3450 Folsom Street, San Francisco 94110 (north side parking lot)
Though visitors tend to head to Twin Peaks for a panoramic view of the city, Bernal Heights Park is a locals’ favorite, with 360-degree city views and a ring road that connects to a warren of hillside stairways and walkable (if steeply pitched) streets. These days, however, Bernal Hill is also known as Alex Nieto Park, commemorating the life of a young man who was killed here by the San Francisco police in 2014. Nieto’s killing became a rallying cry for the antigentrification and anti-police-violence movements, and it also highlighted the tensions present in the contemporary Mission District, in which race and class remain entrenched in the struggle for the very right to exist in the city.
Nieto’s death stirred a vocal and energetic response, with activists calling for big changes in the ways that the police interact with Black and Brown communities. That it happened on this hill, which contains many other layers of political and ecological histories, adds poignancy to the park. Particularly during the era of the US war in Vietnam, for example, the neighborhood surrounding the park was known for the Left-leaning politics of the working-class and antiwar-activist population living on the hill, earning it the name “red hill” in popular lore. The moniker has geologic roots as well, with the hill’s red chert rock base, exposed in the mid-twentieth century by quarrying, offering the occasional red dusty glow to the park. In 1974 the passage of Proposition J protected the park boundaries by designating Bernal Heights, along with hilltops across the city, as protected open space while also funding green-space preservation and improvements.
Another layer: the Mission’s Latinx roots. Although the 911 call that alerted police to Nieto’s presence in the park suggested that he was somehow out of place, his presence there as a Latinx man is part of a long legacy. In the decades prior, the adjacent Mission District had broadly become a haven for Central American and Mexican migrants, with Bernal Heights serving as a hub of the growing Latinx/Chicanx geography of the city. One story places militant members of Nicaragua’s Sandinista National Liberation Front on the hill in the 1970s, where they would use the ring road of the park to train for the 1979 revolution in Nicaragua. The presence of Spanish-speaking residents on and around the hill traces to at least the mid-1700s, during the Spanish colonial period in California history. During the period of Mexican control, the government granted a huge swath of this corner of San Francisco as a rancho to José Cornelio Bernal, who left behind his name.
The long Latinx presence around the hill amplifies the significance of Nieto’s death. Nieto had worked as a teen youth counselor at a local neighborhood center. On the day he was killed, Nieto was eating a burrito on a bench. The Taser that he was required to carry for his other job, as a nightclub security guard, was at his side. He posed no threat to anyone, yet the police fired at him a terrifying fifty-nine times. When it came out in the news media that the person who called the police on Nieto was both white and a recent arrival to the neighborhood, activists seeking accountability labeled the killing “death by gentrification.” This all took place within the rising national awareness about Black and Brown victims of police brutality, from Long Island to Ferguson. Nieto’s killing added fire to the movement against police impunity, as friends, family, and community members demonstrated across the city. Community pressure was successful in bringing the case to trial, but there was no conviction.
There were other police killings around the same time that sparked community action. Within a few months of each other in 2015 and early 2016, San Francisco police killed Amilcar Perez Lopez, Luis Góngora Pat, and Mario Woods. In April 2016 a group calling themselves the Frisco 5 carried out a seventeen-day hunger strike held in front of the Mission police station. They protested the killings as well as ongoing police brutality and sweeps of homeless encampments, and called for the city to fire police chief Greg Suhr, who did indeed resign following another SFPD killing in the Bayview District. The police accountability activism of the Frisco 5 was bolstered by other creative responses around the city, including the work of the Do No Harm Coalition, where doctors and students at the state’s flagship medical campus of the University of California San Francisco developed a working group defining police killing as a public health emergency. Back on Bernal Hill, as a reminder of Nieto’s life, as well as broader issues of police accountability, the city approved a permanent memorial in 2016. It is planned for the north side of the hill, near the bench where Nieto was killed; this is near where the path slopes down to connect with Folsom Street, just a few hundred yards from the parking lot. (LisaRuth Elliott)