On a sunny day last September, Ayisha Williams set up a canopy on the sidewalk outside her father’s house in Emerald Hills. She and her 15-year-old daughter regularly used his Wi-Fi and the canopy’s shade to get homework done. That day, she tried to make sure the shade also reached her 19-year-old son, who was sleeping in her car.
Williams’ girlfriend joined them.
Suddenly, San Diego police officers arrived. A peaceful day devolved into chaos.
Her daughter began to film.
Someone had complained about the canopy, which surprised Williams. She told KPBS no one had spoken to her directly, and it had never been a problem before.
One officer explained it was “encroaching” — blocking the sidewalk, which belonged to the city.
They asked for his name and badge number. Behind him, another officer pulled on gloves and walked out of frame. The dispatch log shows a call for backup.
They assured the first officer they would take the tent down. He said if they did that and moved the chairs, that would be OK with him.
Williams’ girlfriend began expressing her frustration with what she saw as the real issues — there was trash in the street. The roads were in bad condition.
“Come on now, you got a whole lot more shit to be doing,” she said.
She entered the word “encroaching” into ChatGPT.
“The law is encroaching on people’s freedom,” she read. “Did you know that, sir?”
Williams put the tent away.
More officers arrived. The dispatch log lists a total of 24 officers.
Bystanders gathered and began to film.
A video shows the officer who had pulled gloves on earlier with his hands on Williams.
“I didn’t do nothing! What, cause I’m being loud? You want to arrest me for being loud?” she said.
“You’re walking around and you’re not dictating this stop, we are!” the officer said.
She told him her shoulder was messed up.
“Get your hands off me, I can talk!” she said.
“Stop! I don’t want to take you to the ground but I’m getting pretty close. And you’re going to hit your head,” the same officer warned.
Another officer put hands on her 15-year-old daughter and began to steer her back from her mother. Williams said she warned them her daughter has a heart problem.
Her daughter began to scream.
“She’s 15! She’s 15!” Williams yelled.
“I’m a minor, please!” she yelled, and began to wail for her mother. “Mamaaaa!”
Another bystander video shows three officers pinning Williams, handcuffed, to the ground.
“‘Cause you wanna act like this, you’re going to jail now!” the gloved officer said.
“No!” Williams cried.
“We’re gonna wrap her!” he said, referring to a full-body restraint used to subdue combative or resisting suspects.
“No, don’t wrap me! I’m cool!”
“Yes you are! You’re gonna get wrapped now because you did this!”
“I didn’t do this.”
“See? I told you to stop, you don’t listen!”
“You wanted to do this,” she said.
She repeatedly told the officers she couldn’t breathe, and the ground was hot.
Officers also handcuffed Williams’ daughter, and woke her son up in the car.
They claimed there was marijuana in the car and cited him for possession. Williams told KPBS the charge was false and later dismissed. The officers handcuffed her son.
She told KPBS her son has disabilities, and the officers were rough. He needed a finger splint.
“Ay, why are you beating on my son!” she yelled. “Why are you beating on my son!”
People watching couldn’t make sense of the police response.
“They acting like there’s a murderer out here,” one man said.
“Nah, they just had the tent out, for real,” another replied.
Williams said her girlfriend was also handcuffed.
Eventually, the officers released everyone and left. Williams was given a citation for only one charge: resisting an officer.
Why?
The San Diego Police Department declined to answer questions about any of the cases mentioned in this story. They would not provide the police reports or body camera footage.
KPBS does have bystander videos, complaints filed against the police department, and copies of citations.
San Diego Police Department spokesperson Cesar Jimenez answered general questions by email.
He gave three reasons they might charge someone with resisting and nothing else, noting it was not an exhaustive list: If a bystander interferes with an officer doing their job; if someone is detained under reasonable suspicion — for example, if they match the description of a suspect — and they resisted; or if someone resists during a traffic stop, and the officer decides not to charge the traffic violation.
Williams has her own theory: the officers were trying to show they were in power.
She thinks it’s less about how a citizen acts, and more about how the officer acts.
“It doesn't matter if you comply and if you don't comply,” she said.
The charge never went to court. But still caused lasting harm.
“We're not criminals. None of us ever got in trouble with the law. And for me, I'm their sole parent provider,” Williams said. “To hear my daughter scream, you know, there's nothing no one can do or, you know, or there's nothing I can do. It hurts and it makes you hate the police, you know? It makes you hate them. Even though we were taught not to hate.”
She said she started therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I don't want any interaction with the police in the future. Like I tell my kids, ‘If it's an emergency, we're going to have to figure it out ourselves,’” she said.
She’s not alone in this feeling that it’s out of her control what happens at a police stop.
“I don't know what's going to happen when I'm approached,” said Ricky Weaver, who works as a security guard. “I don't know how it's going to turn out. If I cooperate, it can turn bad. If you go in negative, bad attitude, it's going to go bad.”
Weaver was cited for resisting arrest and nothing else in November.
He’s a violence interrupter in Encanto and the surrounding neighborhoods. He said he had separated rival gang members during a heated dispute on Imperial Avenue and had already de-escalated the situation when police arrived.
Officers handcuffed people he had been working with. He tried to tell them it wasn’t necessary.
