Bay Area public defenders held demonstrations outside county courthouses today decrying police brutality and lack of prosecutions for racially charged police killings around the country.
Public defenders in San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and Solano counties protested in support of national outrage over decisions not to indict police officers involved in the deaths of unarmed black men.
“We are here to say that our criminal justice system has no credibility when it fails to hold police officers accountable for the killing of black and brown people,” San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi said of Thursday's protest outside the city's Hall of Justice.
Alameda County public defenders stood outside the René C. Davidson Courthouse in Oakland this morning wearing T-shirts displaying the words "Black Lives Matter" and "Alameda County Public Defender." They wore black gloves and observed 4½ minutes of silence in honor of Michael Brown, who was shot and killed Aug. 9 in Ferguson, Missouri, by police Officer Darren Wilson, who resigned from his job at the end of November.
Alameda County Public Defender Brendon Woods led the action in Oakland. Upon his 2012 appointment, he became the first African-American to hold the office in the county. He said that’s given him a unique perspective on racial inequality in the criminal justice system.