Banko Brown’s uncle responds to the murder video and DA Jenkins’ decision not to prosecute

by JR Valrey, The People’s Minister of Information

“I’m tripping because I don’t think that everybody is seeing the same video that I’m seeing, because it is clear what happened and it’s just being ignored, just like every other thing in the Black community. It’s just being ignored and pushed under the rug. And Jenkins needs to be fired. She’s not doing her job. I don’t get it. I don’t understand it,” said Jerry Brown, the uncle of Banko Brown. 

We talked in the back of the crowd, at the “Justice for Banko Brown” rally on May 17 that was held in front of D.A. Jenkins’ office in San Francisco. 

Banko Brown was murdered on April 27 on Fourth and Market Street in San Francisco in front of Walgreens by an overzealous and aggressive security guard who assumed that Banko was shoplifting. After about a 90-second ordeal where the security guard manhandled Banko Brown on camera in front of the store, Banko Brown walked out and the security guard pulled out his gun and fired. Banko Brown’s last gasp for air was taken on a filthy and pissy sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. 

The division between the haves and have-nots in San Francisco cannot be more stark than in what people call the neighborhood that Banko died in. Depending on what financial class a person occupies, poor people know the area as the edge of the Tenderloin while the one percenters call it downtown San Francisco. 

“It’s tragic. I lost my niece behind some candy? If anything, just arrest her for the candy and let her go, but don’t kill her. It does not make any sense to me. She was slammed and beat up like a rag-doll,” said Jerry Brown, the uncle of Banko Brown. 

“So in other words you are telling me that I can run up on somebody and kill them and tell the police and courts, ‘Well, he said he had something.’ That makes it OK?”

San Francisco D.A. Brooke Jenkins has a bad record in San Francisco when it comes to dealing with the Black community and homeless people. On Jan. 18, San Francisco white gallery owner Shannon Collier was photographed water-hosing a Black homeless woman in front of his gallery, located at 712 Montgomery St. in San Francisco, in the middle of a record-breaking atmospheric storm. D.A. Jenkins refused to press charges until community and media pressure pushed her to seek charges. She chose to charge Collier with minor misdemeanors. 

D.A. Jenkins refuses to prosecute the police murder case of Keita O’Neal, which her predecessor D.A. Chesa Boudin re-opened. Keita O’Neal was unarmed and murdered by rookie officer Christopher Samayoa, who had only been hired by the SFPD four days prior to the shooting.  

On April 5, former SF Fire Commissioner Don Carmignani was attacked with a metal pipe by Garret Doty, a homeless man who Carmignani had sprayed earlier with bear mace. Attorneys allege that Carmignani may be involved in a number of similar incidents of macing homeless people in the Hollow and Marina Districts of San Francisco. 

The case goes to court on May 23, with the homeless man still facing charges, although there is video evidence of seven incidents where Carmignani allegedly sprayed homeless people with mace, unprovoked. 

“D.A. Jenkins is making the City worse. I was born and raised in the City and it hurts me to see what’s going on. She needs to be fired, point blank,” said Banko’s uncle Jerry Brown. “How can you look at that video and come out and say that that is self defense? He dragged her, had her in a headlock, swung her around, threw her on the ground, pinned her, put her in a chokehold, and then when she went to walk out of the door, that’s when he shoots her? Like my brother said, that’s a lynching. You get beat up and then you get killed; that’s a lynching right here in 2023.”

The pronouns used by Jerry Brown, Banko Brown’s uncle, are explicitly his own. 

JR Valrey, journalist, author, filmmaker and founder of Black New World Media. He is also the editor in chief of the San Francisco Bay View newspaper. He teaches the Community Journalism class twice a week at the San Francisco Bay View newspaper office. 

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Source: https://sfbayview.com/2023/05/banko-browns-uncle-responds-to-the-murder-video-and-da-jenkins-decision-not-to-prosecute/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=banko-browns-uncle-responds-to-the-murder-video-and-da-jenkins-decision-not-to-prosecute