Gods bless Mr. Charles P. Pierce (he’ll need it):
Make no mistake about it: The actions of the police department in Oakland last night were a military assault on a legitimate political demonstration. That it was a milder military assault than it could have been, which is to say it wasn’t a massacre, is very much beside the point. There was no possible provocation that warranted this display of force. (Graffiti? Litter? Rodents? Is the Oakland PD now a SWAT team for the city’s health department?) If you are a police department in this country in 2011, this is something you do because you have the power and the technology and the license from society to do it. This is a problem that has been brewing for a long time. It predates the Occupy movement for more than a decade. It even predates the “war on terror,” although that has acted as what the arson squad would call an “accelerant” to the essential dynamic.
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Basic law enforcement in this country is thoroughly, totally militarized. It is militarized at its most basic levels. (The “street crime units,” so beloved by, among other people, the Diallo family.) It is militarized at its highest command positions. It is militarized in its tactics, and its weaponry and, most important of all, in the attitude of the officers themselves, and in how they are trained. There is a vast militarized intelligence apparatus that leads, inevitably, to pre-emptive military actions, like the raids on protest organizations that were carried out in advance of the 2008 Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. Sooner or later, this militarized law enforcement was going to collide head-on with a movement of mass public protest, and the results were going to be ugly. (There already had been dry runs elsewhere, most notably in Miami, in 2003, during protests of a meeting of trade ministers.)
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Meet Oakland, Singapore-by-the-Bay. There will be more of these. Depend on it. After all, they have fans out there…
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And why shouldn’t the police be militarized? After all, we keep handing them “wars” to fight. A war on drugs. A war on terror. A war on graffiti. (Thanks, Rudy.) Wars are not properly fought with half-measures. Wars are fought over territory and wars are fought over power. You put enough war propaganda into the heads of young men, hand them weapons, and give them a license to use them, and they are not going to see fellow citizens through the visors on their helmets. They are going to see enemies. Wars have enemies. In Oakland last night, the police took action against enemies…
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It’s time for the country to realize that something is dangerously out of control here, and that it’s not a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the public parks. There is a tradition of public protest in this country. Hell, this country is itself an act of public protest. Preserve that, or preserve nothing else, because there’s nothing else worth preserving. Police officers are public servants. They are not soldiers, facing down enemies. This is not a war. This is America.
Of course, Mr. Pierce grew up in Massachusetts, where we’re still proud of those dangerous, work-shy DFH rabble who started a decade-long war against public order and their property-owning betters by throwing rocks at duly authorized troops doing their jobs to “protect and support crown-appointed colonial officials attempting to enforce unpopular Parliamentary legislation.”
Kilkee
I grew up in Massachusetts, in the same city as Pierce, at about the same time. We used to be very proud of our rabble-rousers, and still are, so long as they are the dead 18th-century type. Now, however, we make it illegal to vdeotape police in the performance of their, um, duties. That would include, especially, their duty to pummel troublesome DFHs.
Linnaeus
African-American communities (and probably other communities of POC) have been dealing with this for a long time. Of course, it was less noticed then.
Villago Delenda Est
Pierce is absolutely on target. As a former military officer, I’ve seen this happening over the last 30 years, and it alarms me. The people that the police are theoretically there to “serve and protect” have become, frankly, “the enemy”, in the Vietnam/Iraq sense that EVERYONE but your gang, the guys who wear the blue, is “the enemy”.
The rise of the SWAT team, and the pervasiveness of the military mentality is everywhere. Here in Tracktown, USA, we had some out of control asshole with a taser use it on a Chinese exchange student, who spoke and understood English poorly, because the guy (who was in the apartment he was renting at the time) failed to instantly obey the asshole’s command. Shoot first, ask questions later.
Look at Arizona, where making a crime out of existing while brown is public policy, and the local sheriff in Phoenix is an outright fascist.
Campionrules
Come on, it’s not like Oakland has Democrat, female POC mayor who has a liberal ideology….wait, what?
Actually, in better news it looks like that, according to Mayor Quan’s facebook page, the city is going to reallow entry into the square for the Occupy movement. So maybe there’s some positive movement here.
Violet
Apparently Mayor Jean Quan has backed down quite a bit. And Marines around the world are NOT happy about what has happened to one of their own.
I think there is a lot more of this sort of thing to come, but Oakland may prove some kind of a turning point.
@Kilkee:
How the hell is that illegal. There should be court case after court case of it. We pay their salaries. Why can’t see take video of them working for us, especially when they are in public places?
PWL
Well, it does seem that the “Land of the Free, the Home of the Brave” is becoming a vast prison, with us as the inmates–“for our own good,” of course….
BGinCHI
This is a great piece because it’s about root causes. It’s astonishing and sad how much of our media is consumed with surface details rather than looking at causes.
