Justice For Darell

While I was in Davis last night, the local Sacramento Black Lives Matter group held a vigil about a block from my house for Darell Richards, the young man who aroused alarm after brandishing a gun along the Broadway corridor. The cops laid siege to a neighborhood and called in a SWAT team. After about three hours, they flushed him from a back yard and shot him after he apparently did not immediately drop his weapon (which turned out to be a pellet gun that looked like a regular gun):

A large crowd quietly held hands and joined together for a prayer, led in order to “pray for justice for Darell, we pray for justice for the family, and for unity amongst us as a community,” a group leader said.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom, it is our duty to win, we must love and support one another, we have nothing to lose but our chains,” the crowd chanted after the prayer.

Vang and Richards’ other family members cried together while crowd members came and hugged them.

During the early part of the siege, I was monitoring police communications, and was surprised to learn that the police already knew who Darell Richards was. I think they may have already talked to people in Richards’ party, or to others who knew him, and thus learned a few things about him. So, it wasn’t quite like the police had besieged an anonymous gunman. There was some foreknowledge here, and maybe an alternative path. Did the police attempt to contact Richards, by loudspeaker or phone? Perhaps he could have been persuaded to surrender.