A Marxist anti-police group is using social media to promote a brief video they claim shows an off-duty Santa Ana police officer threatening them with violence.
OC Independent has obtained the full, unedited video — which tells a very different story than the narrative being peddled by the anodyne-sounding Community Service Organization of Orange County (CSO-OC), a subset of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, which describes itself as a “national organization of revolutionaries fighting for socialism in the United States.”
Two CSO-OC activists saw off-duty Santa Ana police officer Isaac Ibarra as he was leaving SAPD headquarters to go home. Ibarra is one of two SAPD officers involved in the fatal shooting of Noe Rodriguez. SAPD Internal Affairs has completed an investigation of the shooting, and its findings are embargoed pending completion the the investigation by the state Attorney General – the latter of which is mandated by law.
CSO-OC has been using the Noe Rodriguez shooting to pursue its years-long crusade against law enforcement.
The video excerpt released by CSO-OC leaders David Pulido — the nephew of former Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido — and Abraham Quintana shows them just a couple of feet behind Ibarra in the confined space of a stairwell as the off-duty officer climbs the stairs.
You can see their Instagram post here.
What the post conceals is that at this point, Pulido and Quintana have been filming and harassing Ibarra since he exited the police department building, heading for the parking structure across the street – and will continue doing so for another seven minutes.
Uncertain of the intentions of the two communist activists, Ibarra turns and warns them to back off.
“Don’t come at me, bro. Hey, don’t walk behind me. I’ll have to take that as a threat — you’re following behind me. I have no idea who you are,” Ibarra told them.
Pulido and Quintana ignored Ibarra’s request and continued stalking him into the parking structure, out of the parking structure, and back to the police station — at which point Ibarra phoned police and requested help.
While CSO-OC’s short Instagram post gives the misleading impression the encounter was brief and almost incidental, the full video runs nearly eight minutes.
It begins with Officer Ibarra walking down the sidewalk toward a crosswalk, his gaze forward, while Pulido and Quintana loudly harass him from close behind. Pulido doggedly pursues Ibarra, pelting him with a constant stream of taunts and denunciations — doing his best impression of a Maoist Red Guard from the Cultural Revolution.
Throughout the full eight minutes, it is painfully obvious Ibarra wants nothing to do with Pulido and Quintana and is simply trying to get to his car and go home. They nonetheless refuse to leave him alone, hectoring him with a continuous barrage of verbal abuse:
“You should never show your face.”
“You should turn yourself in. You have no shame.”
“This is the killer cop who killed Noe Rodriguez.”
“You were part of a crime. And you’re not getting away with it. One way or another, Isaac, it’s coming for you.”
“You’re a fucking killer. A shameless killer. You’re disgusting. You should turn yourself in.”
“You’re a fucking liar. You’re a killer.”
Quintana, serving as Pulido’s cameraman, chimed in occasionally: “You’re a fucking killer, dude. You should answer for your damn crimes, man.”
At several points, Pulido and Quintana angled their bodies toward the officer as if trying to provoke a physical reaction while continuing to record — something like drawing a charge in basketball. Ibarra refused to take the bait, continuing to walk away in what appeared to be a deliberate effort to avoid escalation.
At one point, Pulido and Quintana cornered Ibarra between two cars near the edge of the second floor of the parking structure. As Ibarra tried to pass between the cars, Pulido and Quintana obstructed him, despite the officer telling them to move aside.
A few minutes later, on the staircase outside the structure, Pulido and Quintana again placed themselves in Ibarra’s path. When the off-duty officer told them to move – “I’m gonna walk by if you just get outta my way” – and made his way past them, Pulido and Quintana refused, and it appears one of them laid a hand on Ibarra’s back.
“Whoa! Whoa! Did you push me, bro? You just fucking pushed me, dude!” Ibarra said.
Either Pulido or Quintana claimed, incredibly, that it was Ibarra doing the pushing.
Quintana then told Pulido, “I got it!” while Pulido said, “It’s on film.”
Watching the full video leaves no doubt that Pulido and Quintana were trying to provoke Ibarra into exploding verbally and physically in order to capture a viral moment that would generate social media clout for CSO-OC and advance the group’s narrative that police forces are filled with racist killers.
Pulido’s severe demeanor and bloodless tone call to mind Septa Unella from Game of Thrones — the Faith Militant fanatic who tortured the wrong-minded while icily urging them to “Repent! Repent!”
Ibarra ultimately called the police. When the squad car arrived, he invited Pulido and Quintana to speak with the officers. “Follow me. Let’s go,” he told them. Ibarra informed the officers that Quintana had pushed him. “You pushed me when I was trying to go downstairs,” he said, indicating Quintana, who claimed it was the other way around.
The officers asked Pulido to step away from Ibarra. As he did, Pulido continued hurling abuse. “Fuck you. Fuck you. Turn yourself in. You fucking killer,” he cursed.
Pulido then offered police a sanitized account of events. “We followed him, told him we know who he is, and we said he should hold himself accountable for what he did. That’s all we did,” he said — a description that omitted the sustained harassment, the physical obstruction, and the failed attempt to goad Ibarra into losing his temper on camera. Pulido then tried to cast Ibarra as the villain, alleging the officer had threatened them. “All we’re doing is confronting this man for what he did,” he claimed.
It says something about Pulido’s cramped revolutionary worldview that he sees nothing wrong with publicly stalking and harassing an off-duty police officer. Ibarra found himself surprised, outnumbered, and with no idea what these two fanatics were or weren’t planning. He was just trying to go home. Pulido and Quintana, seeing themselves as avatars of “the people” and dehumanizing Ibarra as a “fucking killer,” deliberately tried to provoke him into lashing out on camera.
Perhaps Pulido feels CSO-OC needs to burnish its communist anti-cop reputation with added social media clout. The group has been locked in a power struggle with a rival outfit called Dare To Struggle, which earlier this year accused CSO-OC of collaborating with law enforcement to undermine them.
The radical group from which Pulido and the CSO-OC sprung – the Freedom Road Socialist Organization – denounces police departments as instruments of domestic terror: “Many Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, and poor people view the police as an occupying army in their neighborhoods and towns. Every city police department is a racist institution. Even if Blacks and Latinos are in leadership positions and the police force is integrated, the actions of the police speak loud and clear. In the U.S.A., the police are used to control poor communities of color through intimidation and violence. Their purpose is to keep oppressed nationalities – Black, Chicano / Latino, Asian, and Native American peoples – down.”
It’s hard to think of a worldview more diametrically opposed to the views of Santa Ana’s population – the people Pulido and his comrades claim to champion.
In the final analysis, neither Dare To Struggle nor CSO-OC — nor any of their socialist-communist brethren — truly speak for “the people,” despite endlessly invoking their will. Normal, working, law-abiding people support law enforcement and want it funded and equipped to put criminals behind bars and keep neighborhoods safe.
Acknowledging that reality, however, would deprive the David Pulidos of the world of all sense of purpose and require them to become productive members of society. It’s simpler to live in a hermetically sealed Marxist fantasyland unpeopled by normal human beings.
Editor’s note: the original version of this article erroneously stated the Internal Affairs investigation had cleared Officers Ibarra and Casillas.
