San Francisco's public defender is asking the state to take away the peace-officer credentials of three police officers after releasing video of an arrest that left a man in intensive care.
At a Thursday press conference, attorneys played body-camera and hallway surveillance footage from Aug. 17, 2025, at a residential hotel on Sixth Street. Officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway and Gabriel Rivera are seen tackling 33-year-old Kevon Gibson, punching him in the head, pulling his hair and kneeling on his neck, KQED, CBS San Francisco and NBC Bay Area reported. Gibson can be heard saying he is scared and that he cannot breathe.
Hospital, jail, then mixed verdict
Gibson spent days in the ICU, was placed in a medically induced coma and intubated, then sat in county jail for about a year awaiting trial on three felony resisting-arrest counts plus a gun charge, according to the public defender's office. A jury later acquitted him of the felony resisting charges but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm and three misdemeanor resisting counts. He was sentenced last month with credit for time served and a short stretch of home detention, KQED reported. He plans to appeal the gun conviction.
What the defenders and DA say
Deputy Public Defender John Paul Passaglia told reporters that officers claimed at trial that Gibson bit one of them, punched another in the face and wrapped a radio cord around a neck, and that video disproved those claims. Deputy Public Defender Bonnie Chan-Silen accused District Attorney Brooke Jenkins' office of trying to keep body-camera audio from the jury and of issuing a conviction press release that thanked the officers while omitting the beating and hospitalization.
The district attorney's office denied asking the court to exclude the footage. In a statement to KQED it said the jury convicted Gibson of four crimes and that calling the case a cover-up disrespects the court and jurors. An earlier DA release described Gibson resisting a pat search before officers restrained him and found a loaded, unregistered 9mm Glock. SFPD had not commented by Thursday evening; NBC reported neither the department nor the police union offered a statement.
Next steps
Public Defender Mano Raju's office said it will complain to the Department of Police Accountability and ask the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training to decertify Caraway, Conway and Rivera. Defenders also said police ignored racist threats from the neighbor who first called them about Gibson. The video release puts the case back in public view more than a year after the hallway struggle.