San Francisco’s public defender’s office released police body camera footage Thursday of a violent arrest from August of last year. The video shows officers pulling 33-year-old Kevon Gibson out of an elevator at a residential hotel on Sixth Street, taking him to the ground, striking him and kneeling on his head as they cuff him. Gibson spent several days in the ICU after the beating.
The release came with a serious accusation. The public defender’s office says the police department and the district attorney’s office tried to cover up how rough the arrest was. Gibson was charged with making criminal threats, three felony counts of resisting arrest and gun possession. According to the office, prosecutors offered him a plea deal that would have dropped the felony resisting charges, but it required him to sign a waiver that could have weakened any civil claims he brings against the officers. He turned it down. A jury acquitted him of all three felony resisting counts, convicting him of misdemeanor resisting arrest and felon in possession of a firearm.
The office also alleges that during the trial, prosecutors tried to show jurors the bodycam footage without the audio, and tried to keep out evidence about the other resident’s “propensity for violence and racism.” Deputy Public Defender Bonnie Chan-Silen said the charges were built on lies the officers told to justify the force they used.
The district attorney’s office pushed back hard. It called the cover-up claim an attack on its prosecutors and disrespectful to the court and the jurors who heard the evidence and rendered the verdict. The police union backed the officers, saying the jury convicted Gibson of four offenses and that the verdicts can’t be dismissed because the outcome doesn’t fit the public defender’s narrative. The police department itself did not comment.
Gibson plans to appeal the gun possession charge, arguing he only held the gun briefly to protect himself from the resident he had argued with. The public defender’s office says it will file a complaint with the Department of Police Accountability and notify the state commission on peace officer standards to seek decertification of the officers involved.
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