Michael Brown was stopped for jaywalking and wound up dead. Eric
Garner was stopped for selling untaxed cigarettes and wound up
dead. Hopefully we won’t have to add Delbert Rodriguez
Gutierrez to this death list—the 21-year-old graffiti artist is merely in critical condition
after being struck by an unmarked cop car pursuing him for tagging
a Miami building.
According to The Miami Herald, Guiterrez—known
in the Miami street art world as Demz—has a severe brain injury
after the December 5 incident, when Gutierrez was spotted by
members of the Miami Police Department’s (MPD) “gang unit” while
spray-painting a building. Gutierrez fled when he saw the officers,
turning a street corner and hiding between two cars. “As Miami
police Detective Michael Cadavid turned the corner, police said,
Rodriguez jumped out from between the cars and was struck by the
detective’s vehicle,” the Herald reports.
The black box in Cadavid’s vehicle (which measures things such
as how fast the car was going) will be inspected, MPD says. Neither
Cadavid nor his car had a camera.
There are some who will argue that Gutierrez’s case is not like
Brown’s or Garner’s—that jaywalking and selling cheap cigarettes
are victimless crimes that it’s silly to spend time chasing, while
protecting private property from defacement is a legitimate goal of
community policing. But context matters. According to art mag Hyperallergic, “Gutierrez had been
tagging a building in the heart of Wynwood, an industrial district
that’s become a popular destination for graffiti writers and street
artists over the last decade. Last week Wynwood was full of street
artists in town to create new murals as part of Wynwood Walls,
coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach.”
While some of Art Basel’s street artists are sanctioned, the
festival attracts lots of art and tagging from unathorized folks,
too. In the past few years, MPD has been deploying its gang unit
during Art Basel to catch rogue street artists. According to NBC South Florida, it’s unclear whether
Rodriguez had permission to tag the building.
But whatever you think about police pursuing Gutierrez in the
first place, there’s no disputing that comments from Miami cops
afterward show a nasty sort of mindset wherein any outcome is
justified if someone disobeys authority. Miami Police Chief Manuel
Orosa told the Herald that what happened was tragic, but:
“It’s unfortunate that the young man tried to run from police.”
Miami police union President Javier Ortiz repeated the same
sentiment to Gutierrez’s mom, Nannette Kaniaris, who said Ortiz
offered to buy her dinner after this little lecture. Ortiz later
told the Herald he stood by those comments:
“I understand she is extremely upset, and rightfully so, and
that her son is in the hospital,” Ortiz said by text. “However, for
every action there’s a reaction. If he would have not been
committing a crime and then running from law enforcement, this
could have been avoided. Her son is in our prayers.”
Earlier in the day Gutierrez was hit, activists had marched through Wynwood in remembrance of
not just Michael Brown and Eric Garner but also 18-year-old Israel “Reefa”
Hernandez-Llach, a street artist who was killed by Miami Beach
police in 2013. Reefa was spray-painting an abandoned McDonald’s
building when he was chased down and Tased to death by Beach police. His family has
since filed a lawsuit alleging excessive force and
failure to provide proper medical attention afterward.
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