I’m encouraged that vets are involved in the protests and are speaking about the lack of honor among the police. But it has to come from elsewhere, too. The rule of law has to be taken more seriously by those who enforce it.
Campionrules
I bet Chicago is watching this closely. I believe the G8 is coming there next year? and those protests will probably put this debacle in Oakland to shame.
And by watching, I mean gathering ideas about how to handle the DFH’s and what they can get away with.
Villago Delenda Est
I might add that the perpetrators of the Boston Tea Party dressed as a despised minority group and attacked private corporate property, destroying some of same.
I remember Fark having a contest to show how the modern media would portray that, and more than a few entries depicted 18th Century Faux Nooze, with a union jack waving in the corner of the screen, showing our brave redcoats dealing with the DFHs of the day.
wilfred
It’s no use making the police the enemy. They are, of course, but only because they are lacking in the praxis that is emerging amongst the other sheep. But that can change.
We need the police to recognize that they are little more than the armed guards of the rich. Patience. patience and more patience. It is false praxis to think that the police are not of the same class as the protestors.
Patience. Politics has failed – don’t expect anything from Quan or Jerry Brown. When the police realize that they are of the same class they are pushing against then they will join the movement.
But that has to be an organic process.
Kilkee
@Violet: I’m sure there will be such challenges. And in Massachusetts they stand some chance. The police are basing their position on the law (not designed for them) requiring consent to taping by all parties. Hope springs eternal.
RossinDetroit
I read that last night on Esquire and it sent a chill up my spine.
I’d question quoting the whole thing, though. It’s on a blog on a commercial site. Surely they deserve a quote and a ‘read the whole thing’ link since they’re paying Pierce and their advertisers are paying them.
trollhattan
@Violet:
I’d have been curious as to how Mayor Jerry would have handled things. Oakland is a generally rough city that also contains several very wealthy enclaves, which makes it very schizophrenic. Clearly, including the OPD, who’d best chill the f%$k out.
Zifnab
@Villago Delenda Est:
Strange. FOX never says anything bad about the modern Tea Party. They always give glowing media coverage for the hyper-partisan corporately backed gang of elderly anti-government protesters.
Why on earth would we suspect the original Tea Party would have been any different? Other than, you know, an accurate reading of history.
BGinCHI
@Campionrules: I’ll let you know what I hear. Rahm has so far been pretty law & order. We’ll see how he wants to make his reputation with this.
Nutella
@wilfred:
Yes, and that’s why it’s so important that OWS stays nonviolent towards the police. They’ve done remarkably well so far and it paid off in Albany.
Petorado
Funny that San Francisco is also known as “Baghdad by the Bay,” since heavy-handed police activities are making neighboring Oakland resemble Tikrit or Falluja.
gelfling545
OWS has been bringing to the surface all sorts of societal problems, of which this is one, that have been simmering just off the boil for years. Maybe something will be accomplished, maybe not, but at least it’s making it harder for people to ignore the rot.
Violet
Last night Occupy Oakland called for a General Strike on November 2. Those of us up late discussed it in the late night thread, but I’m wondering what folks here think of it.
It was trending on US Twitter last night. Just saw this:
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If they could get the port shut down… Wow.
Villago Delenda Est
@wilfred:
The problem is not OWS making police the enemy. The problem is the police making OWS the enemy. The police have the weapons. They only see DFHs…not Marines with more balls than they can ever hope, in a million years, to have.
jayjaybear
@BGinCHI: Rahm wants to be Papa Daley so bad he probably has a permanent tent set up at Holy Sepulchre so he can sleep in the aura.
Judas Escargot
@RossinDetroit:
Normally I’d agree, but some of us are stuck behind work filters and can’t get to the Esquire site. So I appreciate the quoting.
Yes, Esquire is blocked. I think the “men’s magazine” rep is the reason.
Villago Delenda Est
@jayjaybear:
Emmanuel probably reviews tapes of Lord Mayor Daley’s 1968 performance at the Democratic National Convention for pointers.
The Moar You Know
I made a comment yesterday about the standing force of rich kids that call themselves “anarchists” and that turn every Bay Area protest into an orgy of violence and vandalism. Anyone who has lived there for longer than a few years knows this to be the case.
So now I’ll comment on the local police, which are uniformly horrible. If you have an encounter with any Bay Area police, odds are pretty good that no matter the issue, you’re going to get, at a minimum, a royal-ass beatdown and if you’re unlucky, you’re going to end up dead. BART police are the absolute worst with the Oakland PD running a very close second. San Francisco cops don’t seem to kill folks very often – the SF DA tends not to defend cops to the death like DAs frequently do in other locales – but that’s more than made up for by the on and off-duty beatings that the police hand out to anyone they feel like punching that day. Including tourists, if you happen to think about go there for a holiday. Something to keep in mind.
