San Francisco’s Public Defender’s Office plans to seek the decertification of three police officers after an August 2025 arrest left 33-year-old Kevon Gibson hospitalized in a medically induced coma. At a news conference Thursday, Oct. 8, the office released body-camera footage showing officers Brendan Caraway, Brian Conway and Gabriel Rivera struggling with Gibson in a residential hotel hallway on Sixth Street. The footage shows the officers punching him, pulling his hair and kneeling on his neck. Gibson can be heard saying he was scared and repeatedly telling them he could not breathe. A hallway surveillance camera also recorded the encounter. Gibson was intubated and treated in intensive care after the arrest. He spent about a year in jail awaiting trial. A jury acquitted him of three felony counts of resisting arrest, but convicted him of being a felon in possession of a firearm and three misdemeanor counts of resisting arrest. He was sentenced last month and received credit for the time he had served. The judge allowed him to complete the remaining 17 days of his sentence in home detention at a loved one’s residence. Deputy Public Defender Bonnie Chan-Silen said prosecutors had tried to keep the jury from hearing audio from the officers’ body cameras. The District Attorney’s Office disputed that claim, saying it never asked the court to exclude the footage. In a statement, the office said Gibson was convicted of four crimes and called the public defender’s accusation of a cover-up disrespectful to prosecutors, the court and jurors. Gibson’s attorneys also challenged officers’ trial testimony. Deputy Public Defender John Paul Passaglia said officers made claims that Gibson bit one of them, punched another and tried to break a third officer’s thumb. Passaglia said videos shown at trial contradicted those accounts. The District Attorney’s Office described the arrest in an Aug. 19, 2026, statement, saying Gibson resisted when officers tried to pat him down for weapons. Chan-Silen said Gibson had briefly possessed a handgun for protection from a neighbor she described as racist. The public defender’s office said officers went to a friend’s apartment looking for Gibson before encountering him as he exited an elevator. According to the office, the officers told him he was not under arrest, then immediately tried to detain him. The footage released Thursday also captures an officer saying that no one would stop him from kicking in the apartment door. Chan-Silen said Gibson had a visible amount of blood on his forehead by the end of the struggle. The public defender’s office said it did not know whether the officers had been disciplined and believed one may have been promoted after the incident. The Police Department had not responded to a request for comment by the time of the news conference. The office said it intends to file a complaint with San Francisco’s Department of Police Accountability and notify the California Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, known as POST, which oversees officer certification. The office is asking for the three officers to be decertified.