On any given day in the Bay Area, it's common to come across aspiring musicians hawking homemade music CDs on the streets of Oakland, Berkeley or San Francisco.
Kazi Reeves, 25, who spends time each week outside Peet's Coffee Shop on Oakland's Lakeshore Avenue, is an easygoing pitchman who uses an iPod and headphones to offer potential customers a free sample.
He is unabashedly friendly and upbeat, except when it comes to the Johannes Mehserle trial in Los Angeles.
"I expect an unfair verdict," Reeves said. "A fair verdict would at least be manslaughter," he said. Anything less "would be enough for me to take to the streets and protest," he said.
Mehserle, a former BART police officer, is charged with murdering train passenger Oscar Grant, who was shot in the back as he lay on a platform at an Oakland train station. The New Year's Day 2009 shooting was captured on video and has been viewed by millions of people.
Mehserle, who is white, killed Grant, who was black, moments after he was removed from the train along with several others, allegedly for fighting. The death of Grant, 22, sparked two nights of demonstrations and vandalism in downtown Oakland.
Mehserle's attorney, Michael Rains, succeeded in his bid to move the trial from Alameda County because of extensive media coverage. The trial, in Los Angeles County Superior Court, is expected to wrap up in the coming days and be handed over to the jury.
Distrust of police
The jury, which has no black people, has sparked the usual suspicions and fears among young and old in the African American community that a lesser verdict will be reached.
For young black men like Reeves, who was 7 years old in 1992 when the Rodney King beating verdict sparked three days of riots in Los Angeles, police interactions such as the one that led to Grant's death are all too familiar, he said.
About two years ago, Reeves said, Richmond police who had identified him as a bank robbery suspect yanked him from his vehicle.
Two young African American men sitting with him Monday, who identified themselves only as Mike and Curtis, nodded their heads. Mike said police in San Leandro rousted him a few months ago when they saw him enter a friend's home.
The men have a different perspective than those who have not experienced such interactions with police.
"Ask the cops how hard it is to resist arrest when you're lying face-down with a knee in your back," Reeves said.
Mehserle's claim that the shooting was accidental may be plausible, he said, but Grant is dead and someone needs to be held accountable for that. If the shoe were on the other foot, and the victim was a white guy, regardless of the cop's race, someone would surely answer for it, Reeves said.
Tears don't convince
The former police officer's teary-eyed explanation from the witness stand last week did nothing to change Reeves' opinion of the case. If anything, it only hardened his well-founded cynicism toward the justice system.
"I've seen a lot of brothers who offered tearful apologies," he said. "They weren't cops, and they received the maximum sentence."
Oakland not villain
For scores of people in the Bay Area, the videotaped killing of Grant is the Bay Area equivalent of the 1991 Rodney King beating in Los Angeles. To them, the Grant video is the latest in a pattern of African American residents being abused by government authorities who are sworn to protect them.
Still, while there will almost surely be some public reaction to the Mehserle verdict on the streets of Oakland, about the only thing more discouraging to some than absolving the former officer of blame and responsibility would be to vent that anger at the struggling city of Oakland and its residents.
This article has been corrected since it appeared in print editions.
Chip Johnson's column appears in the Chronicle on Tuesday and Friday. E-mail him at
chjohnson@sfchronicle.com.
