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Joyous blues

Erica Hanna
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Joyous blues

By Nicole Gluckstern

arts@sfbg.com

FILM In an early scene from Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon’s documentary on the life and musical obsessions of their mutual friend Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, we see Strachwitz behind the wheel of his car, struggling to explain the common thread that joins his wide-ranging musical tastes, from country blues to Cajun Zydeco to bordertown conjunto.

“It’s just got some guts to it. It ain’t wimpy, that’s for sure. It ain’t no mouse music.”

Mouse music? In a later scene, some of his friends attempt to define the term.

“It’s music that’s cheap and not real.”

“Music that is popular.”

“Inauthentic.”

“Anything that Chris Strachwitz doesn’t like.”

Taking their documentary title (This Ain’t No Mouse Music!) from their subject, Gosling and Simon make their own attempt to define the term, following Strachwitz from the crowded warren of his brick-and-mortar, El Cerrito shop, Down Home Music, to the sultry backyards of the Louisiana bayou, where making music is just “a pure joy” — and recording it is Strachwitz’s fondest obsession.

This Ain’t No Mouse Music! is a fascinating road trip through the dusty back roads and anonymous beer joints of “the music of your neighbors.” It follows its subject from his early associations with iconic blues men Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb; his subsequent work with Mississippi Fred McDowell and the powerful Big Mama Thornton; his serendipitous acquisition of the publishing rights to Country Joe McDonald’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag”; his decades-long record-collecting habit (his renowned Frontera collection alone tops over 40,000 albums); his love of New Orleans jazz and Louisiana Zydeco; and his explorations of Tex-Mex conjunto and Appalachian country.

The filmmakers don’t skimp on the soundtrack. There are close to 70 songs used in the 91-minute doc, including historically important recordings — such as Lightnin’ Hopkins’ version of Mance Lipscomb’s “Tom Moore’s Farm,” which led Strachwitz and music historian Mack McCormick (who deserves a documentary of his own) to Lipscomb’s front door in Navasota, Texas, a key discovery for all parties concerned. Taking a page from Strachwitz’s own playbook, the directors are also on hand to record a wealth of vernacular music being played on the spot: the Treme Brass Band on a New Orleans street corner; members of the musical Savoy family playing a backyard barbecue in southwest Louisiana; a front-porch accordion performance in Texas with Santiago Jimenez Jr.; and a raucous Zydeco sing-along in Strachwitz’s kitchen with youthful standard-bearers the Pine Leaf Boys. Throughout, Strachwitz appears most often in his preferred habitat, fiddling with mics and levels and capturing, for posterity, the living breathing music he deliberately surrounds himself with.

Dedicated to the late Les Blank, with whom Gosling, Simon, and Strachwitz all collaborated with over the years (Gosling and Simon as assistant filmmakers; Strachwitz as co-director and producer of several music films, including the 1976 classic, Chulas Fronteras), This Ain’t No Mouse Music! makes good use of footage from several of his films. These include 1970’s The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, and the 1973 Clifton Chenier biography Hot Pepper. Strachwitz even echoes a popular Blank sentiment in a moment when he explains his recording process: “My stuff isn’t produced, I just catch it like it is.”

Gosling and Simon, who became filmmakers directly through Blank — Gosling was his assistant for 20 years, starting in the early ’70s, while Simon was married to him for 20 years and began working with him in a variety of capacities, because “otherwise I’d never see the guy” — credit him for teaching them the importance of approaching a subject with curiosity. They were also inspired by the principle of going in “not knowing anything,” and allowing the story to emerge in its own time, creating a gentle meander through certain key moments rather than a tightly-controlled, connect-the-dots narrative.

Keeping the focus on the music and musicians Strachwitz adores rather than the man himself may be the greatest homage Gosling and Simon can offer their subject. However, this choice leaves a sometimes distracting gap at its center, not quite filled by flashes of Strachwitz’s interior world that do find screen time: a moment of pained disgust at being asked for five dollars for a lemonade made with “just one lemon;” a shame-faced recollection of not taking a stand on behalf of Lipscomb in a segregated Southern café.

Approximately 30 seconds of the film are dedicated to the fact that he never married, another 60 to his family’s flight from Silesia, East Germany (now Poland) in 1945. But never far from the foreground are the many moments that cement Strachwitz’s role as a conduit through which so many overlooked, homegrown genres and musicians have been passed through to the American public, from the days when he drove his inventory around in the trunk of his car, to the present, when he can call business manager Tom Diamant with news of his latest discovery.

“Whether we make money on it or not, we put the records out,” Diamant observes somewhat wryly, a testament not just to the current challenges facing the music industry as a whole, but to Strachwitz’s still-boundless enthusiasm for his profession that supercedes the kind of business “sense” that focuses narrowly on dollars and cents.

Despite his admitted initial reluctance to be the subject of a documentary rather than the producer, sound engineer, or “song-and-dance man” glad-handing the performers before their sets, Strachwitz emerges as a character in his own right — a “classic record man” who entered the music business with the purest of intentions, to make the records he wanted to hear. And 54 years on, we see him doing just exactly that: no compromises, no bullshit, and, most especially, no mouse music. *

 

THIS AIN’T NO MOUSE MUSIC! opens Fri/19 in Bay Area theaters.

Deadly gamble

Erica Hanna
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Deadly gamble

joe@sfbg.com

As BART management and unions were locked in dysfunctional contract negotiations that would result in two strikes and two deaths last year, the district and the media scoffed at workers safety concerns and waged a media campaign demonizing the unions. Now, a new report commissioned by the district calls that strategy a horrible mistake.

The report from independent investigators Agreement Dynamics Inc., “Bay Area Rapid Transit Collective Bargaining Report and Recommendations,” reveals BART management perceived the Bay Area as anti-union. This guided its decision to hire Tom Hock as a contract negotiator and adopt a union-bashing public relations strategy that was then amplified by most local mainstream media outlets.

“In interviews, Tom Hock said he believed the strike would be very short and the unions would have to come back and reach an agreement,” the report, which was based on more than 200 hours of interviews of 60 BART employees, managers, and contractors, found. “He said media reports also heavily favored the management perspective.”

