January 14, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
Van Jones was fresh out of Yale Law School when he decided to drop everything to seek punishment of a policeman accused of beating two men to death. In the process, he developed an innovative system to deter police brutality that is attracting attention nationwide.
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Mr. Jones, now 30, says his crusade began after he read about Aaron Williams, a petty thief who had died while being arrested in San Francisco in 1995. According to newspaper accounts, members of the police department shot pepper spray into Mr. Williams’s mouth, gagged him, and threw him face-down in the back of a police vehicle. The lead arresting officer was Marc Andaya, whom Mr. Jones had just tussled with in court, where the policeman was accused of shooting to death an unarmed, black mental patient who was in his custody. Mr. Jones lost an appeals-court battle to persuade the courts to try Mr. Andaya for the murder, but when he saw that another death had occurred on Mr. Andaya’s watch, he realized that his fight had not ended. “I decided right then and there that I was going to put my entire life on hold and do whatever it took to make sure that this officer never did anything like this again.”
Mr. Jones gave up a job he had begun with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights to focus on fighting Mr. Andaya, who says he did nothing wrong to either of the men he arrested. For two years, Mr. Jones led an effort to remove Mr. Andaya from the police force by organizing protests, making the officer’s record public, and detailing how he failed to follow police procedures.
In 1997, the San Francisco Police Commission fired Mr. Andaya — largely in response to Mr. Jones’ perseverance.
During his battle, Mr. Jones started a hotline, Bay Area Policewatch, so that people who believe they have suffered from police misconduct have a place to call with their complaints. Lawyers and volunteer law-school students man the hotline phones to provide advice to callers, make referrals to other lawyers, and offer to listen to people who feel they have nowhere else to turn.
Information from the calls is plugged into a computer data base, which is considered one of the first of its kind in the country to be run by a citizens’ group. While police departments or courts typically keep track of cases of police misconduct, they generally do not include information about complaints that did not make it to the courts or police officers who were found to be “not guilty” at trial. Such information can be crucial, however, in cases like that of Mr. Andaya.
In 1996, Mr. Jones established the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights in San Francisco to house Policewatch, do advocacy work for victims of police misconduct — and to run legal-service programs. During the next five years, he hopes to create a Bay Area Prisonwatch, Immigration and Naturalization Service Watch, and Hatewatch to help people who suffer abuse at the hands of legal authorities, racists, homophobes, or others.
Human-rights leaders around the country are watching Mr. Jones’ progress.
Gerald Le Melle, a deputy executive director at Amnesty International USA, which recently recruited Mr. Jones to serve as a spokesman on police brutality, says that Mr. Jones and his organization stand apart from the “ragtag groups of people running around with video cameras” that have cropped up after the highly publicized videotape of Rodney King’s beating by Los Angeles police officers.
“He has recognized that the less information there is and the more isolated people are on the issue, the less effective and less protected they can be,” Mr. Le Melle says.
During its first two years, the Ella Baker Center — which is named for the civil-rights crusader — relied on income that Mr. Jones received from a two-year fellowship from Echoing Green, a New York foundation that supports young leaders with innovative ideas.
Today, the center operates on a $300,000 annual budget and has five full-time staff members.
Last year, Mr. Jones won a Reebok International Human Rights Award in honor of his work. He put the $25,000 award into starting New York Policewatch, an East Coast version of Bay Area Policewatch; it now has two full-time employees. “It was important to test our model against the biggest, hardest police force in the world,” he says.
While the prestige of the Reebok Award has helped attract new donors, Mr. Jones — like many young non-profit leaders today — wants to find a way to keep his group afloat without relying so heavily on day-to-day fund raising.
His dream is to build an endowment that can sustain the group on interest from investments. “What I wake up thinking every morning is ‘endowment,’” he says.
He plans to make appeals for endowment gifts to black and Hispanic athletes and entertainers, whom he believes will understand from personal experience why his charity exists. All too often, he says, they come under suspicion from law-enforcement officials no matter how big their paychecks have become.
“You have these situations where these millionaire African-Americans and Latinos drive their fancy cars in their neighborhoods and then find themselves under arrest, face down on the sidewalk,” he says.
Mr. Jones notes that with his comments, he does not mean to imply that he is opposed to police officers in general or in the growth in the size of police forces. But, he says, “Police officers are city employees just like bus drivers or school teachers. They’re not saints; they’re not superheroes. They’re city employees, and they make mistakes.”
“We’re just trying to fight the bad guys,” he says.
