Redlands police officers acted unreasonably and prejudicially when they handcuffed Stanley Clairborne after a traffic stop on July 24, protesters affiliated with the Inland Empire Chapter of the Black Lives Matter movement sought to emphasize in a rally they held on July 28.
Clairborne was stopped, allegedly because his car had tinted windows and a broken brake light. A video of the incident posted to Facebook showed Redlands police officers pulling a black man, identified as Clairborne, out of his car and handcuffing him.
There was no need to treat Clairborne in that fashion, and it is a demonstration of racial profiling, the gratuitously provocative and the unnecessarily aggressive nature of the Redlands police force, which should be defunded, those protesters said. On Tuesday, they scheduled and held their rally at Ed Hales Park.
Another group, one hailing the police as fair-minded upholders of the law, scheduled a counterdemonstration to support the police that was held at the same time near the Redlands Police Station off Cajon Avenue. That prompted the Black Lives Matter protesters to march from Ed Hales Park to the police station. Black Lives Matter protesters said the counterprotesters had scheduled their counterprotest to stir up trouble and create a confrontation.
John Berry, who organized the counterprotest in favor of the police with Redlands City Councilman Paul Barich, said that was not true.
It was the Black Lives Matter protesters, whom Berry referred to as bullies, who were looking to pick a fight, he said.
That did not happen, as the police formed a barricade between the two groups when those marching reached Cajon Avenue.
Berry said the July 24 “traffic stop was a set-up to antagonize the police,” which he said was attested to by the way it was videotaped.
“A lot of what actually occurred is not shown on the video,” Barry said. “They created that video as a justification to defund the police.”
Barry bragged that the 300 or so counterprotesters who were there in favor of the police outnumbered the Black Lives Matter protesters “by about a hundred or so. Our goal was for nothing to happen,” he said, “and nothing did. No arrests. No vandalism. The bullies worked hard at provoking a fight. They worked hard at agitating the police. They were being vulgar and filthy.”
Berry characterized those in the Black Lives Matter crowd as “an anti-Christian, anti-family Marxist group seeking to overthrow the American government and the American way of life.”
Barry credited the Redlands police with doing “an excellent job of keeping them at bay and allowing us to express our appreciation for the police.”