Tyisha Miller

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyisha_Miller

Tyisha Miller was a 19 year old African American woman from Rubidoux, California. She was shot dead by police officers called by family members who could not wake her as she lay unconscious in a car. The incident sparked demonstrations and protests amid claims of police racism. The officers involved were fired from Riverside Police Department but did not face prosecution due to insufficient evidence.


In the early morning hours of December 28, 1998, Tyisha Miller, a 19-year-old African American woman from Rubidoux, Riverside, California, had been driving with her 15-year-old friend late in her aunt's Nissan Sentra when the car got a flat tire. A passing stranger helped them change the tyre, but the spare was flat, so the stranger led them to a filling station to inflate it. The tire would not hold air so Ms. Miller waited in the car while the man drove her friend home to get assistance from the family.

When relatives arrived they found Ms. Miller apparently comatose in the locked car, with the engine running and the radio on. She was shaking bodily and foaming at the mouth, and had a .380 semi-automatic pistol in her lap.  Unable to wake her they called 9-1-1. Four Police officers arrived at the scene within minutes and, informed by family members of the presence of a gun in the car, approached the vehicle with guns drawn. After attempting for several minutes to get a response from Miller, the decision was made to force entry into the vehicle as Miller was in apparent need of immediate medical attention. As one of the officers was attempting to remove the gun, Miller is said to have sat up and grabbed the weapon, at which point the officers opened fire 23 times, hitting Ms. Miller with at least 12 bullets, including 4 in the head. The officers involved, three white and one Hispanic, were placed on administrative leave. They claimed they had acted in self-defense.

The releasing of the coroner's report prompted protests from the community, who rallied at the police headquarters, demanding an independent investigation. amongst suggestions that institutional racism had played a role.


At a hearing in May 1999, Riverside County District Attorney, Grover Trask, stated that the four police officers involved had probably made an error of judgment, but had committed no crime. This sparked protests from the likes of Jesse Jackson and hundreds turned out to demonstrate against the decision not to prosecute, resulting in the arrests of 46 protesters, including Rev. Al Sharpton.

In the wake of these protests, Federal officials announced the formation of a unit of lawyers to investigate and prosecute civil rights violations, and a Federal Department of Justice investigation into Riverside Police Department, to determine if their practices and policies inherently violated civil rights. Following shortly after this announcement, the four officers involved in the incident were fired for "violating department policies", a decision that had been made several weeks before.

Toxicological reports subsequently indicated that Miller had been under the influence of the drug gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) at the time of the shooting. In January 2002, arbitrator Robert Steinberg of Culver City found that the officers had been wrongly fired and that the decision to terminate their employment constituted an "abuse of administrative discretion". He awarded them full back-pay, but did not order them to be reinstated, citing racial politics. In December 2002, the Justice Department's civil rights division, formed in response to this and other shootings, closed the investigation, citing insufficient evidence to prosecute the police officers.


Riverside 20 (also known as the Freeway Twenty because protesters shut down the westbound 91 Freeway in Riverside, CA)

The Riverside 20 are the individuals who were fined, penalized, harassed, abused, searched, seized, slandered, code enforced, threatened, routine traffic stopped and prosecuted for their participation in a protest movement.

The protest movement sprang up around the questionable police shootings of Tyisha Miller (Riverside PD) and Irvin Landrum Jr. (Claremont PD). The original 20 organizers started to movement on the date 1-28-99 after a “Violence in Riverside Symposium” in the Science Library, University of California/Riverside (UCR). The Press-Enterprise reported that the Riverside County District Attorney’s office filed charges against 20 protesters on February 17, 2000.

A play called Dreamscape, based on this incident, has been written by Rickerby Hinds, a faculty member in the Department of Theatre at UC Riverside. Dreamscape has toured Southern California, making appearances at UC Riverside, University of Southern California, San Diego City College, and UC Santa Barbara. Dreamscape is scheduled to visit Washington, D.C., the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the Contact Theatre in Manchester, England.