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It was a mere two days after the one-year anniversary of Alejandro Nieto’s death at the hands of four San Francisco police officers, and Nieto’s father, Refugio, hadn’t the slightest idea of what to expect.

“Today is a day of surprise for me, I didn’t know. I didn’t know until this morning,” Refugio said on Monday, March 23, as he stood alongside his wife, Elvira, amid the crowd of demonstrators, who were honoring his son’s memory by blocking traffic in front of the Mission Police Station on Valencia Street between 17th and 18th streets. “Instead of feeling sad, it gives me joy to see what the community is doing for Alejandro Nieto.”

For more than four hours, hundreds of protesters danced and drummed and demonstrated against police brutality, recognizing Nieto and others who have been killed by SFPD.

The demonstration came more than two months after the SFPD was forced to finally release the names of the four officers who fatally shot Nieto 14 times. Protesters held signs with face-sized portraits of the officers Jason Sawyer (who was actually promoted after the shooting) and Roger Morse, as well as blank faces for officers Richard Schiff and Nathan Chew, whose photos have not yet been released.

“There hasn’t been a lot of information released,” said Kevine Boggess, director of youth organizing and school discipline campaigns at Coleman Advocates for Children and Youth. “I think that’s something that is really concerning: the way the police are able to kind of spin and frame things and withhold the names of their officers, but kind of start the trial on the person who they murdered the moment they let off those shots.”

Boggess has firsthand experience; he was 13 when he first had a gun pulled on him by police. He was a black kid attending A. P. Giannini Middle School in the Sunset District when a fight broke out on a Muni bus. After he and his friends began walking to the next stop, a police officer drove up onto the curve on Sunset Boulevard and forced them on the ground.

“Since then, I’ve always had feelings of mistrust and [a] lack of confidence in the police, wondering if they’re there to protect me or to arrest me,” Boggess said. “I think what we want to do is to show police officers at this station and throughout the city that we need them to stand up and to do what’s right and to stop defending other police officers’ [misconduct].”

The demonstration came at a time when the police department is reeling from the recent revelation in federal court of several homophobic and racially bigoted text messages involving members of the SFPD. Those messages involved Sgt. Ian Furminger—who worked as a plainclothes cop out of the Mission Station before being convicted of corruption charges in February, according to the San Francisco Chronicle—and at least four other officers, who have been identified as Michael Robison, Noel Schwab, Rain Daugherty and Michael Celis.

“It’s bringing to light exactly what the mentality of SFPD is, something that we’ve always known. But now, it’s starting to be official,” said Oscar Salinas, a friend of Nieto’s. “Cops are starting to go to jail.”

Demonstrators also recognized Amilcar Perez-Lopez, the 21-year-old Guatemalan man who was killed in the Mission on Feb. 26 by plainclothes officers Eric Reboli and Craig Tiffe, for allegedly trying to retrieve his stolen cell phone with a knife.

Reboli, El Tecolote has learned, was accused in 2004 of beating someone unconscious in an elevator while serving as a bouncer at Harry Denton’s Starlight Lounge in the city’s Sir Francis Drake Hotel.

SFPD released Reboli and Tiffe’s names nearly a week after the shooting.

“What was [Perez-Lopez] doing?” asked Refugio. “He wasn’t doing anything wrong. For carrying a knife? They didn’t give him a chance to talk.”

“Just like Alex,” Elvira said.

The demonstration lasted well beyond its intended length of four hours and 15 minutes, which was to symbolize not only the city’s area code, but the police code for “disturbance.”