Yvonne Spinks dreamed of California beaches and sun. She imagined less aggressive policing of Black people than she experienced growing up in the Midwest. In 1984, she chased that dream to San Diego.
Her first mission was to find community with people who looked like her. Black San Diegans made up less than 10% of the city’s population. She found what she was looking for in the early ‘90s — a weekly summer gathering of Black families and neighbors at South Mission Beach, the parking lot entirely full and a line waiting to get in.
Spinks said every other day the city’s beaches belonged to white San Diegans, but Sundays at South Mission Beach were theirs.
The south end was far from the food and entertainment spots and it only had one bathroom. But it offered free fun: the basketball court and space to barbecue. They could open up the backs of their cars and play music.
“Forget online Tinder,” she said. “This was our Tinder.”
Everyone shined up their cars and themselves and put on crisp summer outfits. Sundays were to see and be seen, like Will Smith’s rap, “Summertime.”
“‘Two miles an hour so everybody sees you,’” she quoted from the song. “‘Fresh from the barbershop (or) fly from the beauty salon.’ And that’s how it was.”
Spinks owned a salon and stayed busy in preparation for Sundays, pressing hair and twisting thick poetic justice braids.
Spinks’s nephew Antoine Bennett said he discovered the south end for the first time at 13. It was “mind-blowing,” he said.
“To see just the sea of people that look like me enjoying themselves, dressed to the nines,” he said. “The music that I hear in my household and in my neighborhood playing.”
Spinks remembers bumper-to-bumper traffic stretching from the Belmont Park roller coaster all the way south into the parking lot.
She said police took advantage of this crowd of Black San Diegans in their cars to enforce minor infractions. She described watching friends and neighbors get tickets for tire treads that weren’t the right thickness, window tint a shade too dark, music too loud, the wrong grill on the front of a car.
When a friend ran up to the window of her red Jeep to say hi to her passenger, Spinks said, an officer gave her a ticket for “impeding the flow of traffic.”
The police set up a checkpoint that every car had to go through before they were able to turn around, Spinks and Bennett said.
It added a layer of mental stress to what was supposed to be a carefree time.
“Even if your registration is good, your license is good, everybody in your car have the proper amount of seatbelts,” Spinks said, “It was a whole mental thing. You have to go through a full checkpoint of yourself.”
Cars would regularly get towed, she said, including her own, which she described as humiliating.
They said the police presence grew from one or two officers to an entire mobile command center. Black beachgoers started moving north toward the rollercoaster to get some distance from law enforcement, they said, but the police followed.
“Anything they could do, I felt, to deter everybody from coming back here,” Spinks said. “And it worked. Eventually it worked. I guess we all got enough tickets.”
By the early 2000s, Sundays at the beach were lost.
“You shouldn’t enforce wanting to push people out of what they created,” Bennett said. “We created this space.”
A spokesperson for Jerry Sanders, San Diego’s police chief for most of the ‘90s, declined on his behalf to comment.
These disparities remain. San Diego Police Department data show officers are more than three times as likely to stop a Black person than a white person.
Dimitrios Mastoras is a retired officer and consults nationally on a relationship-based policing approach created by his wife Molly Mastoras, a licensed professional counselor.
He pointed to a police department in North Carolina that chose to focus on enforcing safety violations and eliminated administrative and equipment violations like the ones Spinks described. Traffic safety stops increased and racial disparities decreased.
He also said policing non-dangerous, minor violations, especially as an opportunity for consent searches without reasonable suspicion, can break community trust.
More than a decade after Sundays at the beach stopped, Spinks said she got a call from HR at her new job. They told her the city was going to garnish her wages.
“I’m like, ‘For what?’” she remembered.
Old beach tickets. Spinks said the city garnished her wages for the fines and the fees they accumulated, totaling thousands of dollars.
“These are tickets that I wanted to fight because they were just harassment,” she said. “But life goes on. You have to work, you got kids.”
It still upsets her today.
“From a person who grew up in the Midwest,” she said, “It took some of the gleam off California. Everybody want to go to California to the beach and the freedom. And you think that in California you don’t have to deal with the harassment and the overpolicing that’s done in a lot of other areas of the county.”
Bennett said it changed how Black San Diegans relate to the beach. They still pay for the sun and the beach in high housing costs and taxes, but they rarely enjoy it. He quoted local rapper Ryan Anthony and his movement “Barely See the Beach.”
“We are actually from San Diego, but we barely see this thing,” he said, gesturing toward the waves at South Mission Beach. “A lot of us are confined or used to our four-block radius.”
He and Spinks want people to know that wasn’t always the case.
Spinks sometimes comes out to South Mission Beach on Sundays just to reminisce. She tells her daughter about what they used to do and points out the old spots. She said her daughter hears the fun and excitement in her voice, but also the loss.
Spinks dreams of a reunion for Black San Diegans at the beach. Come back to South Mission Beach, she said. Bring your kids.