The San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News attacked BART’s workers in their news and editorial pages, stoking the flames of anger. “As to union claims that this is all about safety — how stupid do they think the public is?” the Merc opined in a July 2013 editorial. The Chronicle struck a similar tone in its Oct. 18 editorial, blaming workers and writing “the walkout is the height of irresponsibility.”

The unions warned management not to run the trains during the second strike, but those safety warnings went unheeded. A contract deal was reached only after two men working on the tracks during the strike, Laurence Daniels and Christopher Sheppard, were accidentally run down during what was later revealed as a replacement driver training exercise — warnings be damned.

“Some in management believed they had a good media strategy that put the public on their side,” the report found. Therefore, “the public was angry with the unions for demanding too much in their contracts.”

BART approved a contract from big-time public relations firm Singer Associates in April last year. Sam Singer and his firm are well-known for pulling the strings of local journalists and using scorched-earth tactics. As a result, articles highlighted riders woes and selected employee salaries while discounting safety and other concerns raised by workers.

But BART management and its board had longstanding CAL-OSHA violations, some of which were the subject of labor negotiations leading up to the strike. Notably, BART’s now-defunct “simple approval” policy, by which workers verbally notified management they would be working on the tracks, was one that both workers and state regulators long urged the district to change. The two deaths were linked to that controversial practice, which BART has since ended (see “Tragedy follows strike,” 10/23/13).

State regulators have fined BART for that fatal misjudgment and a final report from the National Transportation Safety Board is expected in the coming months. Only The Nation, East Bay Express, and Bay Guardian covered BART safety concerns with any depth or gravity before the two workers’ deaths. It’s hard to tell who led the dance — did the mainstream media embolden management, or did management lead on the media? Either way, safety was not a priority for BART managers during negotiations.

“Key points made about safety in bargaining sessions, as reported to us, fell on deaf ears,” the report’s authors noted. “Management thought the unions were just posturing, and the unions thought management was refusing to engage.”

The unions, the report found, “voiced frustration that they have raised these issues repeatedly, and management was not responsive…The ‘simple approval’ policy was seen as indicative of management’s unwillingness to deal with safety concerns until two workers were killed during the second strike in 2013.”

BART’s next contract negotiation is set for 2017. The transit agency has much work to do to repair its lingering culture of distrust, but so-called unbiased media need to cop to their anti-union slants. It took two deaths to show how relevant safety concerns really were.

Still not sharing

Erica Hanna
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0
Still not sharing

news@sfbg.com

As controversial legislation to legalize and regulate Airbnb and other short-term housing rental services operating in San Francisco headed for another contentious City Hall hearing on Sept. 15, the San Francisco Treasurer & Tax Collector’s Office quietly unveiled new policies and mechanisms for hosts to finally start paying long-overdue local taxes on their rentals.

Board of Supervisors President David Chiu’s legislation attempts to strike a balance between protecting housing for permanent city residents — including tenants in rent-controlled units who are being displaced in favor of visiting tourists — and allowing San Franciscans to sometimes rent out rooms through companies such as Airbnb. That practice has mushroomed during the Great Recession even though such short-term rentals of residential units have long been illegal in San Francisco (see “Into thin air,” 8/20/13).

Among other provisions, Chiu’s legislation would require hosts to register with the city and live in their units for at least 275 days per year (thus limiting rental nights to 90), create enforcement procedures for city agencies, and protect below-market-rate and single-room occupancy units from being used as short-term rentals.

But Airbnb has also been snubbing the city for more than two years since the Tax Collector’s Office held public hearings and concluded that short-term rental companies and their hosts are required to collect and pay the city’s Transient Occupancy Tax (aka, the hotel tax), a surcharge of about 15 percent on room rentals usually paid by visiting guests (see “Airbnb isn’t sharing,” 3/19/13).

After other media outlets finally joined the Bay Guardian in raising questions about the impact that Airbnb and other companies was having on San Francisco — and with cities New York City, Berlin, and other cities taking steps to ban short-term rentals — Airbnb announced in March that it would begin collecting and paying the TOT in San Francisco sometime this summer.

But that still hasn’t happened, even though Tax Collector Jose Cisneros recently unveiled a new website clarifying that Airbnb hosts must register as businesses and pay taxes and created a streamlined system for doing so. The office is even allowing Airbnb and other companies to register as “qualified website companies” that collect and pay these taxes on behalf of hosts.

“The law does apply to these transactions,” Cisneros told us. “And the set of requirements are the same for the hosts and the website companies.”

Airbnb didn’t respond to Guardian inquiries for this story.

Meanwhile, an unusually diverse coalition of critics continues to raise concerns about Airbnb and the regulatory legislation, including renter and landlord groups, neighborhood and affordable housing activists, labor leaders, and former members of the Board of Supervisors (including Chiu predecessor, Aaron Peskin) and Planning Commission. They penned a Sept. 15 to Chiu calling for him to delay the legislation.

“Individually and collectively, we have advanced nearly two dozen additional amendments that address the issues raised by short-term residential rentals. While we are not of one mind on every issue or every suggested amendment, we are unanimous in our belief that the process you are pursuing is rushed,” they wrote. “The City will live with the intended (and unintended) consequences of your legislation for many, many years.”

Sources in Chiu’s office had already told the Guardian that he planned to keep the legislation in committee for at least one more hearing so the myriad details can be worked out, as Chiu said at the hearing as well.

“We want to have the time to continue to vet and hear all of the perspectives, and at the end of the day what I hope to do is to be able to move forward and build incentives around something that is far better than our current status quo,” Chiu said at the hearing. “This is a very complicated issue, and we all know that we need to get this policy as right as we can.”

Planning Director John Rahaim conveyed concerns from the Planning Commission that the legislation beef up the city’s ability to regulate short-term rentals.

“The commission does believe that the law should be updated to create a legal avenue for those who do want to host,” Rahaim said. “However, currently there are about 5,000 units in the city engaging in short-term rentals. It’s very difficult to know if there are units not being lived in by a full-time resident.”

