By the mid-1980s, San Diego had become one of the 10 most populous metropolitan areas in the United States, but most residents simply didn’t believe it. To them, it’s still a hip beach town with an unofficial slogan: “We’re not Los Angeles.” Insulate yourself from urban decay.
On March 31, 1985, two white San Diego police officers and a civilian observer followed a pickup truck carrying seven young black men down a long dirt driveway in the city’s southeast. Everything has changed because The tragedy that followed: The truck driver, 23-year-old Sagon Penn, grabbed an officer’s gun and opened fire on civilians and two officers, killing one. The gunman then stole a police car and ran over the surviving officers.
Many San Diegoans were shocked. They shouldn’t be like this.
For more than a decade, warnings of a looming crisis have come from two groups: members of the black community in southeast San Diego and the police officers tasked with policing the area.
While parts of San Diego are outpacing all other major U.S. cities in economic growth, some communities are lagging behind. Black residents had been zoned into the Southeast. Highway construction carved up once-vibrant residential and commercial areas. Changes in city zoning laws allowed for the construction of suburban shopping malls, diverting retail customers away from the independent retailers that underpinned the local economy.
When violent crime began to surge across the country in the mid-1970s, Southeast San Diego suffered along with the rest of the country, and the city’s white majority may have largely turned a blind eye. Criminals have become meaner, drugs have become more prevalent, and guns are suddenly everywhere. By early 1985, residents of the Southeast felt besieged, endangered, overwhelmed, and neglected.
They have an unlikely ally in calling for more resources: the police who police the area, who have witnessed the violence and know they can’t contain it. But as long as San Diego leaders refuse to admit they have a big-city crime problem, they won’t add to an almost comically inadequate police force. San Diego has one police officer for every 714 residents, compared with 1:237 in Philadelphia, 1:272 in New York City, and 1:437 in Los Angeles.
San Diego police, outnumbered and outgunned, were murdered at an alarming rate. One each in 1977, ’78, ’79 and ’83 – all shot to death. Four police officers died in 1981 and 1984: “In Santiago they kill us in pairs,” explained a street policeman. By March 1985, a police officer in San Diego was 15 times more likely to be killed in the line of duty than an officer in Los Angeles.
This was the background to the altercation on March 31, 1985. In the case, the shooter was a black suspect and two of the victims were white police officers.
By the time the paper landed on a suburban driveway the next morning, two opposing narratives had emerged. Many of the nearly 50 witnesses later said Payne acted in self-defense after being beaten with a baton by police. Police and many members of San Diego’s conservatives said this was just another case of a police officer being shot and killed in the line of duty.
An editorial in the historically conservative, white San Diego Union came close to convicting Payne while exonerating the police officer. “The fault lies not with our police but with the punks who inhabit this fair place,” veteran journalist Edward Fike wrote in an opinion piece.
Then something unusual happened. Michael Tuck, a brash young anchor at the ABC affiliate, took on the paper in its editorial section. He accused the newspaper of convicting Payne without a trial. “Give editorial writer Edward Feike a rope and a branch and he’ll be in danger,” Tucker declared on the air.
The anchor represents the “new San Diego” demographic—college-educated, socially liberal, racially diverse. His message was not that Payne was innocent and that police were responsible for the incident, but that the city should exercise patience and restraint and let the courts do their job. Much of the city seemed to take his advice.
Shockingly, so have the unions, which recently hired young journalists and commissioned them to cover the case. They stick to the facts. In the absence of social media and 24-hour cable news, a few responsible voices have prevailed.
Over the next two and a half years, and through two shocking trials, San Diego was forced to come to terms with the fact that it was actually two cities living different lives: one predominantly white, prosperous and safe, The other is predominantly black, struggling and increasingly dangerous.
As the trial unfolded, there were accusations of police misconduct, excessive use of force, police perjury on the witness stand, witness tampering and racism. Some black witnesses were accused of “telling their stories” before testifying to bolster the argument that Payne acted in self-defense. The case doesn’t quite fit into anyone’s preferred narrative.
After the trial, two mixed juries each deliberated for more than a month before deciding that Payne had acted largely reasonably and was not guilty of murder or attempted murder. Officials dropped the remaining charges against him.
People expressed outrage and cries of injustice, but ultimately the city accepted the verdict. Leaders vowed to do better for all of San Diego, not just wealthy, white areas.
Years later, as riots erupted in Los Angeles, Oakland, Las Vegas and other cities following the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department officers who beat Rodney King in 1991, San Diego remained largely calm. “We experienced a crisis between police and the black community years before Los Angeles did,” said former Deputy Police Chief Norm Stamper. “We learned how to talk and listen to each other.”
Southeast community leader Billy Moore also said recently: “If we hadn’t gone through what we did with Sagon Penn, things would be a lot different.”
San Diego doesn’t even want to admit it’s a big city, but it’s become a model for other cities — all because of a tragic night in 1985 that forced a racial reckoning.
Peter Houulahan recently published Harvest the Whirlwind: The True Story of Violence, Race, Justice, and Sargon Pan.
