The past 72 hours have been some of the most traumatic times we’ve had in Lancaster county in recent memory. We are all processing what has occurred and how we heal and move forward together as a community.
On Sunday afternoon, the Lancaster City Police Department sent a lone, armed police officer to meet Ricardo Munoz, who was suffering an acute mental health crisis, after his sister placed a non-emergency call concerned about his well-being and the well-being of her mother.
Arriving on the scene alone and unprepared to de-escalate the situation, the officer shot and killed Munoz after Munoz charged the officer with a knife.
Residents gathered and protests built throughout the day. All summer members of our community have been organizing protests demanding changes to policing, criminal justice reform, and accountability. Munoz’s tragic death underscores the failures of our system.
Though the protests on Sunday were mostly peaceful, that night there were incidents of property destruction. It is unclear who caused the damage or their relationship to the protest, but police seem to have made arrests of whoever they could grab in the vicinity.
On Monday and Tuesday, District Attorney Heather Adams filed outrageous and politically motivated charges against those protesting our broken policing system, clearly aiming to intimidate other community members from speaking out and calling for change.
Those charges gave the green light for Judge Bruce Roth to set bail at an exorbitant $1 MILLION for anyone in the vicinity of the protest.
Lt.-Gov. John Fetterman has spoken out about the situation, describing the absurdly high bail amounts as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
https://twitter.com/JohnFetterman/status/1305825034414497792?s=20
Many others have spoken out forcefully across our state, including the ACLU.
https://twitter.com/aclupa/status/1305973816854802438?s=20
Even national figures like presidential candidate Marianne Williamson have spoken out.
https://twitter.com/marwilliamson/status/1305723418042667013?s=20
One of those arrested, 20-year-old Taylor Enterline, was a Lancaster Stands Up intern in 2018 and is deeply dedicated to social justice and racial justice, organizing peaceful demonstrations in Manheim this summer. 
This photo is of Taylor at a #BlackLivesMatter protest that she helped to organize this summer in Manheim.
Taylor was at Sunday's protest as a medic, a role intended to keep everyone safe. Police clearly arrested people indiscriminately and now Taylor faces an absurdly high $1 million bail.
In the charges police are not even alleging that those charged are the people who carried out the property destruction. Just by being at the protest and exercising their Constitutional rights to engage in protest, they are now being accused of incitement.
This summer we've seen a pattern of highly unusual arrests and prosecutorial strategies in Lancaster Co. that appear to indicate local police, prosecutors and judges closing ranks and targeting the young leaders who have been calling for police and criminal justice reform.
The absurdly high bail amounts indicate that what we're seeing is not a measured pursuit of justice, but a politically motivated attack on the movement for police reform and accountability.
We are working with the @ACLU, @NAACP, the @bailfundnetwork, and local attorneys to get the outrageously high bail reduced and to get these folks out of jail.
We are calling on District Attorney Heather Adams to drop the inflated charges against community members. Please call her office at 717-299-8100 and echo this demand.
Whether we are Black or Latino, Asian or white, we all want our families to be healthy and our communities to be whole.
This week we've seen the Lancaster City Police Dept, DA Heather Adams, and other politicians use this tragedy to divide our community.
They want to distract us from the fact that a young man suffering an acute mental health crisis was killed by the Lancaster City Police.
They want to deflect from their own culpability, not just in this incident, but in maintaining a broken and unequal criminal justice system; a system where how you are treated by police or by judges too often depends on your income, neighborhood, or the color of your skin.
Enough is enough. The people of Lancaster deserve better.
We continue to call on our elected officials to speak out. This is a great injustice and every elected official in Lancaster must go on the record to speak up and call for justice.
We are calling on District Attorney Heather Adams to drop the inflated charges against those who have participated in protests in recent days—as the start of a good faith effort to restore trust between the community and law enforcement officials.
We are thankful for everyone in Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, and across our country working to get people released from jail.
If you can help right now here are places you can donate for legal defense fees: lancasterstandsup.org/sept-legal-def…
We will continue to provide updates as they are available. Thank you for your support and solidarity.
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