A long line of speakers wound completely around the packed chamber in City Hall, awaiting their turn to speak publicly to supervisors and city residents, from 20-somethings making a lives renting out their homes to longtime tenants fearing that home-sharing will hurt city’s character.

Airbnb was represented at the hearing by David Owen, a former City Hall staffer who is now director of public policy for the company, and he was publicly confronted by Chiu on the tax issue. Chiu criticized Airbnb for failing to start collecting those taxes as promised.

“As of now, we are extremely close and you will be hearing from us about that in the near future,” Owen said, provoking audible disbelief from many in the crowd. “We have been working diligently alongside the city. This is a complicated set of issues and those involved have all worked in earnest to facilitate this request.”

When Owen was asked about enforcement of the maximum number of nights a tenant has rented out his unit, he said Airbnb’s cooperation is “akin to the city asking Home Depot.com for a list of home care purchases to see if anyone had illegally renovated their bathroom.” But city officials say they need the company’s cooperation to address its impacts. “We don’t want data, just the number of nights per permanent resident so that we can ensure that the bad outcomes of this setup aren’t occurring,” Sup. Jane Kim said. “Airbnb profits from this industry, and therefore [is] accountable to the city.”

Silicon-centric proposal to split California fails to make ballot

Sasha Cuttler
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Silicon-centric proposal to split California fails to make ballot

While we at the Bay Guardian have long been intrigued by the possibilities of splitting California up into several states — the Bay Area could be an economic powerhouse with compassionate social services and modern infrastructure, while conservative counties would have low taxes but crumbling roads and bridges — we’re happy to hear the news that venture capitalist Tim Draper’s proposed six-state solution has failed to qualify for the ballot.

The most ridiculous part of Drapers’ initiative, which he spent more than $5 million on but fell short of the requisite number of signatures from registered voters, was his plan to call the Bay Area’s state “Silicon Vally” — showing just how arrogant and out-of-touch these tech titans can be. Hey buddy, I hate to break it to you, but the world doesn’t really revolve the tech industry, and it’s just stupid to name a state after a chemical element.  

Personally, I have a long history of covering the idea for splitting up California, starting in 1991 when I covered Lassen County’s threat to secede from California because of its difference with urban areas for the Lassen County Times, a story that then made international news.

Then-Assemblymember Stan Statham used that media spotlight to introduce advisory measures on the question of splitting California up into three states, an idea that voters in 31 counties in the state voted on in election of 1992, most of them approving of the idea.

But unlike the dozens of other times in California history when the idea of splitting up the state was raised — the most serious effort coming in 1941 when the rural northern California counities declared themselves Jefferson State and set up a highway checkpoint, only to have the movement lose stream when Pearl Harbor was bombed three days later — Draper’s measure just seemed like a vanity project from a clueless rich dude. 

Bombshell BART report slams hiring of union-busting negotiator Tom Hock

Erica Hanna
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Bombshell BART report slams hiring of union-busting negotiator Tom Hock

Independent investigators analyzing BART’s recent turmultuous, rollercoaster-ride labor negotiations issued their report yesterday, concluding that last year’s pair of damaging strikes could and should been avoided. The opinions that the analysts collected from the unions, management, and BART’s Board of Directors covered a wide spectrum, but there were a couple of common themes. 

First, the strikes and the death of two BART workers who were killed on the tracks when BART management ran scab-run trains while the workers were on strike, were devastating to the district and its personnel.

“We just walked out of a war,” one anonymous BART employee (or manager) told the report authors. Other anonymous quotes follow a similar theme: “It was like Vietnam… Labor massacare… The bloodiest strike ever… He was our hired gun… They threw bombs.” 

The second thing everyone agreed on, from management to the unions, was that hiring union-buster labor consultant Tom Hock as a negotiator was a bad idea. 

“I think a lot of the stakeholders involved and unions have identified that Tom Hock was the problem,” Tom Radulovich, a BART board director, told the Guardian. “This (report) validates my concerns. They talked to everybody.”

Agreement Dynamics Inc., who conducted the investigation on behalf of the BART board, did in-depth interviews with a multitude of BART union representatives, employees, managers, and labor negotiators. Through the report, Agreement Dynamics found a culture of distrust between labor and management that they described as entrenched and multi-generational. On top of that already potent powder-keg, Hock was hired as a negotiator. Seven board directors cast “aye” votes to hire Hock, including Radulovich. Directors Fang and Murray were absent from the room at the time of the vote.

According to the report, Hock came in with guns blazing. Mixing that attitude with what the report describes as BART General Manager Grace Crunican’s lack of experience in labor negotiations, and there was a perfect recipe for conflict. 

“When Tom Hock took over as chief negotiator, Grace had become hard line,” one source told Agreement Dynamics. “There wasn’t enough trust built… Tom Hock thought a strike was inevitable. I don’t know how we thought we could win. We did not even have the whole board supporting this.”

But despite the lack of groundswell support, Hock perpetuated a strategy to push the unions to strike, according to the source. 

“Tom pushed it to strike because Grace would not budge financially,” the source said. “So Tom said to Grace, ‘You will have to strike with your position.’ Management thought we could win the PR battle and the unions would cave. But the unions had politicians. The press can turn on a dime. They did and our strategy backfired.”

Two managers told Agreement Dynamics that lack of planning exacerbated this problem.

“We did not have a Plan B to prevent a strike,” one manager told the investigators. Another told them, “This strike was not productive. We never did a course correction and then there was another strike. Two people got killed. We spent millions to end up getting creamed, and engendering hate.”

In interviews with the investigators, Hock told them he believed the strike would be very short and the unions would “have to come back and reach an agreement” before management would have to give in. He based this on the Bay Area’s sentiment against the unions, the report wrote. He told investigators that media reports also heavily favored management’s perspective. (The report also outlines how management believed their ‘good strategy’ helped sway big media, like the San Francisco Chronicle, to take their side. Good job, guys.)

