For more background about this, go here and here and here and here.

Labels: Activism, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Racism

I believe that people are going to shocked at the turnout for tomorrow's announced general strike in Oakland. Of course, most people will work, and most businesses will remain open. But the extent of public participation is going to be amazing. It is an intensification of a wave of direct action protest that has emerged in the East Bay in recent years.

First, there was rioting in downtown Oakland after it appeared that the Alameda County District Attorney was not going to prosecute BART police officer Johannes Mehserle for the killing of Oscar Grant during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, 2009. Later that year, there was the student occupation at UC Berkeley in November 2009 in response to enormous fee increases, an occupation that avoided being attacked by the UC police because protesters came to their defense. UC student protests erupted across the state again in March 2010, with students and their supporters closing Interstate 580 in . . . where else? . . . Oakland. More recently, participants in No Justice! No BART!, an East Bay organization formed to demand the disbanding of the BART police after the killing of Grant, were involved in protests at San Francisco BART stations in August and September after the subsequent killing of Charles Hill at the Embarcadero station.

Occupy Oakland has built upon these previous efforts, presenting the most significant challenge to authority in the East Bay in decades. While those who advocate a pacifist form of non-violence found it objectionable, those who sought to recover Frank Ogawa Plaza for continued occupation reenergized the movement after an early morning police raid. After the city announced last Wednesday that the plaza was going to be fenced off indefinitely, a group challenged the officers surrounding it during a late afternoon protest and attempted to force their way through. Of course, we know what happened as a result, a police riot that raged on the streets for hours, a riot whereby the officers sought to bludgeon, tear gas and stun grenade Occupy Oakland out of existence.

But Mayor Jean Quan, Police Chief Howard Jordan and the officers called in from 17 jurisdictions failed. On the following day, people returned to occupy the plaza, this time without incident. The people who challenged the police the previous day had exhausted the appetite of the Oakland establishment for continued repression. And, now, the Oakland Police Officers Association has issued this open letter to the residents of Oakland:

We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.

As your police officers, we are confused.

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the Stop Work strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against the establishment. But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

It is all very confusing to us.

Support for the general strike tomorrow is growing. Afterwards, we will perceive opportunities for a radical transformation of society that have been heretofore unimaginable. t over at Pink Scare has reminded us of a quote by Lenin which concisely summarizes the situation: There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.

Labels: Activism, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Neoliberalism, Occupy Wall Street, Police, Sub-Proletarianization of Europe

UPDATE 3: Police arrest a woman in Civic Center station who told a police officer: BART police need to be reformed. Make BART safe. Make BART safe:

UPDATE 2: According to Kevin Gosztola:

SF Weekly reports suggest there were not many protesting but there were plenty of reporters and camera crews seeking to cover the protest. Also—get this—protesters were told not to chant by police or they would be arrested.

Protesters on Civic Center platform were chanting, No Justice, No Peace, Disband the BART Police, which was chanted last week. The riot police present told protesters that chanting would mean they would be arrested. This was, of course, absurd to those present so they continued to chant. The police arrested a protester. And then another. And then another.

It appears that one of the arrests was for obscenities that were shouted by an older gentlemen, a thirty-five year old white male, who was wearing a red scarf. If that is indeed the case, he clearly lost control and gave BART police the upper hand in that situation. However, arrested for chanting? For speech in the BART station?

This reaction at the protest likely stems from a rule that BART has decided to institute:

No person shall conduct or participate in assemblies or demonstrations or engage in other expressive activities in the paid areas of BART stations, including BART cars and trains and BART station platforms.

The police are probably taking a position that chanting would make the assembly on the platform a demonstration or an expressive activity. If they remain silent, the police couldn’t prove they were there to protest. But the moment they open their mouths they would be violating the rule or guideline BART has chosen to enforce.

BART seems to think that protests called by anyone now constitute an imminent lawless action. Anyone listening to radio communications among BART officers can attest to the fact that BART doesn’t know the first thing about peaceably assemblies. For tonight’s protest they were characterizing what was happening as civil unrest. If what was happening is civil unrest, one wonders what would happen if it had to deal with a bunch of Bahrainis in the Pearl Roundabout. And, last week BART was saying the protesters were engaged in civil disobedience but no officers were saying anything about any protesters breaking the law or defying police orders.

UPDATE 1: Massive police presence at Civic Center station to arrest 4 people on the train platform, two of whom had the temerity to shout no justice, no peace, disband the BART police. There are about 100 protesters in the area, with 30 briefly blocking traffic on Powell Street. Civic Center and Powell Street stations have been reopened after being closed.

