It’s been more than a year and three months since Jamie Bullock and Chukwudi Uche were arrested after Tampa Police Department (TPD) bicycle officers plowed into their peaceful march for Black lives on July 4 of last year.
Nearly every single one of their days since the arrests were full of anxiety due to the charges they faced.
But relief came this month when the state offered them an intervention deal. It’s a deal that they say the state could have offered to them a long time ago, which potentially leads to having no criminal record and all charges dropped if they complete the conditions of their intervention programs.
However, the protesters feel wronged by the situation overall. They, along with legal experts, think that they should never have been arrested for expressing their first amendment rights.
Although the case is now resolved, questions about the case stand out.
How is it the protesters’ fault that TPD bicycle police plowed into them that day and enacted violence as they marched peacefully down the road? Why did the state stand by its claim for so long that the protesters assaulted officers while not having enough evidence to prove it in trial? Why do Bullock and Uche have to participate in intervention programs, when charges of unlawful assembly and battery on a law enforcement officer were dropped, thus negating their reasons for being arrested by police that day?
These are all questions that should make us take a hard look at our criminal justice system, which is driven by police narratives, even though studies and polls have proven time and again that cops embrace deceit. Even though we know that evidence fabricated by cops has ruined innocent people’s lives in Tampa and across the country, there seems to be an addiction to blindly believing the police.
Legal experts say that both the arrest and pursuit of charges against the two Tampa BLM protesters were uncalled for.
“Jamie Bullock should have never been arrested for her involvement in the peaceful march for Black lives,” Kara Gross, Legislative Director and Senior Policy Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida wrote to Creative Loafing Tampa Bay in an email. “There were so many breakdowns in our justice system it’s hard to know where to begin.”
Gross says that the march was peaceful by all accounts and would have continued to be completely uneventful if law enforcement had not forcefully and physically interjected themselves into the peaceful march. Instead of upholding and protecting First Amendment rights by protecting them from any outside agitators, she highlights that law enforcement on that day chose to physically ride their bicycles into the protesters and proceed to arrest people.
“Individuals peacefully protesting need to be protected, not arrested,” wrote Gross. She continued that once arrested, the prosecutors (State Attorney Andrew Warren’s Office, SAO13) should have quickly and carefully reviewed the evidence and dropped the charges accordingly.
“It should never have taken over a year for the unwarranted charges to be dropped,” Gross said.
Virginia Hamrick, First Amendment Foundation Staff Attorney, had similar feelings about the case.
“This case makes clear what we already knew: last summer’s protests were mostly peaceful here in Florida,” Hamrick told CL in an email. “Arresting peaceful protestors chills free speech and deters the public from exercising their constitutional rights.”
CL reached out to the state attorney for comment in response to the ACLU and First Amendment Foundation’s statements.
“Our office has staunchly supported the rights of peaceful protest, free speech and free assembly,” said Grayson Kamm, Chief Communications Officer for SAO13. “We recognize that the events of that day could have been handled differently, and we continue to work to build stronger relationships between law enforcement and our community. But our commitment to public safety prohibits us from turning a blind eye to illegally carrying a gun or putting your hands on a police officer.”
But when SAO13 dropped charges of battery on a law enforcement officer against Bullock and Uche earlier this month, Kamm told CL that the claim of anyone putting hands on an officer could not be proven in court.
“In this case, we received new evidence in the past few days—including bodycam video and interviews with defense witnesses—that had a direct impact on the State’s ability to prove all the required elements of a battery on a law enforcement officer charge beyond and to the exclusion of a reasonable doubt at trial,” Kamm wrote in an email.
Jessenia Rosales, defense attorney for Uche, told CL that she believes that the state attorney violated their mission statement of “pursuing justice and fairness for everyone” through the case. She says that even if it is alleged that her client was found with anything at all on him after the arrest, “You’re completely ignoring the fact that you unlawfully arrested him for nothing.”
In total, CL Tampa Bay published 11 articles related to the case, exposing violent police behavior and questionable motives that day. Reviewing hours of video footage led to us discovering that a TPD officer said “try to get charges on somebody if you can” as police began interacting with the BLM crowd. And bodycam video showed an officer body slamming a Black person to the ground after they said into a megaphone, “Why are we being arrested?”
Over the last year, SAO13 sided with the police on their claims about the trial, repeating again and again that officers had been assaulted. That was until last week, before trial, when new evidence showed that the state didn’t have enough evidence to prove that in court.
“Hillsborough needs a state attorney that seeks justice, not one that is so concentrated on just winning,” said Michelle Lambo, defense attorney for Bullock. “The state attorney obviously sided with the cops in this case, even though they are supposed to represent the people.”
During the case, the state attorney tried to pass a Motion in Limine, which would have silenced any talk of the right to assemble, the right to free speech and talk of police behavior the day Bullock and Uche were arrested. Judge Mark Kiser shot down the main points of the Limine.
“They wanted to win so badly that they sought to silence the voices of young Black people who were expressing their constitutional rights, and not talk about how the police acted like monsters that day,” Lambo says.
Bullock was elated to be able to move on with her life after the state reduced her charges, but made it clear that the resolution was not justice, but instead a compromise.
“As grateful as I am for the opportunity to walk away with a clean record, I want to emphasize that the state could have done this months ago,” Bullock wrote on social media. “They waited until the very last minute and I’ll never forgive them for taking a year of my life. This was the bare minimum.”
During the case, Bullock told CL that the charges had upended her life.
Bullock and her defense team, along with Uche’s defense, all feel as if the state attorney went after protesters who should have never been arrested in the first place. Their unlawful assembly charges were dropped, along with battery on law enforcement charges.
So, how is it that the protesters should have had to go through all of this trauma?
As of now, there’s no clear answer for the protesters, just some community service hours, court fees and a sense of relief, mixed with frustration.
Their situation and feeling wronged is nothing new for people of color in the American justice system. Since its inception, the system has been wrought with unfair judgements waged against Black people especially, oftentimes with far more grim consequences than what happened to Bullock and Uche.
Legendary author James Baldwin commented on the problems of the American criminal justice system in 1972, with a passage that rings disturbingly relevant today.
“...Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any Black man, any poor person— ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it,” Baldwin wrote. “It is certain, in any case, that ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.”
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