The white police chief who joined a Black Lives Matter protest

When Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, last year, protests erupted there and across the rest of the nation. Some of those demonstrations turned violent, but in Richmond, California, one protest against police violence had an unexpected participant: the chief of police.

On Dec. 9, 2014, Chief Chris Mangus of the City of Richmond Police Department, joined demonstrators and held up a sign reading “#BlackLivesMatter” for four and a half hours — the amount of time Brown’s body lay in the street after he was killed.

Magnus says, “The whole point of holding the sign … was to acknowledge that relationships can be better between police and communities of color, that that happens through dialogue and communication and relationship building.”

Kimberly Aceves helped organize the demonstration and is the executive director of the RYSE Center, a facility serving troubled inner-city youths in Richmond. She recalls seeing “the chief drive up with some of the top-ranking officers, and we thought he was going to come for a minute and just say hi. But he said, ‘No, I really want to hold a sign.’ And I think all of us were a little bit taken aback.”

Gemikia Henderson, who works at the RYSE Center, says, “I do feel the significance of it. I feel he just set a foundation for other police chiefs to step up in their own community and be like, ‘We [have to] stand with our community.’”

What no one expected was for the photo of the chief to go viral on the Web, making news across the country.

Richmond is accustomed to being in the news but for all the wrong reasons. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Richmond was a regular on the FBI’s most dangerous cities in America list. But since Magnus became police chief in 2006, crime is down over 30% percent, and officer-involved shootings are down to an average of less than one per year. Many credit these reductions to Magnus’ progressive approach to community policing.

Aceves asks, “What other police chiefs are actually standing side by side with black and brown community members and holding a sign that really is saying ‘I believe black lives matter? And I’m going to stake my job, my position, my reputation on it’?”

There was some criticism of the chief’s actions, such as an online story for The San Francisco Chronicle that cited the Richmond Police Officers Association as objecting to Magnus’ joining the protest while in uniform.

Magnus says he “did get some pushback. But most of the feedback I got was actually very positive. I got, really, thousands of emails from folks around the country, the great majority of which were from people who got it and said that it was important for them to see someone in uniform actually conveying that message that black lives — and all lives — matter.”