Ron Settles: A Victim of Police Brutality

In the image, people passionately protest the death of Ron Settles in Long Beach, California. Known for his time as a football player at Cal State Long Beach, Ron Settles was arrested by the Signal Hill police department for speeding. The morning after his arrest, he was found dead. Police officers claimed that they found him hung in his jail cell, however no proof exists because there are only photographs of Settles on the floor and not hanging. The officers refused to testify and Ron Settles death was declared a suicide. 

Despite the outcome, many felt skeptical and believed that this was another case of police brutality. Many of Settles’s friends and family agreed that he would never kill himself and had “too much to live for.” An examination of his body determined that Settles was potentially killed from a chokehold and the jury decided that he had died “at the hand of another,” not suicide. No one was prosecuted for Settles’s death and the City of Signal Hill gave the family a million- dollar settlement.

Since the early twentieth-century, African Americans in Long Beach have been resisting racism and exclusion by organizing social injustice groups, often around church. In 1903, on Tenth street, a Colored Baptist Mission became one of the early forms of organization for Black residents in the area (Norman 15). After a few years, Whites began to react in the form of opposing sharing neighborhoods and schools with Black residents.

An explosion of overly racist activities followed the First World War in the area. The City Attorney rejected proposals to ban the hostile game “drowning-the-n*gger” (Norman 16). In the following years the Ku Klux Klan’s first initiation to an audience of thousands of Long Beach residents appeared, and later on Black homeowners were banned from purchasing desirable beachfront property (Norman 16).

After the Second World War, an upwardly mobile and desegregated generation of Black veterans coupled with a nascent civil rights movement in Long Beach created large-scale social and economic progress (Norman 17). The 1960s included rapid change in the form of new organizations, such as the Civic Improvement League of Long Beach, and Blacks elected to positions of power, such as James Harold Wilson, the first Black City Councilmember (Norman 17-18).

Across the US and in Long Beach, African Americans have faced numerous hardships in the modern era. Before the 1980s, millions of African Americans were moving to industrial cities for jobs, and although racism prevailed, so did white flight. This exodus resulted in these African American-concentrated industrial cities having less tax revenue for city services and programs. In turn, these issues motivated civil rights organizations to expose the injustices inflicted on African Americans and these different policies of racial discrimination in the Los Angeles area (Lee).

In 1981, the opaque death of Long Beach student Ron Settles in police custody left a wound in the local Black community, sparking protests. According to police, he committed suicide in his cell, though no proof supporting this claim exists. His death and the following backlash motivated reforms in police transparency in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Most police now wear body cameras and are more thorough in their written reports. 

African Americans have suffered a great amount from police brutality, even before the establishment of policing. The period of time when Jim Crow Laws were enforced in America was a nightmare for African Americans residing in the South. Seeking refuge from the harsh realities of their existence, many fled to the Northern states, but the police still constantly scrutinized and persecuted Black Americans. President Herbert Hoover established the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement to investigate policing tactics used and Prohibition-related crimes, revealing severe police brutality. Though the report did not expose the racial disparity, evidence clearly showed African Americans as disproportionately affected. From this time, police brutality continued to worsen. 

Furthermore, during the Civil Rights era in America, police violence expanded to incomprehensible lengths. Civil rights activists practiced peaceful protests, such as sit-ins and city walk-throughs, but police brutality still prevailed. Police used dogs, fire hoses, and even stick-beating to punish peaceful protestors. Civil rights riots were often violent, and police made the situation much more dire by brutally beating and often killing African Americans. One of the deadliest riots was in Newark in 1967. Police beat John Smith, a Black cab driver, and killed him. Twenty-six more died in the days that followed, all initiated by police. Most recently, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and countless others have been killed by the police. 

Police have failed to ensure safety for all people in America. Since its establishment, the United States intended to create a “more perfect union,” which cannot be done without abolishing the unjust police actions. Ron Settles exemplifies the same failure of the United States to live up to its founding credo. A young college student arrested for speeding found dead in jail in under 24 hours. A power imbalance in the unsubstantiated police testimony of a hanging superseding a jury ruling that he had died “at the hand of another.” No prosecution. The protestors in the image are not simply rejecting the death of one man in a Long Beach jail but are repudiating centuries of unequal treatment under the law everywhere in the United States.

African Americans in protest march against Signal Hill police in death of Ron Settles in Long Beach, Calif., 1981. Rick Meyer, December 6, 1981. Image courtesy of UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections.

Works cited

1. Norman, Alex J., and Lydia A. Hollie. 2013, The State of Black Long Beach: A Call to Action for the Black Agenda, www.bhclongbeach.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/StateofBlackLongBeach2013.pdf. 
2. Lee, Deborah. "New Leadership and Urban Change, 1979–1984." The American Mosaic: The African American Experience, ABC-CLIO, 2020, africanamerican2.abc-clio.com/Topics/Display/33
3. Nodjimbadem, Katie. “The Long, Painful History of Police Brutality in the U.S.” Smithsonian.com, Smithsonian Institution, www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/long-painful-history-police-brutality-in-the-us-180964098/. 
4. “June 2, 1981: Football Player Ron Settles Murdered in Police Custody” Blackthen.com, April 26, 2020 https://blackthen.com/june-2-1981-ron-settles-murdered-in-police-custody/
5. Cynthia Adina Kirkwood “Ron Settles' Jail Hanging Grieves Me Still” Freedom Writer, July 4 https://www.cynthiaadinakirkwood.com/post/ron-settles-jail-hanging-grieves-me-still

Cite this article

Anisha Alam, Martin Bourdev, Andrea Flores, Shannyn Sul. "Ron Settles: A Victim of Police Brutality." Los Angeles: The City and the Library. Colleen Jauretche, Editor. Fall 2020. /article/2020-12-10-f20-lecture10-01