Speaking of Racial Profiling: Part II

By Dani McClain, WireTap. Posted May 9, 2006.

(Ed.'s Note: On April 3, WireTap covered student walkouts at San Francisco State University in support of Dr. Antwi Akom, who was arrested on campus grounds. The walkout participants argued that Akom's arrest was motivated by racial profiling. Our readers commented that the incident had not received adequate coverage in the media and asked for more facts. Our in-depth investigation below is a result of that request.)

His is not a household name. And while the image of an Afro-haloed Angela Davis raising her clenched fist in a California courtroom stirs up a response in most members of a certain generation, relatively few are familiar with Dr. Antwi Akom or the confident smile he kept on his angular face throughout much of his recent trial. Despite its lack of national coverage, the arrest of Akom, a sociologist and Africana Studies professor, is among the latest incidents to stoke the ongoing national debate on racial profiling. Though Akom's arrest occurred last year, his case continues to pit some students and faculty against the administration at one of the country's most progressive university campuses.

The two central parties involved -- Akom and San Francisco State University's Department of Public Safety -- offer very different renderings of their interaction on the evening of Oct. 25. They do so only through written statements -- police reports, blog postings, and a well-maintained "Justice 4 Akom" campaign website. The criminal proceedings have ended, but because of the lack of resolution on San Francisco State's campus, neither party is speaking to the press. From the various documents that claim to chronicle the evening's events, the following picture emerges.

Sometime between 10 and 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, Akom pulled his Land Rover into a parking space outside the Ethnic Studies and Psychology building near the heart of San Francisco State University's campus. After checking to make sure his five- and seven-year-old daughters were comfortable in the back, he stood to his full height of 6 feet 3 inches, locked the car doors and hurried toward the building's main entrance. He planned to stop by his second-floor office briefly, just long enough to pick up the books he needed to prepare for a lecture the following day.

Akom pulled open the front door, which had been propped open, but only after walking past Adalberto Guevara, a guard charged with keeping the site secure while a team of electricians installed new wiring in the classrooms upstairs. Guevara stood outside the lobby of the two-story building talking on his cell phone. He followed Akom inside the building and asked him if he worked there. The professor said yes and continued through the lobby and upstairs toward his office. In earlier police interviews, Guevara said he followed closely behind, asking Akom to see his identification card all the while. Guevara later changed his story, admitting that he never asked to see the professor's ID. It wouldn't have been a problem if he had, Akom says. His campus badge was in his pocket all along.

Guevara later told police that he wondered why this man, dressed in a black sweatshirt and sweatpants, was being so confrontational. Why had he gotten within inches of Guevara's face and shouted, "I'm tired of everybody messing with me!" and "Leave me the [expletive] alone!"

Guevara went back downstairs, called his supervisor at Wackenhut Security and explained the situation. Minutes later, 22-year-old officer Brandon Rodgers arrived. With Guevara nearby, Rodgers began searching the rooms on the building's second floor. Soon, Akom emerged from the office door marked "217."

And this is where the initial meeting of an employee of a company on contract with the university and a self-described "scholar-activist" of African-American and Ghanaian parentage morphed into a larger confrontation that would engulf the campus community and, more broadly, California's Bay Area. With Akom's emergence from his office, the accounts of what happened dramatically diverge.

Akom says that he walked out with his arms full of books and, upon seeing the police officer, repeated that he was a professor. He was walking toward the stairwell when Rodgers used force to stop him from behind, and only then, says Akom, did he fight back. At some point, though, the interaction between the two men drew a small crowd that included electricians who were working nearby, an undergraduate student who was studying on the floor and -- after Rodgers radioed for backup -- two additional members of San Francisco State's police force.

Dani McClain is a writer living in Brooklyn, N.Y. She also serves on the advisory board of WireTap Magazine.

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