Ben
From Google:
“We received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove YouTube videos of police brutality, which we did not remove.” – https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/US/?p=2011-06
The Moar You Know
@Violet: Oakland port is pretty minimal. If you want to create the mother of all shitstorms, the port to shut down is Long Beach. Probably 80% of everything that comes from Asia to the US goes through there.
RossinDetroit
@Judas Escargot:
No foolin? I’m on the ‘guest’ WiFi network at a high school right now. I’d think these were the most aggressive Cisco Clean Access filters around. I’m surprised someone else is more stringent.
Okay, then. I agree. But I still think that where practical commercial sites deserve the traffic. Especially if they’ve made the commitment to give someone like Charlie a forum.
Amir Khalid
The comparison isn’t quite fair. Half a century of the PAP’s rule in Spore, especially under founding prime minister and ultimate strict daddy Lee Kuan Yew, has turned Singaporeans into a nation of cowed, well-behaved children. I doubt that the Oaklandese* have come to that; if they had, there wouldn’t even be an Occupy Oakland protest.
(*Oaklanders? Oaklandish? Oaklandeans? Help me out here.)
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
There are people who want nothing more than for other people to get hurt, or better yet, killed in this kind of event and they are not cops.
El Cid
The mayor’s office links the crackdown in part to a report of a homeless man attacking OWS.
Also, the then-TV pundits pressuring Rev Dr Martin Luther King on his irresponsible rabble-rousing and demonstrations without a purpose.
Villago Delenda Est
@Amir Khalid:
“The there’s no there theres”
That’s what you call the residents of Oakland.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@The Moar You Know: Yea, try that shit in Pedro.
Violet
@The Moar You Know:
If they want to shut down a bigger port, I hope they decide to do it with more than a week to plan. I’m not sure what this General Strike call is going to deliver, but it’s interesting to watch, that’s for sure.
scav
@Amir Khalid: Oaklanders? Doesn’t she give personal advice to trees in the shredded corpses of still more of their ilk? Oh, sorry, not helping.
Warren Terra
Speaking of Mr. Pierce, he has a post up about how a planned nationwide test of the Emergency Broadcasting System has unleashed the Black Helicopters line of thought among Glenn Beck’s remaining followers.
If you click through Pierce’s post to Beck’s site, the comments are fascinating. What a bunch of lunatics.
RossinDetroit
Things are a little different in Orange County:
Unabogie
Teabaggers walked around with loaded guns and no one bothered them.
Just saying.
tulip
@RossinDetroit:
Man I wish we had a city council like that. That’s awesome.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Unabogie: A dude with an AK strapped gave the mayor in Atlanta cover to shut it down.
Judas Escargot
Not sure if this counts as OT or not: Mass GOP ties Elizabeth Warren to OWS, dubs her the “Matriarch of Mayhem”.
Katharsis
Yeah, what he said: @The Moar You Know:
A lot has been brewing in Oakland: http://is.gd/2BaiHd (msnbc article)
Johannes Mehserle & Lovelle Mixon.
Robert
I think the protesters throwing chemicals, stones, and paint at the police might have encouraged this response. It might also have to do with how anytime someone was being arrested for drug use, a mob would form around the cops and try to stop them from doing their job. There are injured police officers and injured protesters.
If everyone had just calmed down for a hot minute and thought about what they should be doing to conduct a peaceful protest/enforce the law, none of this would have happened. No one backed down, both sides lobbed projectiles at each other, and it ended poorly.
PeakVT
Happy to be proven wrong, but I don’t see a general strike working well in the US. There aren’t enough unions to orchestrate people not showing up, and pretty much everyone can be fired at will, so there’s a “you first” kind of problem for anyone at a workplace that isn’t organized.
Oddly enough, police forces are one of the few workplaces where the employees are organized sufficiently so that they could get everyone to stay home…
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
@Robert: But, but that doesn’t fit what WE want to believe.
Campionrules
@Katharsis:
Well the BART killing was just tragic.
Lovelle Mixon was a child raping murderer and I will shed no tears that he got one in the head after his rampage.
I wouldn’t really compare the two – I did see a picture of a sign supporting Lovelle at the Oakland OWS. I mean, really?
trollhattan
@Unabogie:
Can you imagine the shitstorm if the DFHs started to “open-carry?”
*Armed wingnut: defending your Freedoms(tm).
*Armed DFH/NBPP: reason to deploy the National Guard (and for wingnuts to
doubletriple their existing arsenal).Comrade Colette Collaboratrice
@The Moar You Know:
Oh, doG, yes! I’ve worked in Oakland and Berkeley long enough to recognize the names and faces of a dozen of them now. These little fuckers have no message other than “Let’s smash stuff!” They’re the local equivalent of soccer hooligans.