INITIAL POST: The live reports of the Mission Local blog are quite useful in separating fact from fiction, particularly the kind that one finds in the San Francisco Chronicle, which uncritically relays the perspective of BART and the police. For example, you never would have known, if not for Mission Local, that BART ordered four station shutdowns last Monday in response to the enormous number of 150 protesters. If you've actually been in downtown San Francisco during a major protest, you'd immediately understand the absurdity of it. But, as I said last week, BART and the police have a different motivation than the publicly stated one of safety.

Issues of ideology and political effectiveness aside, the protests are exposing the practices that the police will utilize in urban areas if significant unrest erupts, shutting off electronic communications, shutting down transit service and relying upon the deployment of riot police in large numbers. All of this is done with the objective of fragmenting the protests, while inducing the apolitical public to blame the protesters for the disruption of their lives. In other words, the strategy is to intensify the chaos resulting from protest for the purpose of generating support for even more repressive measures. As they said of BART's inspiration, Mussolini, he made the trains run on time, but, so far, it hasn't done so. Hopefully, the Anonymous collective is learning through practical experience and developing a means to effectively confront it.

Labels: Activism, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Police

As you might have expected, BART overreacted to the protest called by Anonymous:

The busy evening commute out of downtown San Francisco gave way Monday to a chaotic cat-and-mouse game between police officers and roving protesters who lashed out at the transit agency for temporarily shutting down underground cellular phone service last week.

BART closed all four downtown San Francisco stations - Civic Center, Powell, Montgomery and Embarcadero - soon after the protest began at 5 p.m. Officers in riot gear blocked entrances as many train riders fumed on the sidewalks and tried to figure out how to get home. All stations were reopened by 7:30 p.m.

BART is playing a high stakes game, trying to inflame its commuter ridership against protesters angry at the agency's police violence and suppression of cell phone communication. According to Mission Local, the station closures had the absurd result of enabling about 150 protesters to strand hundreds of commuters. Politically, it has an obvious allure, but ignores the possibility that the protesters and their supporters can make the operation of the system extremely difficult.

It is possible that the BART response is indicative of a more serious governmental concern, the fear that thousands of people may attempt to shut down services essential to day to day economic activity within cities in response to policies of austerity and militarism. If one evaluates the pictures of threatening riot police at various downtown BART stations in this light, it makes more sense. Hence, the deployment, which creates a comical first impression, is designed to normalize such actions in the future as an appropriate response to any form of political protest or unrest.

Of course, the commuters find themselves in the middle. One woman complained that she couldn't get to her children's preschool on time to pick them up. As the parent of a four and a half year old, I empathize, but it is worth noting that Oscar Grant doesn't have to worry about this sort of thing anymore in regard to his young daughter. BART police officer Johannes Mehserle killed him. Sometimes, it is important to see beyond your immediate needs.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Racism

Anonymous has announced a protest today in response BART 's decision to shut off cell phone service last week in response to a belief that there would be protests at stations in downtown San Francisco over the killings of Oscar Grant and Charles Blair Hill. Meanwhile, BART wants everyone to understand that protest is verboten at any of its transit stations.

Labels: Activism, African Americans, BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Racism

From today's San Francisco Chronicle:

A judge sentenced ex-BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle to the minimum term of two years in prison Friday for fatally shooting unarmed train rider Oscar Grant, saying he believed the former officer's testimony that he had confused his pistol for a Taser.

Mehserle, 28, faced as many as 14 years in prison after he was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter and a separate charge of intentionally firing a gun at Grant at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland early Jan. 1, 2009. But Judge Robert Perry threw out the firearm conviction before sentencing Mehserle in Los Angeles County Superior Court, saying there was no evidence to support it.

Reminiscent of the absurdity of a San Francisco jury finding Dan White guilty of manslaughter for the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk because he ate too many twinkies, Judge Perry ruled that Mehserle was involuntary acting upon muscle memory when he killed Grant:

Perry's remarks suggested that, had the prosecution won the murder conviction it sought, he would have overturned it because he found no intent to kill.

Mehserle's muscle memory took over in this moment of great danger and stress, the judge said. No reasonable trier of fact could have concluded that Mehserle intentionally fired his gun."

