Monthly Archives: March 2012

Berkeley City Council To Vote On Occupy Arrests

29 March 2012

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Photo Courtesy of socialistlib510 (SL510)

 

Unlike the City Council in Oakland which has remained silent while OPD and the District Attorney Nancy O’Malley brutalize and criminalize Occupy Oakland protesters, the Berkeley City Council could soon weigh in on the side of protesters free speech and assembly rights.  On Tuesday, April 3, the Berkeley City Council will take a vote on whether or not they will send a letter requesting O’Malley drop all charges related to the November 9 arrest of 13 protesters. All the protesters, except UC Berkeley associate professor of English Celeste Langan, were given stay away orders.

Read more about the vote in Soumya Karlamangla’s article in The Daily Calfornian:

http://www.dailycal.org/2012/03/28/berkeley-city-council-to-weigh-in-on-charges-against-occupy-cal-protesters/

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Whose Playground Is It?

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By DB
Photo: REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

On January 30th, Mayor Quan, as you may remember, made the statement that Occupy Oakland protestors were using Oakland as their “playground”. Not quite how I see it, Your Majesty. I’m in my forties, live in Oakland, work here (I’m a teacher), pay my taxes here, and wouldn’t want to call anywhere else my home. I love Oakland and am proud to say, am an active Occupier. I just want to pass on some personal observations as to the “Occupy problem”.

I grew up in the suburbs around the bay. Pacifica, Fairfield/Suisun, Vallejo, Port Costa, etc. I grew up living right next door to the officers who make up the many police departments around the bay. Including OPD Officers. I knew their kids, went to school with them, attended their weddings and a couple of their funerals. Hell, I even used to target practice with an SF Sheriff’s Deputy. One thing I’ll tell you is that the officers I knew quite vocally let their opinions of the population of Oakland known.

Though it’s been years and the obsolete specifics I can’t recall, what I can recall is the message. The hatred and total disregard for the population of Oakland is what stands out. Particularly that of the African American population (surprise surprise). I can also tell you that the majority of these guys can’t wait to use their new toys on people (flash-bangs, less-than-lethals, etc.) Temper these with a “boys club” mentality and a “blue line” code of silence and what you have is very much what we have in Iraq and Afghanistan: A very large, professionally trained and well-armed group of racist, suburban frat-boys, who’ve demonized the population they are pretending to protect and serve.

In other words, Your Lordship Mayor, It is your Police Department that is using Oakland as it’s playground. Like the bullies they are, they don’t dare do it in their own yards. They prefer to jump the fence and kick someone else’s ball on the roof…

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Quan Blames Occupy Oakland for Increase in January 2012 Crime

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By VAUHINI VARA, Wall Street Journal

Oakland Mayor Jean Quan’s challenges have only piled up since being criticized for a clumsy response to the city’s Occupy protests last year.

The city faces rising crime rates, with 26 murders so far in 2012, the highest at this point in the year since 2008. Oakland was dealt a blow when California Gov. Jerry Brown eliminated the local redevelopment agencies tasked with boosting economic development. And a campaign is under way to recall the 62-year-old mayor. One City Council member has already pledged to run against her.

Much of the criticism stems from Ms. Quan’s handling of the Occupy protests last year. She initially asked police not to intervene but later changed her mind. Police subsequently tear-gassed demonstrators who had tried to re-enter an area that had been cleared.

Ms. Quan, the first Chinese-American mayor of Oakland, was elected in 2010 to a four-year term. She has roots in the city that date back to 1906, the year of a massive San Francisco earthquake. After the temblor, her great-grandfather took the ferry across San Francisco Bay and became part of a new Chinatown in Oakland. Ms. Quan recently discussed Oakland’s quandaries, and her own.

WSJ: How are you responding to the campaign to recall you as mayor?

Ms. Quan: I’m really busy being the mayor of Oakland. But I had 1,000 campaign volunteers and [I have] a very loving husband. They’ve been holding meetings. They have signs, buttons. To be honest, I’ve only been to one meeting. I’m not spending much time on it.

WSJ: Crime is up so far this year, compared with last year. What’s going wrong?

Ms. Quan: I’m not sure what the real trend is. Sometimes, more crime doesn’t necessarily mean more crime. Sometimes, the offenses going up means the police are more engaged, and that’s a good thing. For instance, we’ve been looking at car thefts. We’re trying to figure out if maybe [the reason they] are up by a big jump is that we’re picking up more cars in Oakland, because the Highway Patrol this year has really been helping us cut down on car thefts. There’s an unusually high percentage of domestic-violence murders, but street murders are down. We had a kid who killed both of his parents. I’m very concerned about domestic violence. Some of the services that used to be available, like family counseling, have gone away.

WSJ: You’ve touted your 100 Blocks initiative, which zeroes in on the 100 blocks of Oakland where nearly all of the homicides take place. How is it going?

Ms. Quan: It’s tough. You have to give something like this time. We started talking about it in October and then Occupy happened. So we only really got to start implementing it [in January]. We had the Occupy thing, and [crime] went up in January. It was really high in January, and now it’s down again in February and March. You look at that and try to figure out: What are the patterns?

