Part Eight: The Testimony
Three weeks after the incident, I testified before the city’s police oversight board.
I had been asked to testify voluntarily, and I had agreed voluntarily. I want to be precise about this because I have heard it described as a confrontation, as a power move, as an act of institutional retribution. It was none of those things. It was the appropriate response of someone who had direct, documented, first-person experience of events that were relevant to an ongoing policy conversation and who had an obligation, having spent twenty years building her understanding of these issues, to contribute that experience where it was useful.
I testified for two hours.
I described the stop. I described each decision point. I described what I had felt — and here I was careful, because my feelings were not evidence of anything except my feelings, but they were relevant to the question of how these encounters were experienced by the people on the receiving end of them. I described the accumulation of small decisions that constituted the event: the pre-formed conclusion, the failure to verify, the escalation, the specific moment when Brentwood had been presented with clear disconfirming information and had responded by doubling down.
I described Reynolds. I said what I had told him in chambers: that his willingness to intervene had mattered, and that his failure to insist had also mattered, and that the institutional culture that made not insisting the path of least resistance was the problem that needed to be addressed.
I described what it felt like to stand against my own car with my hands on the hood.
I described the sound of the handcuffs.
I described looking across the street at Thomas Chen and thinking: let them see.
The board members were attentive throughout. Several of them asked questions. The questions were good — the kind of questions that suggested they were trying to understand the specific mechanisms, not just the summary. I answered each one with the care I tried to bring to everything.
At the end, the board chair — a woman I had known professionally for twelve years, a former public defender with her own long history of these issues — looked at me and said: “Judge Washington, what do you think needs to change?”
I had thought about this question before coming.
“The documentation culture,” I said. “The gap between what happens and what gets reported needs to close. And it will only close if the people who see what happens — the Reynolds of the department — are given institutional support for insisting. Right now, insisting costs something. It needs to cost less.”
She wrote it down.