Meanwhile, in regard to killings by the US miltary on the other side of the world:

In another top case, eight Marines were initially charged with murder or failure to investigate the killings of 24 Iraqis that occurred after a roadside bombing that killed a Marine. Six have had charges dropped or dismissed, and one was acquitted.

Marine Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, the squad leader, is scheduled to go to trial Sept. 13 on reduced charges of voluntary manslaughter in nine of the 24 deaths and other crimes in the November 2005 shootings in the town of Haditha.

Last year, a Marine accused of killing an unarmed Iraqi detainee during a 2004 battle to recapture the city of Fallujah pleaded guilty to dereliction of duty after the government dropped a murder charge as part of a plea agreement.

The other two defendants were acquitted, one by a military jury and the other by a civilian court after he completed his military obligations and was beyond the reach of a court-martial.

Any explanation by police officers or US troops is apparently sufficient.

Labels: "Support the Troops", BART Killing, California, Iraqi Deaths, Police, Racism, US Military

Last Friday, a Los Angeles County jury returned a verdict in the criminal proceeding against Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop that killed a young, African American man, Oscar Grant, in the early morning hours of New Year's Day, 2009. Predictably, it was involuntary manslaughter. Sporadic rioting took place in Oakland after the police closed down rallies where people condemned it. People apparently focused their rage upon transnational franchises when others in the community organized to defend local businesses. For a radical perspective of someone who has been closely associated with the protests since Grant was killed, and partipated in the protests after the verdict, consider this Counterpunch article by George Cicariello-Maher.

My purpose in writing this post is to examine the incident in light of the ambivalent relationship between BART and the communities associated with Oscar Grant, the impoverished, predominately neighborhoods of color in the East Bay. Planning for BART predates World War II, and financing for the system was put in place in the early 1960s. Trains began running in 1972, with the Transbay Tube opening in 1974. Trains ran between the Daly City station south of San Francisco and the Fremont, Concord and Richmond stations in the East Bay. It is fair to say that no infrastructure project of the last 60 years, with the possible exception of the interstate highway system, has had as much of an influence on the Bay Area.

In conjunction with the interstate highway system, BART facilitated the ongoing suburbanization on the east of eastern Contra Costa and southern Alameda counties, across the hills from Oakland, Berkeley and Richmond,fueling population growth in cities like Concord, Pleasanton, Lafayette, Livermore, Hercules and Pinole, among others. People who moved to these places could take the interstate to a BART station, and then commute to work in the East Bay or the City. Given that three of the four train lines traversed the financial district in downtown San Francisco (and still do), the result was the intensification of highrise development, a process that went by the name of Manhattanization. San Francisco was transformed into a central city employment and entertainment destination after a long history of economically diverse interconnected neighborhoods.

For East Bay cities like Oakland, Richmond and Hayward, BART was just another excuse for white flight, leaving behind, first, islands of poor, predominately African American neighborhoods, and then, as a result of Latino and Asian immigration, poor, predominately neighborhoods of color. The departing middle class could now travel through these neighborhoods while safely esconsced inside comfortable, silver high speed metallic trains. Later, people priced out of expensive real estate markets by the bay found themselves relying upon them as well. BART was a physical manifestation of the phenomenon of physical isolation that rendered lower income communities west of the hills subject to the economic asphyiation of Reaganism and neoliberalism. By placing these communities out of sight, it was then fairly easy to initiate the demonization of the people within them as expressions of various artificially created social pathologies.

There reverse side of this coin of suburbanization was the increased mobility that BART provided for young people, including those who lived the lower income communities of the East Bay. I have traveled on BART frequently over the last 30 years, and I have observed how young people have come to rely upon it more and more as a form of social networking. Before there was Facebook, there was BART. Teens and young adults move between San Francisco, the East Bay and the East Bay suburbs almost effortlessly. Within a day, one could see friends in the Mission, go to a concert in Oakland or Berkeley and then return home. By adding one's bike to the equation, one's range grows even greater. Oscar Grant himself was an example of this in the hours before he was killed when he traveled from Hayward to the Embarcardero in San Francisco to participate in the New Year's Eve celebration there. Without BART, he and his friends may well have decided to do something else because of difficulty of driving into the City and the cost of parking once they arrived.

But there is a problem. The suburbanites that use BART to travel to work and entertainment activities all around the bay find these young people rather unnerving. Like most young people, they can be boisterous and sometimes rude. A few, it must be conceded, commit crimes, although I am not sure whether they do so at a rate substantially higher than older adults. So BART faces a dilemma: how to manage a system so as to maintain the confidence of those who use it to commute to work and travel to evening entertainment events, like, say, a baseball game at AT&T Park. Not surprisingly, the response has been to rely upon a highly visible police presence, and the characterization of young people traveling on the system as anticipated perils.

