Berks Stands Up

Saturday September 19th!

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, 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. Though the protests on Sunday were mostly peaceful, that night there were incidents of escalation and property damage. 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 calling Taylor and the others’ bails blatantly unconstitutional. We are working with the Lancaster Legal Collective, ACLU, NAACP, the National Bail Fund Network, and local lawyers to get the outrageously high bail reduced and to get these folks out of jail. Tomorrow morning, Sept 17th, there is a bail hearing that could reduce bail for the people who are being detained. We are calling on DA Heather Adams to drop the inflated charges against community members. Please call her office at 717-299-8100 and echo this demand. We are thankful for our community partners, SafeHouse Lancaster and the NAACP Lancaster Chapter, who we’ve been working with to get people released from jail. There will be a joint press conference with these organizations tomorrow at 1pm (location TBD) that will be live-streamed on the LSU facebook page. We will give important updates and talk about the path forward to healing and justice. If you can help right now here are places you can donate for legal defense fees: https://lancasterstandsup.org/sept-legal-defense-funds/ Thank you for the outpouring of support over the past few days, the people of Lancaster never fail to show up for our community.