The friendly faces of the San Diego Police Department.

The encounter began as a routine traffic stop. It ended with the avoidable shooting death of a young man that the killer described as an act of self-defense. 

After the jury acquitted the defendant of murder, the prosecutor indicted the shooter a second time on several lesser charges. The second jury acquitted the defendant on the most serious charges and deadlocked regarding multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon. The prosecutor, grudgingly admitting that the defendant had been exonerated in a “fair trial,” dismissed the remaining charges. 

San Diego resident Sagon Penn was 22 years old when he was detained and assaulted by Officers Donovan Jacobs and Thomas Riggs in March 1985. At the time, he was about two weeks away from starting a job as a “community service officer” with the police department. He had also filled out an application to attend the police academy. 

Physically and temperamentally, Penn was over-qualified for a job with the SDPD. Although he hadn’t played high school sports, he was tall and athletic, and had earned a brown belt in Karate. According to his friends and family, he was a natural peacemaker, a student of Buddhism who later converted to Christianity and who learned martial arts as a way to protect himself and those around him without using lethal force. 

Jacobs, by way of contrast, was superbly qualified to be a law enforcer, and patently unqualified to be a peace officer. He was described as “one of the most prejudiced white people I’ve ever known” and “an ideal candidate for the Ku Klux Klan” by former police colleague Drew MacIntrye, who  became a minister in nearby Alpine after leaving the San Diego PD in disgust. 

Fellow SDPD Officer Nathaniel Jordan, a black man who also left law enforcement for the ministry, confirmed that assessment, testifying that Jacobs made casual and frequent use of epithets in his presence, such as “n*gger” and “boy.” During Penn’s second trial, former SDPD Lieutenant Doyle Wheeler described his attempts to warn superiors that Jacobs’ bigotry and aggression had provoked confrontations endangering the lives of his comrades.

Jacobs was made a Police Agent (the department’s designation for a patrol officer) despite an academy assessment documenting his tendency to “use profanity, slurs, and lies in his police work,” in the words of a Los Angeles Times summary of trial evidence. 

“Unless you show some considerable change or at least some more consideration for others and can change your behavior … we don’t want you because you are going to do nothing but create problems for yourself, for the public, and for the department,” Jacobs was reportedly told by an academy supervisor in 1979. 

At the time of his confrontation with Penn, Jacobs was a known danger to his colleagues and the public at large. Penn, despite “rumors” that the prosecution lusted to introduce as evidencein the subsequent trial, had no criminal record, no gang affiliations, and no demonstrated inclination toward violence. 

Among the tenets instilled in Penn by his Karate instructor, Orned Gabriel, was the need to de-escalate conflicts before they blossom into violence. Self-defense, Penn was taught, begins with walking away from a potential fight.

Officer Jacobs, who had stopped Penn without cause simply because he was a young black man in the company of several black friends, was determined to start a fight. Penn, on the other hand, was determined to avoid one.

Penn wasn’t stopped for a traffic violation. The official pretext supplied in the subsequent report was that he had made an illegal U-turn, but that pretense dissolved very quickly during the first trial.  He was seated behind the wheel of a pickup truck in a driveway talking with friends when he was accosted by Jacobs.

“Are you Blood or Cuz?” Jacobs sneered at Penn, assuming that the puzzled young black man simply had to be a member of a street gang. “Are you Blood or Cuz?”

Although Jacobs had neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion to do so, he demanded identification from Penn.