Black activist charged in SLO protest will keep diversity task force seat, city says
A San Luis Obispo protester charged with a crime in connection to a local Black Lives Matter protest will stay on as the chair of the city’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force, as his case proceeds, the city announced Sunday night.
Amman Asfaw, a local youth leader and president of Cal Poly’s National Society of Black Engineers, has led the task force of community members since early September.
“He will continue in his role on this important effort while these separate proceedings unfold,” the city wrote in a news release. “One of the most sacred and important principles in the American criminal justice system holds that all persons are innocent until proven guilty.”
Asfaw, 22, was charged by the San Luis Obispo County District Attorney’s Office with a single misdemeanor count of false imprisonment in connection with his involvement in a July 21 protest in San Luis Obispo.
A total of eight people have been arrested in connection to the demonstration — including local Black Lives Matter organizer Tianna Arata, whose attorneys claim her arrest and prosecution is unconstitutional. Five of those charged are people of color.
8 people face charges in SLO protest
The July 21 protest, which found as many as 300 people marching on Highway 101, ultimately ended in the arrest of Arata and Elias Bautista, who is seen on video kicking a police officer as Arata is carried away to a patrol vehicle.
Arata, 20, is charged with a total of 13 misdemeanors: five counts of false imprisonment, six counts of obstruction of a thoroughfare, one count of unlawful assembly, and one count of disturbing the peace by loud noise. Bautista, a 23-year-old UC Santa Cruz student, is facing a felony and two misdemeanors.
On Friday, county prosecutors added three co-defendants, all of them Black men: Asfaw, Marcus Montgomery and Joshua Powell.
Montgomery, 24, faces four misdemeanor charges, including false imprisonment, obstructing the free movement of any person in a public place and resisting or delaying a police officer. And Powell, 23, is charged with delaying two police officers.
Late Friday, another filing by the District Attorney’s Office charged three white men over an incident on Highway 101 in which a motorist’s back windshield was smashed by a protester’s skateboard after the driver accelerated into the crowd.
Robert Lastra Jr., 21, is facing a felony charge of vandalism and a misdemeanor count of false imprisonment, according to the complaint. Jerad Hill, 27, and 25-year-old Sam Grocott, who was hit by a silver BMW, were charged with misdemeanors.
“The city is committed to supporting the full and fair adjudication of the cases through the established judicial process,” San Luis Obispo officials wrote in Sunday’s release. “There is a pending motion for a gag order seeking to limit city public comment in those pending cases of Tianna Arata and Elias Bautista.”
City officials haven’t commented since the conclusion of the San Luis Obispo Police Department’s investigation into the protest and intend “to limit any official statements to those made in the course of city participation in the judicial process, absent the need to correct any public misinformation.”
The San Luis Obispo City Council declared racism as a public health issue on June 17 and set aside $140,000 for diversity and inclusion spending at its budget cycle this fiscal year. That was added to a previously earmarked $20,000, bringing the total to $160,000 in available funds.
San Luis Obispo Mayor Heidi Harmon condemned San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow over the arrests in an open letter on Saturday, saying, “Dow’s actions — to charge these community members for exercising the 1st Amendment — is nothing more than an intimidation tactic; telling our community members that they must be silent or be subject to arrest.”
“My campaign released a highly watched video of Mr. Asfaw endorsing our campaign and urging his fellow students to vote,” Harmon added in the letter. “We published his name again as a member of the City Council appointed DE&I task force just one day before Mr. Dow elected to include Mr. Asfaw in his roundup.”
Diversity task force chair is Cal Poly graduate student
The vice chair of San Luis Obispo’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Task Force issued a statement saying that Asfaw “embodies his personal core values of respect, integrity, and commitment through servant leadership.”
“On behalf of the task force,” Boyer wrote Monday in a news release, “I want to convey support for Mr. Asfaw’s continuance as both a member and in the role as chair.”
Boyer noted that Asfaw is a graduate student in electrical engineering and part-time lab instructor at Cal Poly, and plans to complete his master’s degree in June 2021.
Asfaw is the only student columnist for the American Society for Engineering Education’s magazine.
He’s also the youngest member of the diversity task force and its sole student, and was unanimously elected as chairperson, Boyer wrote.
“He is passionate and thoughtful in his service to the San Luis Obispo community,” Boyer wrote. “We look forward to his ongoing contributions in the pursuit of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
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