The negotiators were told by Hock that a number of factors led to the strike, as he tried to deflect blame. But the report’s analysis said “the conditions cited by Tom Hock (elected board, politically strong unions, ineperience in labor negotiations) have existed in prior negotiations when no strike resulted.” 

So Hock pushed the unions to strike, the same strike that led to two workers’ deaths, the report seemingly implies. But that was not his only misstep, according to the report. He also didn’t read the contract he signed off on.

After labor negotiations concluded, BART management brought celebrations to a screeching halt. For those that remember, a provision on family medical leave, section 4.8 of the labor contract, was disputed by BART management. They said they never signed that provision, which could cost BART upwards of $40 million in sick leave, if approved. 

BART management said it signed the provision due to a “clerical error,” which BART board director Zachary Mallet confirmed to the San Jose Mercury News. “The cause of this incident has been confirmed as a miscommunication-based clerical error during the write-up of a tentative agreement,” Mallet told the Merc. 

But Hock and district negotiators Paul Oversier and Rudy Medina all told Agreement Dynamics that they signed it without reading it. “If Tom Hock had read it before he signed it, 4.8 would not have happened,” one BART staff member told the investigators. 

But as much as Hock comes under fire in this report, the report also found that he came at a time of deep division between labor and management. The report shows a way out for that: leadership from the BART Board of Directors. Radulovich told the Guardian he agrees. The board must take the reins in righting the historic bad blood between all sides at BART. 

“A lot of it is the culture of your organization,” he said. “When I was a baby BART director, [employees and management] were complaining about things that happened back in 1979. You do feel like you’re walking in on a fight going on long before you got there, and going on long after you leave.”

“That antagonism has been there from the beginning,” he told us. “The question I ask myself is: how can I change that?”

Tomorrow morning at a press conference at 9am, some of the BART board will present the report and talk about its findings. Maybe we’ll find those answers then. 

Lee and UC Berkeley institute take on income inequality

Sasha Cuttler
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Lee and UC Berkeley institute take on income inequality

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) and U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society are teaming up today [Wed/10] in Washington DC to release and discuss the institute’s first policy prescriptions for reducing inequality.

The policy brief—the first to be issued by the Haas Institute—will introduce research-based approaches suggested by a diverse array of economists looking at inequality through different lenses.

The policy brief calls for the integration of regions through land use rezoning to decrease inequality, an increase in public investments in preschool programs, raising the minimum wage, and the reformation of unfair tax policy that favors the wealthiest 1 percent.

“Inequality is a defining issue for America’s future,” John Powell, director of the Haas Institute, said in a press statement. “The good news is that we know variation in inequality and mobility imply that local, state, and federal policies can have an impact. Therefore, the solution is within reach, but only if policymakers learn from and apply researched based initiatives.”

While this is the Haas institute’s first policy brief, it is far from being Lee’s first foray into the issues of inequality. In fact, it’s become an area of her expertise. Lee, will give this morning’s keynote address, has been introduced two bills to curb the growth of inequality.

The first, the Income Equity Act (H.R. 199), would limit the tax deductibility of executive compensation packages. Currently, the more a firm pays its CEO, the more the firm can deduct from its taxes, leaving “cash-strapped taxpayers picking up the tab,” said Lee in a 2013 blog post.

“Despite record corporate profits, none of it is being shared with the American working class—the strongest work force in the world,” Jim Lewis, Lee’s press director, told the Guardian. “We’re pushing for research-based initiatives that are realistic when implemented.”

Locally, state Sens. Mark DeSauliner (D-Concord) and Loni Hancock (D-Oakland) introduced a pay-disparity bill (SB 1372) in April, which would tax companies with a wide income gap between CEOs and workers, and give tax breaks to companies with lower income disparities.

The second, Lee’s Pathways Out of Poverty Act (H.R. 5352), addresses unemployment in minority communities, namely African Americans and Latinos. It aims to create good-paying jobs and increase social mobility while strengthening the social net for those still struggling.

Research based solutions seem like a perfectly practical way to go about solving our evident wealth gap, but “1 percenter” and “the 99 percent” have only been part of the national lexicon since 2011’s Occupy protests.

A Gallup poll from January this year revealed that Democrats and independents are overwhelmingly dissatisfied with income and wealth distribution, as well as a majority of Republicans. The poll also found that only slightly about half of Americans are satisfied with the opportunity to get ahead by working hard.

“For many years, income inequality was viewed as an important factor and byproduct of growth,” said Powell. “That has been largely discredited by economists. It’s not a necessary byproduct of technological advances and globalization.”

All of this comes at a time when the wealth gap in the United States—and especially in the Bay Area—is reaching exorbitant proportions.

In June, the San Francisco Human Services Agency released a report stating that while the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, the city’s middle class—those earning around the median household income of $72,500—is disappearing altogether.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution revealed that between 1990 and 2012, the city’s middle class has shrunk from 45 percent of the population to 34 percent.

“There’s no need for this kind of gap, it’s unsustainable,” Powell said. “We need to work on a local level, especially when we have a more liberal legislature in California. Closing the gap can enhance economic growth. It can bring the country together.”

To the classrooms, Baby Boomers

Michael Redmond
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OPINION As long as I’ve been substitute teaching, people have asked what I thought we could do to improve public schools. With all of the classrooms I’ve been in, they figured I might know something. But I’ve never had a simple answer for them, because I don’t actually think there is a single overriding educational crisis.

For most kids, the system works okay, or at least as well as it always has. At the same time, there are large groups of kids clearly struggling — black students most obviously, but not only. If we’re serious about fixing the educational problems of the nation’s “disadvantaged” kids, we need to improve the overall circumstances of their lives.

I’d say there is one surefire thing we can do to improve America’s classrooms: Put more adults in them — and not just teachers.

Think of how seldom the question of class size makes it into the highly politicized national education debate. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it must be an insignificant element. But if you really want to know if class size is a big deal, just ask someone who teaches. Or if you want private sector confirmation of this, check out the private school brochures or websites, which tout their smaller class sizes.

