ACLU, California city settle lawsuit over artwork protesting police brutality
The city of Pomona and the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California have settled a lawsuit over murals protesting police brutality that were painted on the exterior walls of a social justice nonprofit group’s center.
The settlement, signed in May and announced Monday, July 14, ends legal action filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California on behalf of Gente Organizada or “Organized People,” which runs a youth center on West Holt Avenue.
The ACLU sued the city in 2023 after Pomona officials that year cited and fined Gente for paintings on its youth center.
Formed in 2014, Gente “works with communities that comprise historically underrepresented, immigrant populations to understand their rights and the power of community action,” the lawsuit states.
At issue were three murals on the youth center’s exterior walls. Those murals were vandalized “after we went public with everything” and had to be replaced, Ivan Hernandez, Gente’s director of movement building, said via email.
One showed a group of protesters marching with a sign reading “Tim Sandoval Defund Pomona Police.” Sandoval is Pomona’s mayor.
Another mural, titled “For the People,” showed a roll of film with images from a 2022 Black Lives Matter protest in Pomona. The third mural depicted people standing in a field of flowers above the slogan “End Institutional Violence.”
The lawsuit alleged that the city contended the murals violated Pomona’s zoning ordinance, which forbids certain signs and banners.
Besides fining Gente, the city “sent the citation to the home of Gente Organizada’s co-founder and threatened him that, unless he and the Organization immediately got in line and took down their art, the City might ‘take criminal action’ to force them to do so,” the lawsuit states.
The ACLU argued that the city’s actions violated Gente’s First Amendment rights.
The lawsuit also alleged a city hearing officer who upheld the citations “made several clear legal and factual errors” and Pomona’s sign code applied to business-related signs, not expressions of political beliefs.
The settlement calls on Pomona to rework its sign code “to eliminate provisions in the law that violated the public’s constitutional rights to free speech and expression,” an ACLU news release states.
Gente’s lawyers also will have the chance to weigh in on upcoming changes to Pomona’s public art code before those changes go to the city council.
The city also agreed to let Gente mount new artwork without the need for new permits for the next five years. And Pomona will pay Gente’s legal team $150,000 for legal fees and refund Gente $374 for what the nonprofit organization paid for citations.
Hernandez, of Gente, praised the settlement.
“While Pomona attempted to block our right to free speech and weaponized city code so that we could not exercise our right to artistic expression, we are grateful this litigation resulted in changes in the city code that uphold our constitutional rights — ensuring that other Pomona organizations are not unfairly subjected to improper citations and fines,” Hernandez said in the release.
The release quoted Jonathan Markovitz, an ACLU staff attorney, as saying: “We hope this case inspires other cities to honor fundamental rights to free speech and expression when considering their own zoning and sign codes.”
Pomona Assistant City Manager Mark Gluba declined to comment on the settlement.