It was this, the collision between the fears of an older, more suburban ridership, and the social exploitation of it by young people, that contributed to the killing of Oscar Grant by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle. On New Year's Eve, BART trains operated into the early morning hours past the usual midnight shut down of the system. Officers on duty that evening were instructed to anticipate potentially serious problems with rowdy young New Year's Eve celebrants. According to BART, a couple of guns had been recovered on the line in the hour before the shooting, and Mehserle had been involved in an incident earlier that evening when a teen age boy with a semi-automatic weapon had broken bones after jumping over a fence. Given BART's spotty, seemingly self-interested, record of public disclosure and disinterest in promptly communicating with the witnesses to the incident, I will leave it to the reader to decide whether these events actually happened. Just prior to the shooting of Grant, BART police were responding to reports that up to 20 people were involved in a fight on the BART train approaching Fruitvale station.

Grant did not know it, but, as he was traveling home on the Fruitvale line, he satisfied two of the major criteria for being targeted by the police as the source of the reported trouble on the train, he was young, and he was a black male. As the train arrived, another BART police officer, Tony Pirone, was detaining a drunk man in the station. Pirone ran upstairs to meet the train, and forcibly detained Grant, ordering Mehserle to arrest Grant and a friend for, yes, resisting arrest. Of course, one is immediately struck by Pirone's decision to detain Grant, who was, after all, getting off the train, without any apparent effort to determine if the report was true, and, if so, what assertion of authority was required. Immediately thereafter, Mehserle pulled out his gun, shot Grant in the back as he lay on the ground, and killed him. Three eyewitnesses testified at Mehserle's trial that neither Grant nor his friend resisted, and expressed disgust at the aggressive conduct of the officers.

Labels: BART Killing, Bay Area, California, Neoliberalism, Police, Racism

For background on the killing of Oscar Grant at an Oakland BART station by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, go here and here and here. Here is a KTVU report about Grant's funeral earlier today.

Family members told KTVU reporter Claudine Wong that they are pleased that the public is coming foward with videos of the incident. A frame by frame analysis of the most recent one indicates that Grant was handcuffed before the shooting, as initially reported based upon the statements of several witnesses. Furthermore, indybay.org is reporting that a protest that began at the scene of the killing at Fruitvale station has been tranformed into a march through East Oakland involving betewen 500 and 1000 people.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Racism

For background on the killing of Oscar Grant at an Oakland BART station by BART Police Officer Johannes Mehserle during the early morning hours of New Year's Day, go here and here and here. Today, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Tom Orloff made it crystal clear that the US will support the Palestinians before he decides to criminally prosecute Mehserle:

If Mehserle is charged with a crime in Grant's shooting, it will be a first.

No one we talked with - from the district attorney's office to lawyers who work either side of police shootings - could remember a case in the last 20 years in which an on-duty officer had been charged in a fatal shooting in Alameda County.

"By and large, police officers have been reacting to some type of situation before they shoot someone that usually provides a legal justification," said District Attorney Tom Orloff, who has seen dozens of police shooting cases during his nearly four-decade career as a prosecutor.

Orloff, whose office would ultimately decide whether Mehserle should be charged with anything, hastened to point out that many details about the Fruitvale Station shooting remain unknown and that it is far too early to know whether the case will enter the criminal arena.

The most recent controversial police shooting in Alameda County happened July 25, when Oakland police Officer Hector Jimenez shot a drunken-driving suspect in the back as the man ran from an early morning traffic stop in the Fruitvale District.

Police said Jimenez shot 27-year-old Mack "Jody" Woodfox III because he thought Woodfox was reaching into his waistband for a gun, although no gun was found. Jimenez gave the same reason for taking part in the fatal shooting New Year's Eve 2007 of another man, Andrew Moppin, who, like Woodfox, turned out to be unarmed.

Police and a deputy from the district attorney's office interviewed Jimenez after the Woodfox shooting, then went out to the scene at night and re-enacted the incident as the officer related it.

The result - although technically the case is still pending, no charges have been filed.