So why don’t we hear more about this? Maybe because there’s no major corporate or political interests pushing it, as opposed to charter schools — or the various tenure, curriculum, or discipline reforms that vie to become panacea of the moment.

For instance, you’ll likely hear more about the problem of inadequate textbooks in “poor schools” than the too-large classes in them. Could this be related to the fact that the only part of the publishing industry that isn’t struggling these days is the educational sector?

The world’s four largest publishers produce educational materials, and they’re out there making their case and drumming up business all the time. There’s a lot of money to be made selling $85 world history texts to middle school classes of 35 students. Again, if you’re not sure yourself, ask any teacher which would help more: the latest textbook or a smaller class?

Moving from business to politics, the Obama Administration has recently expressed interest in reforming school discipline policy, but it says so little about the surest route to reducing classroom problems: a lower student-teacher ratio. The reason for the silence is pretty obvious. More teachers cost more money. This means higher taxes (or maybe reduced military spending). New textbooks cost money too, of course. The difference, however, is that there are no giant corporations pushing for hiring more teachers — there’s simply no money in it for them.

Yet we could put more adults into the mix even when we can’t actually reduce class size. I’ve been in classrooms where it seemed like the adult-to-child ratio needed to really give kids a shot was something like one-to-five-or-six — and this was not special ed. And I’ve seen combinations of teachers, paraprofessionals (aka teachers’ aides), student teachers, parents, or volunteers from the community that achieved that goal — at least for a little while. I’ve also seen situations where an additional person helped a kid who would have otherwise likely disrupted an entire class and not only prevented that, but got him to produce something useful.

After I had expounded on this idea at a recent gathering in Boston, an old friend came up to me and said, “Look around this room,” noting the crowd of Baby Boomers who are soon retiring and will have considerably more time on their hands. All had an interest in public education.

What if even a small percentage of them could find their way to helping public schools by actually spending time assisting in a classroom? Wouldn’t we have a significant asset on our hands? I think he was right.

Tom Gallagher is a San Francisco substitute teacher and the author of Sub: My Years Underground in America’s Schools (Coast to Coast Publishing, 2014). He can be reached at tgtgtgtgtg@aol.com. To submit a guest editorial, contact news@sfbg.com.

A firsthand account of the 5-alarm blaze in the Mission

Sasha Cuttler And Mary Magee
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A firsthand account of the 5-alarm blaze in the Mission

Editor’s note: We received this firsthand account from Ben Rosenfeld, who lives in close proximity to the site of yesterday’s [Thu/4] 5-alarm fire. Read more about the blaze in the San Francisco Examiner.

By Ben Rosenfeld

For those who don’t know, we were lucky our building survived a 5-alarm fire yesterday, almost directly behind us (feet away). Fortunately too, there were no serious injuries.

“Fire watch” crews stayed through the night in the back yard dousing flare ups, and are still here now keeping an eye out. Supervisors, inspectors, and news crews have come in and out. [Department of Building Inspection] inspectors came to confirm the obvious: that the building that burned would be condemned. And AT&T showed up and concluded that their engineering department will need to rewire, as our wires come off the building which burned and which undoubtedly will be demolished. Remarkably, though, my phones still work.

There’s no question that the SFFD’s swift and overwhelming response (and decision to “go defensive” and contain the fire in the unit it broke out in) saved this building and the neighbors’. It was amazing to watch them in action and talk to them about their craft.

I saw the smoke when it was little wisps coming out the back (I happened to be in the back room looking out the window while on the phone), and ran out with a fire extinguisher (absurdly as it turned out), calling 911, and yelling “fire,” and reporting that 911 advised us to evacuate.

I think we banded together really well as residents, working to make sure everyone was alerted and accounted for. We want to help the neighbors rebuild their garden with a neighbor solidarity party in which we also discuss disaster contingencies.

This was a good lesson in the meaning of the phrase, “we’re all in this together,” and in how dependent for our safety we are on one another – especially in SF, where we’re almost literally stuck together.

Photos by Ben Rosenfeld

Guardian Intelligence: September 3 – 9, 2014

Michael Redmond
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CASTRO CURTAIN CALL

If your favorite thing about seeing movies at the historic Castro Theatre is hearing the score for that Charlie Chaplin short played on the instrument that would’ve been used when the film actually came out — well, get thee to the movies, and fast. The Castro Theatre’s famous Wurlitzer organ is being sold by its current owner, and will be replaced early next year with an elaborate, one-of-a-kind digital console, with seven keyboards and more than 800 stops, designed by acclaimed organ creator Allen Harrah — pro bono. One trade-off: We’re guessing this will be better for scoring alien movies than its analog counterpart?

THEFT TIMES TWO

It’s a drag to have your car stolen. But if the vehicle is recovered, the high fees you may fork over to get it back only add insult to injury. In San Francisco, police give the owner of a recovered stolen vehicle 20 minutes to retrieve it before sending the car to impound. That’s where the costs add up. Worst-case scenario? The fees rise above the value of the car, and it gets auctioned off. Sup. Scott Wiener has called for a hearing to review the city’s towing policies with respect to stolen cars. The company that operates the city’s impound lot, AutoReturn, is due for contract renewal next year.

TAG, YOU’RE IT!

The neighborhood some call “upper Safeway” has gotten some negative attention lately, but the Friends of Duboce Park Tag Sale — back for its 17th year — is perfectly timed to recharge the area’s community spirit. Last year’s event was hit with an unexpected deluge, so hope for sunny skies Sat/6 and head to the ‘hood’s collective backyard from 9am-2pm for shopping (bargains galore on household items, clothes, sports equipment, books, and more!) and hob-nobbing, with all proceeds going toward improvements to Duboce Park, including its playground. www.friendsofdubocepark.org

SWEET TRIBUTE

Former SF clubkid (now renowned LA artist) Jason Mecier is famed for his celebrity portraits done with junk food and trash — and his tribute to Robin Williams is gaining attention. “It’s Robin Williams as Mrs. Doubtfire, with a Patch Adams nose and a Flubber green background,” Mecier says. “This portrait took over 30 hours to make and is comprised of thousands of candy pieces including Red Vines, Black Licorice, gum balls, Jelly Bellies, Jelly Beans, Tic-Tacs,Gum Drops, Gummy Bears, Sixlets, Mike and Ike’s, Hot Tamales and others. I’ve always wanted to do a portrait of him combining all of his most popular roles. Unfortunately, now was the time to do it.” www.jasonmecier.com

