The San Francisco public defender’s office on Thursday released police body-camera and security footage showing three officers punching and kneeling on a man last year in a SoMa apartment building. The office also accused the district attorney of trying to hide evidence from a jury and misleading the public about the case.
San Francisco Police Department officers kneeled on Kevon Gibson’s head and neck and struck him with their fists during the Aug. 17, 2025, incident inside a Sixth Street building, public defenders said. Gibson can be heard pleading with officers and saying he can’t breathe.
Gibson was hospitalized in intensive care for several days after the altercation. The officers contend that Gibson fought them.
The public defender is filing complaints against the officers with the city’s Department of Police Accountability and will seek to have state regulators decertify them, which would bar them from working in law enforcement.
“It’s our job as public defenders to fight back against government overreach, and to protect the community by confronting violence perpetrated by state actors,” Public Defender Mano Raju said. “This is why we are exposing this police brutality and the district attorney’s office’s attempts to cover it up.”
The public defender argues that this footage disproves police officers’ claims about the altercation. | Source: Courtesy San Francisco Public Defender’s Office
Raju said that Gibson’s words echoed those of Eric Garner, who died when placed in a chokehold by a New York City police officer, and that the SFPD officers’ actions resembled those of Minneapolis officers who killed George Floyd. “Thank God Mr. Gibson is alive,” he said.
According to the public defender’s office, the episode began when a resident confronted Gibson, who had been staying in the building to care for a friend. The resident called police and said Gibson had threatened him with a gun. Defenders said what the man described as a firearm was in fact a torch lighter.
Police body-camera audio captured the resident making racist comments about Gibson, who is Black, and threatening to stab him, the defense lawyers said. The resident used the n-word to refer to Gibson and said he would “stick this knife into his Black ass.”
Later, Gibson returned to his friend’s apartment, running past the other resident’s door in the hope of avoiding another confrontation, but the resident summoned police again with additional phony allegations, the public defenders said.
Kevon Gibson was treated in an intensive care unit after being beaten by San Francisco police officers on August 17, 2025. | Source: Courtesy San Francisco Public Defender
SFPD officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway, and Gabriel Rivera responded. Footage shown Thursday depicted the officers pounding on the door of the woman who is Gibson’s friend, apparently believing he was inside, according to the public defender’s office. The officers can be heard mocking Gibson’s first name, calling him her “big ass boyfriend” and telling her that if they kicked in her door, “no one would care.”
An officer’s camera shows Gibson emerging from an elevator and the cops telling him he was not under arrest and would not be pulled out, but two immediately grabbed his wrists, and a struggle ensued. Gibson said he was not resisting as the cops repeatedly hit him. One officer said Gibson bit him. Surveillance video without audio shows officers pulling Gibson from the elevator and repeatedly striking him as he is on the floor.
The DA’s office gave a different account of what followed. It said Gibson was identified as a person with a gun at a residential hotel on Sixth Street and did not comply when officers ordered him out of an elevator. When officers tried to pat him down, it said, he began to “actively resist” and fight them, and three officers eventually restrained and handcuffed him. A loaded, unregistered 9mm Glock was found in his right pocket, the office said.
Gibson was sedated and intubated in the hospital, defenders said, before being taken to jail, where he stayed for a year while awaiting trial.
Defenders said prosecutors charged Gibson with making criminal threats, three felony counts of resisting arrest, and gun possession. They said the felony counts rested on officers’ claims that Gibson bit one, punched another in the face, and nearly broke a third’s thumb. Deputy Public Defender Bonnie Chan-Silen said the video footage refuted those claims.
Public Defender Mano Raju compared the treatment of Kevon Gibson by police to the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd.
A jury acquitted Gibson of all three felony counts but convicted him of misdemeanor resisting arrest and unlawful gun possession. Prosecutors dismissed the threats charge during trial, defenders said, after problems with the complainant’s credibility emerged.
The district attorney’s office said (opens in new tab) Aug. 19 that Gibson was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm and of three counts of resisting arrest. Defenders declined to discuss Gibson’s criminal history.
“Compliance with our gun laws, especially for convicted felons, is not optional,” District Attorney Brooke Jenkins said in the statement. Assistant District Attorney Elizabeth Jimenez, who prosecuted the case, said the verdict “recognized the work that San Francisco police officers do every day.”
Chan-Silen said the statement amounted to a cover-up. “Brooke Jenkins claiming victory, hiding any mention of police brutality, and thanking the very officers who the jury described as violent is deceitful and deeply unjust,” she said.
Defenders accused prosecutors of several missteps. They said staff from the office’s Independent Investigations Bureau, which is supposed to examine police use of force independently, woke Gibson in the ICU to interview him and passed their notes to the prosecutor. They said Jimenez offered a plea deal that would have required Gibson to sign a waiver weakening potential civil claims against the officers. He declined.
They also said Jimenez sought to show jurors body-camera video without audio and fought disclosure of evidence about the complainant, which a judge ordered turned over. The court allowed jurors to see and hear all of the footage.
Gibson plans to appeal the gun conviction, saying he possessed the weapon briefly, out of necessity, because he feared the neighbor. His attorneys said he still suffers medical problems from the beating, including an eye injury.
Police said that Gibson bit one officer and nearly broke the finger of another while he contends that he did not resist the cops.
The public defender’s office said it plans to file a complaint with the Department of Police Accountability and to ask the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to decertify the officers. Defenders said they believe the officers are still working, and one was promoted shortly after the incident. Gibson is exploring a lawsuit, they said.
The district attorney’s office took umbrage in response Thursday. “The jury saw the video. The jury heard the evidence. The district attorney’s office never asked the court to exclude this footage which we played for the jury,” a spokesperson told The Standard by e-mail. “The jury convicted Mr. Gibson of four crimes. Calling this a ‘cover-up’ isn’t just an attack on our prosecutors — it shows remarkable disrespect for the court and the jurors who heard the evidence and rendered the verdict.”
A police department spokesman said the district attorney’s office’s independent investigations bureau found the officers’ use of force was justified under state law. The department is conducting its own administrative investigation, which the spokesman described as standard procedure after a bureau review. The statement did not say whether the officers are still on duty.
Louis Wong, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, said officers deserve “a fair assessment of their actions based on the facts and the law, not inflammatory accusations or politically charged attacks.” He said the evidence was presented in court, reviewed by a judge and weighed by a jury, which convicted Gibson of four criminal offenses. “Those verdicts cannot simply be dismissed because the outcome does not fit the narrative being advanced by the public defender’s office,” Wong said. He said the union stands behind its officers and their right to due process, and that any misconduct allegations “deserve a thorough and impartial review, not a public rush to judgment.”