Orloff's assertion deserves more scrutiny than that provided by the San Francisco Chronicle columnists who wrote the story, Matier and Ross. To their credit, they implicitly acknowledge that there have been no judicial determinations that shooings perpetrated by local police officers are justified because the district attorney doesn't file cases against them. But they then rather oddly proceed to cite this fact as an indication that these shootings are invariably legal when it actually suggests that the District Attorney is allergic to prosecuting them under any circumstances.

Nothing like a cop friendly district attorney's office with cop friendly media allies to ensure that nothing ever happens to officers who kill people in the line of duty, regardless of the circumstances. If the family of Oscar Grant expect an honest investigation of his death, they should insist that the investigation be taken away from BART and the Alameda County District Attorney's Office as quickly as possible, because, as they used to say at race track, the fix is in.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Racism

For the first two installments regarding the killing of Oscar Grant at an East Bay train station in the early morning hours of New Year's Day by a BART police officer, go here and here. The new propaganda line out of the BART offices in Oakland, as expressed in this KTVU report, is that the officer may have mistakenly believed that he was firing his taser instead of his gun.

It sounds superficially plausible until you realize that there's no evidence that this cop carried a taser. As previously reported by KTVU, not all BART cops are armed with them. But, don't worry, BART will get back to us on that, because it is still investigating whether the officer had one at the time of the shooting. What?? You say that, after 5 days, BART should already know whether officer had one? If so, you are missing the entire point of the exercise.

Of course, BART already knows whether the officer had a taser or not. After all, how long can it take to find out? 2 hours? Indeed, I'll stick my neck out and make a prediction: we will eventually discover that he didn't have one, but only after BART has sufficiently publicized the possibility that he might have in order to muddy the waters for its benefit when there is no criminal prosecution and jurors are someday selected to hear the $25 million lawsuit filed by John Burris on behalf of the Grant's family. Every day that BART is able to promote this fiction through a gullible media means more and more people who will believe that it is actually true, regardless of what facts emerge down the road.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Police

Well, you know, it takes a long time to develop a reason why a BART police officer kills a man by shooting him in the back while restrained in a prostrate position on an Oakland train platform, especially when, as related in this KTVU report by reporter Claudine Wong, there is so much video of the incident floating around. A passenger who did not want to be identified provided cell phone video of the shooting to KTVU, which is now prominently displayed on the KTVU website, but not to the investigators. Wonder why?

BART police seized one from a person on the platform shortly afterwards, but, gosh darn it, why did all those passengers have to have cellphones? Note how the BART police chief talks about the need to interview all the officers, with no mention of the numerous passengers who witnessed the incident, raising the obvious suspicions that the officers need to get their stories straight and that the observations of the cops alone should determine the outcome of the investigation. Turns out that the victim, Oscar Grant, was not handcuffed when he was shot, as first reported, but he was clearly restrained. Note also that KTVU, a television station in Oakland, California, is providing coverage that is much more empathetic to the victim, and more questioning of the police, than one commonly encounters in most places.

An aggravating aspect of this gruesome incident has been the purported concern of the BART spokesperson in regard to the contamination of public perception. Complaining about disclosures through the media (no doubt thinking, why didn't the incident commander order the seizure of ALL digital cameras, cell phones and other video devices from the passengers as evidence? memo to file: urgent that this subject be incorporated in all future officer trainings), he urges that everyone wait until the investigation is concluded. Naturally, as you might have guessed, BART is simultaneously already floating excuses for the officer: the cops were stressed because a couple of guns had already been recovered from passengers on other trains that New Year's Eve night, that the cops on the platform perceived themselves to be outnumbered in responding to a report of rowdy passengers involved in a fight because Oakland Police Department officers had been called as backup, that the officer in question might have mistakenly thought that he was using his taser instead of his gun (not bothering to show, of course, that the officer even had a taser).

Whether any of this is true and the extent of the evidence in support of these thinly veiled rationalizations doesn't really matter, because the purpose is to encourage the public to fill in the blanks by reference to their own biases, the victim and the other disembarking passengers detained by the police were obviously bad apples, the cops had every reason to fear for their safety and, hence, how can anyone of us question the split second decision of the officer to pull his gun and shoot the victim? You know, the more I think about it, I am reminded of some similarly horrific killings by US troops in a country far across the ocean, a place where the people aren't as dark skinned as Grant, but equally subjected to crude, violent stereotypes by many Americans. I fear that Grant's death will likewise be dismissed as unfortunate and tragic.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Police, Racism

The victim's race? You get one guess.

Labels: African Americans, BART Killing, California, Police, Racism