CYCLE UP

San Francisco-style cycletracks — bike lanes physically separated from automobile traffic — could proliferate in cities throughout California under a bill approved today [Fri/29] by the Legislature, provided Gov. Jerry Brown decides to sign it. Assembly Bill 1193, the Protected Bikeways Act, by San Francisco Democrat Phil Ting, was approved today by the Assembly on a 53-15 vote after clearing the Senate on Monday, 29-5. The bill incorporates cycletrack design standards into state transportation regulations, which had previously stated that such designs weren’t allowed. In other bike news, the SF Bicycle Coalition announced that a plan was approved to bring a raised bikeway to Valencia between Cesar Chaves and Duncan Streets next year, creating a buffer between drivers and cyclists.

VOTERS IN THE DARK

Proposed legislation to shed light on who’s bankrolling political campaign ads has been stalled for now. The DISCLOSE Act — which stands for “Democracy is Strengthened by Casting Light on Spending in Elections” — needed a two-thirds vote to pass both houses of the California Legislature, but lacked support. It would have required funders of TV, print, and radio ads, and robocalls, to be clearly identified by closing a loophole that allows them to be disguised by ambiguous committee names. Sen. Mark Leno and other cosponsors vowed to continue the fight next year.

ZOOBORN

On Aug. 26, the SF Zoo welcomed rare newborn twin male giraffes — unfortunately one was too weak to survive, but the other little fellow is doing fine at 100 pounds and 5’6″ tall. The calf’s mother is 11-year-old Bititi, who was born at the Oakland Zoo and made the journey across the bay to live at the San Francisco Zoo in 2005. The father is 12-year-old Floyd, who was born in Albuquerque at the Rio Grande Zoo. We’re looking forward to the naming contest. www.sfzoo.org

PARK ARIAS

One of our favorite picnic singalongs (and “try-to-singalongs”) is coming, as SF Opera’s Opera in the Park hits Sharon Meadow in Golden Gate Park, Sun/7 at 1:30pm. On the menu? Mozart’s Don Giovanni Overture, Puccini’s “Nessun dorma” from Turandot, and Leoncavallo “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci. (You may not know the titles but you’ll recognize the tunes.) Pack a flask of wine and pray for sunshine. www.sfopera.org.

GORGE YOURSELF

The Asian Arts Museum’s “Gorgeous” show (through Sept. 14) is a sugar rush of centuries’ worth of crowd-pleasing art hits, including everything from Jeff Koons’ infamous porcelain portrait of Michael Jackson and pet monkey Bubbles to breathtaking ancient Chinese paintings. The show, produced in partnership with SFMOMA, provides a great introduction to art history for our ADD age; more experienced types will appreciate the chance to linger before Mark Rothko’s “No. 14, 1960” alongside works from artisans of other eras. www.asianart.org

 

From tanks to scooters: The top five most and least intimidating SFPD vehicles

Erica Hanna
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From tanks to scooters: The top five most and least intimidating SFPD vehicles

Our news feature story this week covered the militarization of police departments across the country, including the SFPD, and how the easy accessibility of “cool toys” like grenade launchers and armored vehicles encourages violence.

But one conclusion we were left with as we worked on the story was this: the SFPD ain’t all bad. During the last Police Commission meeting, Chief Greg Suhr mentioned he was almost hesitant to order four forklifts from the Department of Defense due to scrutiny from the news media. 

With all the eyeballs on the SFPD’s military machines, we thought we’d take a lighter approach to the issue with a look at some of the San Francisco Police Department’s most and least intimidating vehicles. The winner for most and least intimidating appears at the top of both lists, and I’d bet it strikes close to home for just about everyone who lives in the city.

All photos courtesy of the SFPD, via Police Car Website.net. 

Five Most Intimidating

5. Suzuki dirt bikes

suzuki

Sure, one of these isn’t intimidating, but have you seen them in action? They climb stairs like it’s nobody’s business, and often can be seen buzzing around the homeless of Golden Gate Park. Imagine a team of four motorbikes racing towards you, and that’s reason enough to shake in your boots. Toss the weed, it’s the cops!

4. Bomb squad truck 

bomb

This might be the biggest police vehicle you’ve ever seen, and I’d be just as happy to never actually lay eyes on it in real life.

3. Lenco BearCat

bearcat

It comes as no surprise that the SWAT unit uses this bad boy, which looks like it could withstand anything…except maybe the police department’s own grenade launchers and helicopter armament subsystems, that is.

2. Saracen Rescue Vehicle

sarcan

Although it’s a “rescue vehicle,” this behemoth looks like it can do, well, a whole lot more than rescuing. Let’s just say it gives the Batmobile a run for its money.

1. Go-4 Scooter

scooter1

Okay, this one doesn’t look too scary. But for anyone who has been slapped with a parking ticket that costs somewhere in the triple digits, this vehicle probably evokes painful memories best kept in the past. Ironically, the SFPD car we should all fear the most is the one that looks the least harmful.

Five Least Intimidating

5. Transport Bus

transport

This bus looks old enough to be out of commission, but if the SFPD were to put it into active duty you can be sure someone’s grandmother would get on, asking how far it is to the zoo. Beep beep!

4. Mobile Command Center

command

The SFPD uses this vehicle to conduct business away from the office, but it also brings to mind a certain Breaking Bad RV. (Okay, that’s kind of a stretch.) But the way things have been going lately, from the crooked drug lab to federal indictments of SFPD cops, would you be surprised if the Police Department had a big-time meth operation going on in its “command centers?” (We’re kidding, of course.)

3. Segway Scooter

segway

Sometimes walking around is just too much effort. If you’re a cop and you ride this, you may as well swap your gun belt for a fanny pack.