And of course that plays right into the OPD’s (and the media’s) hands. We need better protesters. It’s so frustrating.
Katharsis
@Campionrules:
The comparison is the locale. When a simple traffic violation turns into four dead, what do you think might happen to the mentality of that institution involved? That’s my point. Not defending it, just pointing out some context for understanding.
The Moar You Know
@Robert: Those weren’t protesters. Read my comment here, there’s some of the backstory. I’ll reiterate. There’s a few hundred rich kids in the SF Bay Area who make a hobby out of crashing any and every protest, then assaulting passerby, cops and locals. These shitbags set stores on fire, wreck cop cars, and do all the things you saw on the video.
Gotta be honest, probably a bad idea for OWS to hold any protests in the Bay Area at all, and they should have known better. The anarchist retards have been doing this crap since I got there in the late 80s, and show no signs of stopping.
EDIT: Comrade Colette Collaboratrice knows what’s up, I see.
Bubblegum Tate
@Violet:
I can’t help but think that move might backfire. It’d make a great short-term point, but in the long term, might it scare shippers away from doing business in Oakland?
scav
@RossinDetroit: Just to kick along the good news / allies / saner aspects of OWS, here are two with a religious theme and a “All of you kids, come onto our lawn!” vibe.
London: Canon of St Paul’s who resigned in protest of proposed removal of camp: church cannot answer peaceful protest with violence
Chicago: Clergy providing spiritual support for Occupy Chicago masses
Note how OWS has both religious and military presence adherents — Uh Oh, complex narrative alert, national divisions may not be those seen in your standard binary media and TV mirror and people might just be beginning to notice.
Raven (formerly stuckinred)
An Iraq war veteran who was injured during the raucous Occupy Oakland protest Tuesday night was upgraded to fair condition this morning at Highland Hospital in Oakland, a nursing supervisor said.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/10/27/BAD61LN3LM.DTL#ixzz1c0KDfF7s
Violet
@Raven (formerly stuckinred):
This is really good news. What happened to him is so wrong. I’m glad to hear his condition is heading in a good direction.
Bubblegum Tate
@Campionrules:
Immediately after Lovelle Mixon’s rampage, there were protesters claiming he was a victim of “police brutality.” Like I said before, the glut of protesters in the Bay Area tends to make Bay Area protests ridiculous because people will protest anything from any point of view. It’s sad.
The prophet Nostradumbass
@Warren Terra: It’s like those people think the X Files was a documentary series.
tkogrumpy
@Raven (formerly stuckinred): Yes and they are not to be underestimated in their ability to control events.
Linda Featheringill
@Amir Khalid: #28
http://www.oaklandmagazine.com/media/Oakland-Magazine/January-February-2007/Youre-an-Oaklander-If-/
A local magazine used the term Oaklander. I’d go with that.
Amir Khalid
@The prophet Nostradumbass:
Excuse me, are you suggesting that it wasn’t?
schrodinger's cat
@Amir Khalid: The truth is out there….I was a huge fan of Mulder back in the day.
p.a.
C’mon, Anne. As a fellow New Englander (RI) don’t you know Lexington and Concord are in New Hampshire? A Republican presidential hopeful told us.
Paul in KY
@Comrade Colette Collaboratrice: The people in charge of the protest in Oakland need to put the thumb down on the anarchist assholes.
Paul in KY
@The Moar You Know: The OWS people need to get some union help in there. The boys from Local 247 Stevedores or something like that will know how to ‘dissuade’ such hooligans.
Edit: If they are so few in number (the rich anarchist assholes), someone who can ID them will point them out & then they can be counseled.
xian
@Villago Delenda Est: uh, she wrote that because her chilldhood home in Oakland had been torn down.
Rathskeller
@The Moar You Know: I can only partially agree with this. They are always present in the bay area, just as you say, but they’re not always effective. After the Mehserle sentence came down, people were gripped to find out what the protests would produce. And it was mostly the anarchist knuckleheads, but they were effectively shut down. Although I live about ten blocks away, I have not visited the OWS-Oakland camps, and I would doubt any quick characterization of them as being filled with just more of the same kids protesting the same things.
I will be writing to Mayor Quan, as I am a (new) homeowner in the city, and presumably she gives a shit about people like me. I was stuck at thinking about what would be the most effective way to phrase my objections, since my first impulse was just to write “what the fuck are you guys doing?” Any suggestions??
terraformer
@Unabogie:
Clearly, that’s because the Tea Partiers serve the interests and goals of the 1%-ers. Whereas OWS threatens their interests.