“”I think there were mistakes made. …I wasn’t happy to get off a plane and have a text from my daughter saying: ‘Mom, stop the tear-gassing.’ “” Oakland Mayor Jean Quan

WSJ: You’re saying Occupy played a role in boosting crime rates in January?

Ms. Quan: Yes. We had to bring a lot of officers on overtime to do a lot of monitoring downtown, and even the regular beat officers got pulled off their beats. That’s a problem for us.

WSJ: How else did Occupy impact the city?

Ms. Quan: We think the national Occupy movement needed to happen. In Oakland, you had a very quick takeover by the organized anarchists. There was constant vandalism. The vandalism is going to run around $1 million. The overtime for police was around $2.9 million.

WSJ: You got criticized for your handling of Occupy Oakland. Do you feel you could have handled it differently?

Ms. Quan: I got a lot of criticism. The criticisms were either that I was too liberal or too hard. I think there were mistakes made. Unfortunately, I was in Washington, D.C. I wasn’t happy to get off a plane and have a text from my daughter saying: “Mom, stop the tear-gassing.”

WSJ: What are Oakland’s economic-development plans now that the redevelopment agency, which gave Oakland a way to offer financial incentives to businesses that located in the city, has disappeared?

Ms. Quan: I’ve been talking about sharing sales tax [with businesses]. We are also an area with enterprise-zone funds, so you if you hire a young worker who lives in a low-income area of Oakland, you can get a $7,000 tax credit. We’re centrally located at a time when population is shifting east in the Bay Area. There are a lot of options available.

This interview was originally published in the Wall Street Journal.

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Additional $250k requested to investigate OPD

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Oakland’s City Council voted in February to boost the pay of the Frazier Group, the city’s contractor charged with investigating police abuses during the Occupy protests, by $100,000. The extra money was intended to help the contractor process the unexpected influx of new complaintsagainst officers flooding their office.

Now it seems the city is set again to increase the Frazier Group’s pay, this time by a quarter million dollars. The investigator’s total pay increase over the last two months will be $350,000 if approved, making it one of Oakland’s single largest contracts.

Read the entire story by Darwin BondGraham.

Occupy Oakland Interfaith Service by Judith Scherr, (IPS)Inter Press Service

28 March 2012

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U.S. Occupy Activists Hit With Stay-Away Orders
By Judith Scherr

OAKLAND, California, Mar 23, 2012 (IPS) – A dozen or so people in the Wednesday night crowd of around 150 at the amphitheatre in the public plaza at Oakland City Hall covered their faces with masks or bandanas.

They wanted to make it difficult for police observing the scene to know if activists slapped with judicial orders barring them from the plaza had violated the orders and were at the rally hosted by Occupy Oakland’s Interfaith Committee.

Religious leaders from the Christian, Buddhist, Muslim and Jewish faiths from across the country organised the event, where they called for economic justice and condemned what they said were illegal court orders that banned more than a dozen activists from the physical space that has been the heart of organising for Occupy Oakland since its inception.

“We don’t know if any real people with stay-away orders are with us or not,” said Rev. Doctor Rita Nakashima-Brock, one of the Interfaith Committee rally organisers. “We’re not asking who’s behind the masks.”

Stay-away orders are the newest weapon in District Attorney Nancy O’Malley’s arsenal to control the occupy groups that continue to proliferate in the Oakland-Berkeley area over which she has jurisdiction.

O’Malley issued stay-away orders to Occupy Oakland activists arrested in January, barring most of them from coming within 100 or 300 yards of the public plaza where Occupy Oakland originally set up its encampment and where it continues to hold meetings and rallies.

And this week, O’Malley imposed new stay-away orders for a dozen Occupy Cal activists arraigned Mar. 19, 20 and 21. These activists, mostly University of California, Berkeley students, are banned statewide from University of California property, except to go to class or work.

The American Civil Liberties Union responded in superior court to the Occupy Oakland activists’ stay-away orders with a habeas corpus writ, arguing that the orders violate constitutional protections.

“They are all clearly violations of First Amendment rights, their right to engage in expressive activity,” said Jivaka Candappa, attorney for two of the four people named in the ACLU writ. “They wanted to break the back of the movement and this is a way of teaching these demonstrators a lesson,” he added.

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Read More—–> http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=107174

America Magazine and Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland

27 March 2012

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Last week, I was in Berkeley, California, for the Occupy Faith National Gathering, coordinated by the Interfaith Tent at Occupy Oakland. I was one of six from Occupy Faith NYC/Occupy Wall Street, and our delegation was a small part of over 60 conference participants from some fourteen Occupations around the United States. Christian-identified participants were the overwhelming majority, and there were also Jewish, Muslim, Native American, Buddhist, and Wiccan-identified participants, and more, including multiply-identified persons. We also convened an interfaith service at Occupy Oakland. The whole conference was generously facilitated by theologian and activist Dr. Rita Nakashima Brock.

