in all, 71% of all felony arrests in the city of Fresno for that time period were either Black or brown men,” she said. “And in Fresno, there’s an added layer — if you’re undocumented ... that puts you in a really precarious situation because then you end up most likely in the hands of ICE.”
Latino residents in Fresno County are also most likely to be killed by police, said Kevin Little, a civil rights attorney in Fresno for more than 25 years.
“It’s overwhelmingly communities of color on the receiving end of use-of-force by law enforcement,” he said, adding that a language barrier between a white officer and a Latino resident — where a person wouldn’t understand how to comply — could increase that individual’s chances of being killed.
“In many of the incidents where I represent people, officers don’t even attempt to communicate with a person who speaks little English or no English when it comes to excessive use of force incidents,” Little said.
Police force needs more diversity, critics say
As of 2019, the Fresno Police Department was made up of more than 800 law enforcement personnel, including officers, sergeants, lieutenants and cadets, according to police records obtained by The Bee. About 45% of the officers identified as white, 39% Hispanic and 6% Asian. Only a handful of officers were of another minority, including 5% who identified as Black, while 4% either identified as “Pacific Islander” or did not specify their race.
About 76% of the police force was male.
While Latinos make up more than half of the population in Fresno County, Black residents only make up about 6%, despite being stopped more frequently and killed more often than white residents, according to the ACLU.
But Latinos in Fresno represented nearly 60% of all officer-involved shootings, while Black residents represented 22%.
“I understand the pain and suffering that my Latino brothers go through,” said Rev. Floyd Harris Jr., one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement in Fresno. “The problem is, the police department today — the cops who come into our communities — do not want to talk to people like me or brother Centeno. Our voices, as brown and Black people, are not heard.”
Fresno’s stark racial divide has nearly 80% of its Black and brown residents concentrated in poverty-stricken areas in the city’s western and southernmost corridors. An analysis by The Bee showed that in west Fresno, where more than half the residents live below the poverty line, Latinos make up about two-thirds of the area and Black people about one-fifth, according to 2018 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The community wants to be seen, they want to be safe,” Ralphy Avitia, a former member of Fresno’s Brown Berets, said. “They would prefer to have some sort of law and order. The sad part is many of them have come to fear calling the police because ... it ends up that somebody is shot.”
Fresno police deny discriminating
Law enforcement officials say the statistics don’t tell the full story.
Authorities say officers are more likely to experience an escalated encounter in a high-crime area where a threat is perceived.
“There is no other profession that is as scrutinized (as) police officers,” said Todd Fraizer, president of the Fresno Police Officers Association. “We do not target race or racial groups. We respond to crime trends.”
Fraizer said Fresno police staffing levels are “the same in the poorer areas of the city as they are in more affluent areas.”
In addition, some districts can have more residents of “one culture,” said Fresno Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Jeff LaBlue, but crime trends are “not usually based” around where people live.
Longtime police chief and Mayor-Elect Jerry Dyer recently participated in an online discussion hosted by The Fresno Bee.
Dyer said officers patrol some communities more frequently because violent crime and gang activity occurs there. But reducing crime “comes at a cost,” he added, because enforcing the law exposes the police department to the public’s scrutiny.
“You can reduce crime to a very low level, but it comes at a cost,” Dyer said. “You’re out there making traffic stops and you’re out there in a suppression mode. The more you’re involved in those types of enforcement activities, the more likely you are to offend members of the public and lose the community’s trust.
“So if you back away from those efforts, oftentimes you end up maybe seeing more crime in your city,” he added.
Dyer and other leaders have pushed back against racial profiling and brutality criticisms and denied the department discriminates.
“We are not saying they (discriminatory practices) exist per se,” LaBlue said. “We are open to conversation and reform to represent our public.”
Dyer in June said he firmly believes the Fresno Police Department does not discriminate.
“I believe if I would have overseen a police department that had discriminatory practices, I would not have been the police chief for 18 years,” Dyer said in June. “What we have to do as a society is filter out what’s true and what’s not true, what is rhetoric and what is fact ... we’ve lost sight of the good things that have occurred in the police department.”
Dr. Francine Oputa, director of the Cross Cultural and Gender Center at California State University, Fresno, said Dyer’s comments reflected his privilege. For police practices to change, it’s essential that Dyer acknowledge inequities, she said.
“To say that you have an organization as large as the police department and say there have been no discriminatory practices — it’s frightening,” she said. “But if we come in saying that there are no problems, we’ll get nowhere.”
Recent calls to “defund” or “abolish” law enforcement have pushed for more independent citizen oversight committees and more robust accountability measures. Police employee unions have also faced renewed criticism over the role these lobbying groups have played in reform efforts.
Fraizer said any criticism that the Fresno police union has stood in the way of meaningful reform is “ridiculous.”
“All we want is to ensure our officers receive due process and not terminated for making split-second decisions in life-threatening situations,” he said, adding that some proposed reforms could “jeopardize officer safety.”
Calls for police reform
The Fresno police union will play a role in the city’s newly formed reform commission. Fraizer is among those appointed to the commission, chaired by Oliver Baines, a former police officer and ex-city councilmember. The 37-member committee also includes residents, prominent Black leaders, local advocates, and other police officials.
The commission comes on the heels of a string of public demands led by the NAACP. The group has urged the city to end qualified police immunity, improve diversity within the department, and called for more transparency surrounding use-of-force incidents in general and shootings in particular.
After Centeno’s brother was killed, local police reform advocates sought substantial change, but say those efforts fell short. They’re hoping for significant progress this time around.
“We’ve seen more change in a few days of protests than we have in decades,” Little said. “I am hopeful that we will have continued involvement, anger, and protest by the energetic folks here in Fresno who will insist that the police department be accountable — that’s the only way.”
“It won’t be fast,” Centeno added. “But, it will happen.”
This story was originally published July 1, 2020 at 9:21 AM.