MEDIA COVERAGE: "I Am You"
‘I Am You’: Black San Bernardino deputies ask critics to look beyond uniform
By BRIAN ROKOS | brokos@scng.com | The Press-Enterprise
PUBLISHED: July 12, 2020 at 11:54 a.m. | UPDATED: July 12, 2020 at 11:56 a.m.
I am, Dashaun Jones says, a father.
I am, Sean Bateman says, not the enemy.
I am, Joshua Young says, a brother.
The men say they are not, as they’ve been ridiculed, an Uncle Tom, a traitor, a Black man who has been whitewashed.
These three San Bernardino County sheriff’s deputies are among the 12 appearing in and out of uniform in a one-minute video in the Sheriff’s Employees’ Benefit Association “I Am You” campaign designed to show that Black deputies are part of their communities just as any other mothers or sons — and that they are part of the solution, not the problem.
“I just wanted people to know that behind the badge we put on, beyond the uniform, we are just regular human beings,” Young, 23, a graduate of Rancho Verde High in Moreno Valley, said in an interview. “We have emotions, we have feelings.”
Lolita Harper, 42, a former sheriff’s detective, is now director of government and media relations for SEBA, a union that represents 3,800 law enforcement officers in San Bernardino County.
Harper said officers everywhere are a part of what she described as a “collective consciousness” about racial and social injustice and how communities should be policed following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, a Black man, after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes.
“What we saw was there was a group that seemed to be excluded from this conversation that had probably the best knowledge of all of this, and that was our African-American deputies,” Harper said.
And then, during a Black Lives Matter protest in Rancho Cucamonga, Frank Harris, a Black deputy, was filmed receiving racist taunts as he stood in riot gear on a skirmish line. A man and woman, who could not be seen, called him the n-word several times. “At the end of the day Officer Harris, you ain’t (bleep). You’re another (n-word) on the street,” she said.
At that point, Harper explained, “We thought we at the union had a duty to amplify those (deputy) voices. Who better to talk about being African-American in the United States today and the state of modern policing than people who are involved in both?”
“I looked at them as heroes”
For Young, it sometimes has been difficult to live in those two worlds. He is stationed at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga, where he said he receives more praise from inmates for being a good role model than criticism. Still, he’s been called a sell-out and said Blacks tend to be harder on him than any other race.
“I feel torn in between that I’m African-American but I’m African-American in uniform. And so it’s hard because you have a group that says you’re supporting us, you want change. But there’s a part that says your voice doesn’t matter because you are Black and in uniform.”
In the video, the deputies say in their own words such statements as “I am not against you,” “I want to be the voice of reason and be a face you can relate to” and “I am a mother.”
Jones, 29, wanted to be a police officer ever since he was a child growing up in a “gang-infested” neighborhood on San Bernardino’s west side.
“When I played cops and robbers, I was always the cop,” Jones said. “I looked at them as heroes.”