Read More —-> http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?blog_id=2&entry_id=5017

Occupy Oakland, RNC 04, and the Preemptive Arrests We Face in Advance of May 1st

27 March 2012

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by EJ Fox – @mrejfox

The Occupy Movement is the largest mass movement for social change since the 60s, and if it maintains momentum it may eclipse its predecessor in both brilliance and effect. But that’s only if we keep pushing. In retrospect, it’s as if the movement practically exploded out of New York in the fall, propelled by pictures of a vicious NYPD cop pepperspraying female protesters, foreshadowing scenes we would see reenacted all across America. I’d just moved to the Bay Area from New York to join a startup, and I remember telling my best friend about the news I’d read that some protesters had moved into a park to “Occupy Wall Street” – I was ecstatic, but disappointed as I’d just driven across the country.

“The revolution’s starting, but it’s all the way in fucking New York,” I said. I had no idea.

I was aware of and had passively participated in the activist community in New York for as long as I could remember. First as one of those kids you see marching along, on the shoulders or holding the hands of their parents. I have memories of marching through the streets of Manhattan to protest the about-to-begin invasion of Iraq, as New Yorkers waved out their windows and sat on their fire escapes cheering us on.

My first vivid memory of a protest was the Republican National Convention in New York the next year in 2004. The New York Times called it the biggest protest NYC had seen in decades. I was 12, but for the first time I was old enough and conscious enough to be pissed off about George Bush, and I had something of a purpose as a marcher. As I walked with my mom to meet up at Union Square where the march was starting, I convinced her to take me into a CVS and buy me 2 disposable cameras. People interact with each other so differently at a demonstration, and I couldn’t help but want to photograph it. I still can’t. Whether it be protester to protester interactions, offering me or each other food, water, or a sign to hold. Whether it be onlooker to protester, running the gamut of clapping support to attempting to grab protesters’ signs. At RNC 2004 I became aware of a conservative group that specialized in counter-protesting demonstrations called Protest Warrior. They did just that, ripping a sign from the hands of a protester who had infiltrated the convention floor and I remember feeling the anger around that story. For me, most interesting were the interactions with the cops, which I was for the most part kept far away from. But I was hooked.

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Vu Deja. Oakland Police Did To Oscar Grant Protesters What They’re Doing to Occupiers.

26 March 2012

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On the night of January 28th, 2012, Oakland police kettled (aka surrounded) Occupy Oakland protesters and mass arrested 300-400 of them without any legal basis to do so. Sitting in transports for hours in too-tight cuffs and without food or water, they were eventually transported to Santa Rita jail where many were held for days in disgusting conditions. People like Allie123 were denied needed prescription medications. Women who have been arrested for misdemeanors in other Occupy Oakland protests have been given pregnancy tests along with being groped and otherwise demeaned.

And the list by no means stops there.

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It is therefore with a sense of Vu Deja that I’m reading the latest press release from the National Lawyer’s Guild, announcing a class action suit against the Oakland Police for events that happened more than a year earlier, related to protests arising from the slaying of Oscar Grant.

United State District Court Judge Thelton Henderson granted the plaintiffs’ motion for class certification in a lawsuit brought by the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) against the Oakland Police (OPD) on behalf of 150 people arrested at a November 5, 2010, demonstration.

What happened back in 2010 to stimulate this sense of Deja Vu Vu Deja?

Find out in the rest of the essay at Daily Kos.

Live stream evidence used against the Ice Cream 3 – OGP Gazette

26 March 2012

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The “Ice Cream 3″ case is going to trial.

This case involves a group of Occupy Oakland activists who met at Fenton’s ice cream shop on Piedmont Avenue and planned a non-violent bank protest, only to find three of them prosecuted with trumped up “hate crimes” charges due to a supposed assault and anti-gay slur against a pedestrian near the action. In fact, the supposed victim admitted in the pre-trial hearing to using racist language toward at least one of her “attackers” and assaulting them.

According to one person who attended the pre-trial hearing, our tactics are being used against us:

But [District Attorney] O’Malley would not have had the satisfaction if it weren’t for a little help from OPD’s sworn enemy: Occupy Oakland itself. According to the testimony of officer Yun Zhou, it was after he reviewed the initial police report written by a rookie officer as well as the livestream of Stowers-Occupy altercation, that he decided to call Stowers, asking her to come down to the police station to make a second statement. According to defense lawyer Dan Siegel, it was the livestream footage that allowed OPD to target and arrest the Ice Cream Three at subsequent demonstrations over a week later: “There would be no case at all if people were not taking video and posting it publicly, and if the defendants had refused to speak with police once they were in custody.” Patti, Nneka’s mom, commented, “The really sad thing is that the footage came from Nneka’s best friend. She would never have wanted this!”

We must be incredibly careful with our video footage, and may want to completely reconsider the practice of livestreaming. Anything said to police can, and probably will be used against the movement. Defense lawyer Yolanda Huang urged, “When in custody, the only word you know is ‘lawyer.”

Read the entire story at the Oscar Grant Plaza Gazette