Cop-Friendly San Francisco DA Approves of Public Execution, Lets Killer Michael Anthony Walk Free
On Monday, May 14, 2023, San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins, who has a history of dropping charges against police, announced that she was declining to prosecute the Walgreens rent-a-cop Michael Anthony for the April 27 murder of Banko Brown. The security video has been made widely available on social media, and one thing is clear: this was an execution. Anthony lunged at Banko, then let him go; when Banko turned to leave, Anthony shot him. The rent-a-cop would later say that Banko was threatening to stab him, but, of course, there was no knife, and we have only his self-interested word for that.
The DA’s report alleges that Banko had “collect[ed] items” and then “move[d] to exit the store without having paid for any items.” From the brief clip that has been circulating on social media, it’s clear that when Banko tried to leave the Walgreens, he was confronted by mall cop Michael Anthony. Although Anthony wept when he was told he’d killed Banko, he later said what he meant: “I did what I had to do.” He told the police “I feel like I wasn’t, you know, wrong.”
Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony is employed by private security corporation Kingdom Group Protective Services. His title is “robbery suppression officer.” Walgreens has a contract with Kingdom whereby the pharmacy employs these “robbery suppression officers.” Kingdom requires them to buy and maintain their own firearms. Although almost all loss prevention staff are instructed not to get into physical altercations with people they suspect are shoplifting this is purely out of the corporate interest to avoid lawsuits — because Kingdom is a private contracting group and Walgreens is unlikely to be held responsible for their “hands-on policy.” Armed and unaccountable, rent-a-cops like Michael Anthony are the front line of defense… for what?
For corporate property.
Let us be even more precise: this front line of defense is maintained not by watching, recording, reporting, but by unleashing these rabid mercenary dogs to go on the offensive, to proactively murder people they suspect of shoplifting.
We have no evidence, other than the word of the top cop, DA Brooke Jenkins (and the killer Anthony himself), that Banko was trying to steal anything. Legally, thefts of the kind that Anthony claims was occurring are low-level misdemeanors. Under California law, petty theft is the theft of anything under $950. The maximum penalty for this kind of petty theft is a six month prison term. Loss prevention officers and mall cop types love to physically block, tackle, or grab people who are committing what would otherwise be a petty theft or a minor larceny. The reason for this is simple: robbery, that is theft from a person or using force, is a felony. In California the difference between walking out of Walgreens with under $950 worth of merchandise and of tugging a plastic bag containing $1 in snacks away from a “robbery suppression officer” is the difference of a jail sentence of six months, and one of nine years.
But here’s the thing: even under the law of capitalism, what Anthony did was murder.
We know that property owners will kill to make sure their ownership isn’t contested, and that’s not just in the claim-jumper frontier murders of bygone ages. Every winter, unhoused people are swept out of abandoned buildings to freeze to death on the street so the owners of those buildings can maintain their title. White homeowners in particular have established a recent trend of murdering strangers for driving up their driveways, knocking on their doors, etc. Property is sacrosanct, and Americans have been primed to defend theirs with violence.
Still, it is a long established practice that loss prevention is not supposed to be involved in the actual physical apprehension of people they think are taking property. Of the $48.9 billion in shrinkage reported in 2016, for example, less than 1 percent of that was accounted for by “external theft.” Loss Prevention Media, an online trade magazine, said this, in 2018: “[T]his is a staggering statistic. Even when a substantial margin of error is factored in, this data does not support the philosophy of any loss prevention program that spends the bulk of their time and capital investing in the apprehension of shoplifters.” The California State Senate passed Bill 553 this summer, which bans retail staff from physically stopping suspected thieves.
Under U.S. law, using deadly force against someone to stop them from stealing is murder. It’s not manslaughter, it’s not justified homicide. It’s murder.
So why isn’t Anthony being charged with murder?
Despite the fact that the laws, as they are on the books, forbid the execution of suspected thieves — despite the fact that the only justifiable homicides are those in which the imminent use of deadly force is reasonably feared by the person who did the killing — despite the fact that using escalating force is not justifiable (if you make a fist I can’t shoot you in self defense) — despite all of this, suspected thieves or people who are later said to be suspected thieves almost never receive the protection of the law. The law was written by capitalists and their petty-bourgeois lawyer cronies. When they want to change it, when they need it to do something other than what it says it must do, they can.
There’s this thing, you see, called prosecutorial discretion. That means prosecutors get to choose which cases to bring and which cases to drop. There’s no way to hold them accountable for this.
That’s why Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco DA, moved to dismiss the murder case against Officer Kenneth Cha for the brutal slaying of unarmed Sean Moore as soon as she took office. That’s why she won’t prosecute Anthony. What did she say when she made this choice? “The people of San Francisco elected me to restore accountability and enhance public safety… As prosecutors, we have a sacred duty to try cases in good faith, to not abuse our power and ensure that the cases we bring forward are fair in order to maintain trust in the criminal justice system.”
What Jenkins meant was that she was going to quash investigations into the police. In her twisted parlance, “accountability” meant the end of accountability. She essentially accused her predecessor, not the police of being “unaccountable” for trying to prosecute them. Not even the most straight-forward language is safe around the lackeys of capitalists — they will piss on your head and tell you it’s raining.
Samuel Sinyangwe, an anti-police violence activist, said that “murder is now fully decriminalized for police in the city of San Francisco.”
Just like the murder of Banko, the murder of Sean Moore was captured on video. In Sean’s 2017 case, there was no crime whatsoever. He was at home, on his front steps, unarmed. A noise complaint had been made and Kenneth Cha had been dispatched to investigate. Moore was having a mental health crisis when the police arrived and, from the safety of his home, he told them to leave. They forced him outside, pepper sprayed him, and beat him with a baton. In his thrashing, he punched an officer and kicked Cha.
Cha shot him. Those wounds killed him in prison.
Jenkins presides over a city with one of the worst records in California for disparate use of force on Black people, who are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than white people by San Francisco officers. This, despite the fact that there are 10 times as many white people in San Francisco as Black people.
Jenkins, who has helped the police and the monied interests of the Golden City to contort the law in new and obscene shapes to help justify their violence, is an enemy of the people she claims to serve.
