About 80 people marched to the Sacramento County District Attorney's Office Thursday to deliver 100,000 signatures from an online campaign to have officers in the Stephon Clark shooting prosecuted.
The group marched from the California Attorney General's Office up I Street and down 9th Street to District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert's office. Nine people carried boxes of signatures.
Marchers chanted, "Whose streets? Our streets!" and " What do we do if we don't get what we want? Shut it down."
The signatures were gathered online by the racial justice organization Color of Change. Clarise McCants, a campaign director with the group, flew out from Washington, D.C., to deliver the petitions.
"Days after Stephon Clark was murdered, we launched a petition calling on the district attorney to indict the officers," McCants said.
Clark was shot by two officers March 18. They were responding to calls of vandalism in a South Sacramento neighborhood.
Marchers were met by a half dozen officers from the DA's office, a private security company, and the Sacramento Sheriff's Department. After some chanting at the DA's front door, the marchers put the boxes on a red hand cart which the DA's office had waiting.
"We'll read them all,” said Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Grippi. “We hear what's being said. We're not tone deaf to it. But, ultimately, we're gonna follow the law and the facts and make sure due process is being served, for everyone."
Rashid Sidiqe is with the group Law Enforcement Accountability Directive. He said one of the foundations of protests such as this is Schubert's failure to act in the past, such as in the police shooting of Joseph Mann. Schubert declined to file criminal charges in the case.
Tonya Faison with Sacramento Black Lives Matter says Wednesday's news conference by Schubert did nothing to help the situation.
"Not at all. There was nothing satisfying about she said yesterday. She gave us information that we already knew. So, that's an insult to the people's intelligence," Faison said.
Schubert told reporters it could be a year before her office decides whether to prosecute the officers in the Clark shooting.
After delivering the petitions, some of the marchers spoke. Keon Johnson was one of several who called on black communities to police themselves.
"By us finding ways to govern ourselves, in more ways than one, that in itself will shut down our interaction with these pigs policing our neighborhoods,” Johnson said. “That right there is gonna save more black lives than begging them to stop. Because the fact is they not gonna stop."
The marchers dispersed a little after 11 a.m. Some planned to return at 3 p.m. Thursday afternoon.
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