La Mesa settles lawsuit with protestor partially blinded by bean bag

The High Cost of Forgiving

Author

By Walter Mencken

Publish Date

March 31, 2023

La Mesa Mayor Mark Arapostathis presents Leslie Furcron’s attorney Dante Pride with a very large check. “Our officer may not have done anything wrong,” he said during the ceremony, “but we hope this makes it right. Next time a large crowd of angry protestors comes to our town, surrounds our government buildings, and starts throwing rocks and bottles, I promise that no police officer will shoot anyone in the head with a bean bag. Mostly because this $10 million had to come out of our public safety budget, and so we just don’t have the manpower for that sort of thing. But also because we are definitely not racist!”

On May 30 of 2020, La Mesa police detective Eric Knudson fired a bean bag round at Leslie Furcron as she took part in a protest outside the La Mesa Police Department. Protestors were throwing rocks and bottles at police officers gathered outside the building, and when Furcron threw her empty can of Red Bull, Knudson mistook it for a rock and fired in response. Neither the La Mesa Police Department nor the County of San Diego determined that Knudson had acted improperly from a legal and policy standpoint. But there were other factors to consider. “We might have done okay in court,” explains La Mesa Mayor Mark Arapostathis. “Ms. Furcron is on video encouraging protestors to burn the police station down. But those protests were organized in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of a police officer in Minnesota. And they were centered in La Mesa because one of our officers got filmed being too aggressive with a black suspect a few days later. So I sat down with Ms. Furcron’s attorney and asked, ‘How much is it going to take to make La Mesa not racist?’ Turns out it was a pretty big number.”