Justice and Accountability March for Brenda

"Oh, how I wished these people could have seen the Salinas Police Department’s war zone tank parked in the middle of one of our poorest neighborhoods to contain a 20-year-old woman. In my wild imagination, the Facebook commenters would understand that the last thing their neighbors need — after worrying about lack of adequate housing, hunger, mental health issues and a myriad of issues that go hand-in-hand with poverty — is to worry about having police officers where school counselors should be placed. Maybe these neighbors would see that having a swarm of officers in an already traumatized community to deal with a very distressed community member only creates more trauma, resentment and fear.

"I hope they saw the footage. I hope they read a story in the Monterey County Weekly that describes Brenda Berenice Rodríguez Mendoza, 20, as suffering from postpartum depression and as having run out of her meds. I hope they saw she was living in a car and was desperate because she wanted to recover her baby, but because she was homeless and had a history of drug abuse, she knew she was facing a mountain of hurdles. Seen through the lens of postpartum depression, the hurdles must have looked to Brenda the size of Mount Everest."

Read more:
Uneccessary trauma
https://voicesofmontereybay.org/2019/03/13/unnecessary-trauma/