2. Lawnmower

lawnmower

We’re not sure if the SFPD has any lawns to mow given California’s crippling drought, but this little machine could be used to get rid of the type of weed that doesn’t grow in everyone’s garden. (Yes, that one.) Commence operation weed-killer!

1. Go-4 Scooter

parking

The meter maid’s vehicle of choice is a dual win. Because getting ticketed for parking in the wrong place at the wrong time is a scary thought for anyone, but appearance-wise, this cute little scooter won’t scare a flea.

Oversight

When it comes to the SFPD’s acquisition of these vehicles and other “toys” like body armor and high-powered weapons, oversight is generally nowhere to be found. Though not every SFPD vehicle looks worthy of oversight, it’s clear that federal funding finances some of the Police Department’s high-scale purchases, including the BearCat and Mobile Command Center. 

But our story this week found that the Police Commission often holds hearings for the appropriation of funds for military weapons after the equipment has already been ordered, like in March 2010 when a commission agenda had a request to “retroactively accept and expend a grant in the amount of $1,000,000.00 from the U.S. Department of Justice.” More oversight on these matters could go a long way toward preventing militarization.

Predicting earthquakes, from 14-year-old prophets to train-stopping ShakeAlerts to lessons from disaster flicks

Erica Hanna
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Predicting earthquakes, from 14-year-old prophets to train-stopping ShakeAlerts to lessons from disaster flicks

Earlier today, I called my mother, a natural disaster film junkie, and asked her, “Do you know of any movies where someone predicts natural disasters, but no one believes the guy, and so everything goes a little haywire?”

“10.5, Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Volcano, Deep Impact, and Knowing,” she replied without any hesitation. “But in Knowing the protagonist gets help from aliens to predict disasters, so I don’t know if that’s bordering on fiction.”

Despite the hundreds of natural disaster blockbusters warning the public to listen when someone predicts catastrophe, earthquake prediction technology can’t defeat the rules of physics and the unpredictable nature of shaking earth. When a 14-year-old from Florida claims he predicted the recent Napa earthquake, for instance, doubts are raised, heads were tilted, and facts must be checked at once. 

“I started jumping up and down when I heard about the earthquake,” high school student Sugganth Kannan told us.

Kannan was sad about the destruction, sure, but he also thought the earthquake’s timing, location, and magnitude validated his prediction that an earthquake with a magnitude of at least 5.0 would occur 50 miles from the South Napa location within 180 days from last December when he made the prediction. So, he was close, but off by a few months. 

To make his prediction, Kannan used the Spatial Connect Theory, which states that all earthquakes within a fault zone are related. Then, looking at past earthquakes, he made functions based on the angle of change, geographical difference, and the time between earthquakes to eventually come up with a pattern. His work has been published in the Journal of Geology & Geosciences. 

Of course, earthquakes in California are both as no-kidding-predictable as they are scientifically unpredictable. According to the US Geological Survey, which cites studies examining the past 14,000 years, catastrophic earthquakes strike along the southern San Andreas fault about once every 150 years. And if you don’t believe the US Geological Survey, there’s always Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has stated, “There’s a real likelihood of a major, major earthquake in the next 10, 15, 20 years.” We’re seismically active, and we know it. 

While 14-year-old Kannan and the lieutenant governor might want futures as earthquake prophets, Richard Allen, director of the Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, is just happy he can predict earthquakes within 10 seconds of their first furious rumble. He helped pioneer an early warning system called ShakeAlerts that’s currently got 150 subscribers and does just that. 

Now there’s an idea for a natural disaster movie: Nicholas Cage predicts an earthquake a whopping 10 seconds before the disaster happens, causing BART trains to automatically come to dramatic, adrenaline-rushing halt, saving thousands of lives! It might not be fodder for disaster movies, but it is good news for actual and real world of real and actual earthquakes. 

BART is one of Shake Alert’s users. When the Napa earthquake went off, an alarm went off at BART’s offices announcing an approaching earthquake. Spokesperson John McPartland explained at a press conference on Monday that the trains moving at 33 MPH or less would have stopped had they experienced a a 3.1 earthquake or higher. But in the Bay Area, the magnitude was much smaller, and the trains raced on, unknowing.

“If there’s an earthquake, and you’re on BART, the best thing you can ask for is for the train to stop,” said Allen. You can check out a video for CISN ShakeAlert here. In the video, you can hear buzzing, and then a somewhat intense robotic voice telling you, “Earthquake! Earthquake! Light shaking expected in 10 seconds. Earthquake!”

“The farther away from the earthquake, the sooner you’ll get the alert,” Allen told the Guardian. “In the best case scenario — as in, the worst case scenario earthquake — you’ll get up to a minute warning. For this one, BART got 10 seconds. There’s no way to improve that. It’s physics.”

He hopes to get more funding to bring ShakeAlert to more people, and to one day develop a mobile app so anyone can be alerted seconds before an earthquake occurs. Ten seconds might not sound like a lot of time, but for those knitting with dangerous needles, or cooking with sharp knives, or just generally doing things not conducive to huge earthquakes with large, pointy things, 10 seconds could mean a whole lot. Although California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law to turn Shake Alert into a statewide program last fall, the project has only received $10 million of the $80 million it needs for new sensors and infrastructure. 

Then there’s virtual reality. Michael Oskin, a professor of earth and planetary sciences who studies earthquakes and seismicity at UC Davis, has taken his students to the site of the Napa earthquake to take photographs of the destruction and use the photographs to build 3D models to help them understand the wrath of the quake and what could come next.  At UC Davis’ W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES), researchers get to experience earthquakes virtually and take heed. 

Much of Oskin’s work with virtual reality assimilation revolves around looking at earthquakes before and after they’ve occurred, examining the fault lines throughout these phases, and studying how the faults have moved afterwards. 

“If you want to understand the record of faulting, you look at earthquakes that have just happened to see how complicated they are and how they’ve changed. Then you get a better sense of how to interpret them,” Oskin said. From there, he can also create a virtual world to provide a visual of what could happen to houses built along fault lines.