An officer began telling him to back up, but he continued to protest the arrests. Then they handcuffed Weaver.
He said his charges also got dismissed.
He’s been charged with resisting three or four times, he said. The first, when he was 14 years old.
“Boy, you traumatized me that there,” he said. “And you know, then you go and tell my mom, ‘Oh, he resisted.’ No, you asked me to stop, I stopped. I did everything you asked me to do. But then one grabbed me by the neck and the other one grabbed me, pulled me down, pulled my neck up there. I ain't know if I was going to die or what the hell was going to happen. So from that day on — you become traumatized from that stuff, putting in handcuffs and all that.”
Weaver has his own theory about why police use the resisting charge.
“It's just to continue the cycle, you know, for a young Black man. It's just to continue that cycle of, ‘OK, we want you on paper.’ If they can get you on paper, then everything, a lot of other things become blocked in your life,” he said.
‘Rinse and repeat, over and over and over’
Keshawn “Shaheed” Price was driving away from a high school football game in Spring Valley with his family last September when SDPD officers stopped him.
They alleged he’d been speeding, but Price told KPBS that was impossible since they were behind two buses.
“I got my ID and my license and I got my insurance, but y’all stopping me and putting lights in my kids faces and all that, y’all don’t need to be doing that,” he told the officer at his window.
His 14-year-old son and 15 year-old daughter were in the back seat.
“I don’t feel safe with y’all pulling me over!” he said.
The front passenger was filming. He asked them to call his wife.
Officers ordered him out of the car.
“I don’t have to get out of the car!” he protested.
They handcuffed him, and both his children. He said it was their first interaction with the police.
“It felt very, like, helpless,” he told KPBS. “I felt like I was being robbed and like my kids were being kidnapped, honestly. It was the worst feeling ever, just like not being able to do nothing.”
They took Price to jail for resisting an officer. His next court date is this month. His lawyer said the officers never charged him with a traffic violation.
A District Attorney spokesperson didn’t immediately answer why the office is choosing to prosecute his case.
Price works for a nonprofit that assists people impacted by the local justice system. He said he and his colleagues had already noticed a pattern of stand-alone resisting charges.
“So we was already like, kind of like strategizing around it, just like talking about it. But when it happened to me it was like, ‘Wow,’” he said.
They requested data from the City Attorney: all cases where the only charge was resisting from Jan. 1, 2024 through Oct. 31, 2025. Police typically submit resisting charges within city limits to the City Attorney, a spokesperson said.
That data show Black people are about nine times likelier than white people to be charged by San Diego law enforcement with resisting an officer and nothing else.
SDPD spokesperson Cesar Jimenez said by email that this statistic doesn’t tell the whole story.
He said every citation for resisting is based on probable cause.
The data include more than 1,300 cases where the only charge is resisting. That’s about two a day. San Diego’s City Attorney declined to prosecute about a thousand of them.
“The person's charge, it gets dismissed, a judge never sees it. And then rinse and repeat over and over and over,” said Scott Holmes, a civil rights attorney and law professor in Durham, North Carolina. “And no one is keeping up with the magnitude of the problem, or quantifying it or presenting it to the public.”
‘A red flag’
Holmes noticed a pattern with his clients and started researching resisting charges.
“There was a high correlation between people being stopped without any reasonable suspicion or any grounds, and then arguing or complaining about it, and then ending up with a resisting charge to punish them for arguing about their interaction,” he said.
Holmes found in Durham, 90% of people charged with resisting and no other major offense were Black. And most of those charges were never prosecuted.
To him, that’s a red flag.
“It really is a signal more that the police have engaged in misconduct than the person is guilty of the crime,” he said.
He said many of these cases are unconstitutional.
“If the person is only charged with resisting arrest, the question is, well — arrest for what? What was the legal duty that brought this person before you that made them obligated to comply with your orders?” he said.
Generally, an officer has to have reasonable suspicion to detain somebody. Heated words aren’t enough.
“Unless your words are fighting words or you're actually verbally threatening the safety of the officer, you can express your disapproval of how things are going in the most strong terms and be fully protected under the First Amendment,” he said.
Spokesperson Cesar Jimenez said SDPD supports free speech, and if someone believes their rights have been violated, they can file a complaint.
“The purpose of the charge in that moment is to control that person and send a signal to everybody else that this is not the way you deal with the police. ‘You have to obey us,’” Holmes said. “The impact of it is to dissuade other members of the vulnerable community from asserting themselves.”
Holmes said using criminal laws to control Black people has been a tactic since slavery ended.
He offered a solution: When officers charge resisting without legal grounds, they should be held liable.
“If I walk up to you and I say, ‘Do what I say’ and you won't, and I put you in handcuffs, that's false imprisonment and assault,” he said. “And that's what they have done. When they do this, it's a crime. And if prosecutors started prosecuting it as crimes — prosecuting the police every time they stop somebody without reasonable suspicion and laid their hands on them and assaulted them and put their kids in handcuffs — and charged them with false imprisonment or kidnapping, then police would stop it.”
Williams gave this advice: “Always have someone with you and have someone recording the whole time. You got to. Because you can’t understand their judgment of character of you.”
