Steven Taylor: Justice Denied

OAKLAND—On December 12, Alameda County dropped charges against San Leandro cop Jason Fletcher, who shot Steven Taylor pointblank at a crowded Walmart five years ago. In the midst of a mental health crisis, Taylor, a 33-year-old black father of three, had tried to walk out of the store with a baseball bat and tent without paying. As directed by security guards, Steven was waiting by the rolling carts near the door when Fletcher arrived. Forty seconds later, Steven was fatally shot.

This horrible injustice is a case study in how the cops, courts and politicians work hand in hand to ensure killer cops walk, and why the movement against police brutality needs to be rebuilt. Taylor’s family has tried every legal avenue. It was enough to get the courts to put up a facade of pursuing justice, but not enough to actually change the outcome and put the cop away.

After George Floyd’s lynching provoked international protest, then Alameda County D.A. Nancy O’Malley, who had never before brought charges against a cop, charged Fletcher with “voluntary manslaughter.” Then O’Malley just sat on the case. Nearly three years later, when Pamela Price was elected D.A. on a police reform platform, Fletcher still hadn’t been tried. The courts took the Taylor case out of her hands, claiming political bias. Price simply filed an appeal that predictably went nowhere and called it a day. As for the other grieving families who looked to Price with hope, they were hung out to dry. Of the eight cases she chose to “review,” only one ended up in court: Mario Gonzalez’s. The charges against the cops who killed him were dismissed.

There were other avenues she could have pursued to win justice for Taylor, like opening the police archives on his case, Gonzalez’s and the seven other victims whom she claimed to be fighting for. Exposing the details of the cops’ crimes to the public could have created the groundswell necessary to fight back against the never-ending cop atrocities. The Partisan Defense Committee wrote Price to demand she do just this. But she did nothing. Price was recalled for supposedly being “soft on crime” in November 2024 but is now running to regain the office. Her inaction and betrayals during her first term are reason enough to not support her re-election campaign.

Now, with the BLM movement safely in the rearview mirror and the political climate having shifted to the right, the charges against Fletcher have been dropped by agreement of the judge, defense lawyers and prosecution. Reform schemes for oversight committees, cutting the budget and begging politicians to do the right thing did not move the needle on police killings, nor did they secure convictions in the vast majority of brutality cases, as the Taylor case vividly shows. Getting the capitalists to put away one of their thugs in blue requires mobilizing a force that will make them fear the consequences if they don’t.

We must take the fight for justice into our own hands. The cops and courts want us to forget Steven Taylor so that he becomes another victim of cop terror lost to time. We must not let this happen. Take his case to your communities, workplaces, unions, churches, etc. to burn it into everyone’s memories and rally broader support for the fight to open the police archives and get some justice.

We need to rebuild the movement against police brutality, looking to those who will see justice through to the end and won’t scramble to reverse any progress as soon as the headlines change. We must mobilize the working class, which both can force the hand of the capitalists and has a real interest in ending police brutality and racial oppression. Rebuild the movement against cop brutality on a class-struggle basis! Open the police archives!