“Hopefully in 20 years, the tools will be available for everyone to use – on laptops and 3D TV screens so you can visualize an earthquake on a screen in 3D,” Oskin said. “It’s not high end software. It’s just creative programming.”

If earthquake forecasting apps for all is the dream, we’re certainly getting closer. John Rundle, a UC Davis physics professor, co-launched OpenHazards.com, which produces earthquake forecasts and a mobile app. 

“What we do is we count smaller earthquakes to forecast bigger earthquakes,” Rundle explained. “Once a magnitude 6 earthquake occurs, like the one in Napa, we start counting the number of small earthquakes that occur in the region after that. Once we get 1000 earthquakes with a magnitude of 5, it’s time for another 6 to occur. We convert that statement into a probability around the world, every night, and display it on the website.” 

Rundle said his system has a 80-85 percent accuracy rate.  “If you were to make a whole bunch of random forecasts today, and you were to do that tomorrow and the next day and then compare the forecasts we use, Open Hazard would be better 80-85 percent of the time,” he explained. “That’s roughly equivalent to a weather forecast three or four days into the future. That’s where our accuracy is.” 

Back in 2012, an Italian judge convicted seven scientific experts of manslaughter and sentenced them to six years in prison for failing to give warning before the April 2009 earthquake that killed over 300 people. But that’s why earthquake forecasting is called forecasting, and not predicting. Fortune tellers may not be trusted, but you can’t kill the weatherman, especially over quakes. 

Gearing up for war

Michael Redmond
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Gearing up for war

joe@sfbg.com

A tear gas canister explodes as citizens flee from the gun-toting warriors, safely guarded behind their armored vehicles. Dressed in patterned camo and body armor, they form a skirmish line as they fire projectiles into the crowd. Flash bang explosions echo down the city’s streets.

Such clashes between police and protesters have been common in Ferguson, Mo., in the past few weeks since the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager killed by a police officer. But it’s also a scene familiar to anyone from Occupy Oakland, where Iraq veteran Scott Olsen suffered permanent brain damage after police shot a less-than-lethal weapon into his head, or similar standoffs in other cities.

police embed 1As the country watched Ferguson police mobilize against its citizens while donning military fatigues and body armor and driving in armored vehicles, many began drawing comparisons to soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan — indeed, viral photos featuring side-by-side comparisons made it difficult to distinguish peace officers from wartime soldiers.

So how did law enforcement officers in police departments across the country come to resemble the military? And what impact is that escalation of armaments having on otherwise peaceful demonstrations? Some experts say the militarization of police actually encourages violence.

Since the ’90s, the federal Department of Defense has served as a gun-running Santa Claus for the country’s local police departments. Military surplus left over from wars in the Middle East are now hand-me-downs for local police across the country, including here in the Bay Area.

A grenade launcher, armored command vehicles, camera-mounted SWAT robots, mounted helicopter weapons, and military grade body armor — these are just some of the weapons and equipment obtained by San Francisco law enforcement agencies since the ’90s. They come from two main sources: the Department of Defense Excess Property Program, also known as the 1033 loan program, and a multitude of federal grants used to purchase military equipment and vehicles.

A recent report from the American Civil Liberties Union, “The War Comes Home: The Excessive Militarization of American Policing,” slammed the practice of arming local police with military gear. ACLU spokesperson Will Matthews told us the problem is stark in the Bay Area.

“There was no more profound example of this than [the response to] Occupy,” he told the Guardian. He said that military gear “serves usually only to escalate tensions, where the real goal of police is to de-escalate tension.”

The ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and others are calling for less provocative weaponry in response to peaceful demonstrations, as well as more data to track the activities of SWAT teams that regularly use weaponry from the military.

The call for change comes as a growing body of research shows the cycle of police violence often begins not with a raised baton, but with the military-style armor and vehicles that police confront their communities with.

 

PREPARING FOR BATTLE

What motivation does the federal government have to arm local police? Ex-Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Stephen Downing told the Guardian, “I put this at the feet of the drug war.”

The initial round of funding in the ’90s was spurred by the federal government’s so-called War on Drugs, he said, and the argument that police needed weaponry to match well-armed gangs trafficking in narcotics. That justification was referenced in the ACLU’s report.

After 9/11, the desire to protect against unknown terrorist threats also spurred the militarization of police, providing a rationale for the change, whether or not it was ever justified. But a problem arises when local police start to use the tactics and gear the military uses, Downing told us.

When the LAPD officials first formed military-like SWAT teams, he said, “they always kept uppermost in their mind the police mission versus the military mission. The military has an enemy. A police officer, who is a peace officer, has no enemies.”

“The military aims to kill,” he said, “and the police officer aims to preserve life.”

And when police departments have lots of cool new toys, there is a tendency to want to use them.

When we contacted the SFPD for this story, spokesperson Albie Esparza told us, “Chief [Greg Suhr] will be the only one to speak in regards to this. He is not available for the next week or two. You may try afterwards.”

 

“CRAIGSLIST OF MILITARY EQUIPMENT”

Local law enforcement agencies looking to gear up have two ways to do it: One is free and the other is low-cost. The first of those methods has been heavily covered by national news outlets following the Ferguson protests: the Department of Defense’s 1033 loan program.

The program permanently loans gear from the federal government, with strings attached. For instance, local police can’t resell any weapons they’re given.

To get the gear, first an agency must apply for it through the national Defense Logistics Agency in Fort Belvoir, Va. In California, the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services is the go-between when local police file grant applications to the DLA.

The bar to apply is low. A New Hampshire law enforcement agency applied for an armored vehicle by citing that community’s Pumpkin Festival as a possible terrorism target, according to the ACLU’s report. But the report shows such gear is more likely to be used against protestors or drug dealers than festival-targeting terrorists.

“It’s like the Craigslist of military equipment, only the people getting this stuff are law enforcement agencies,” Kelly Huston, a spokesperson of OEMS, told the Guardian. “They don’t have to pay for this equipment, they just have to come get it.”

Troublingly, where and why the gear goes to local law enforcement is not tracked in a database at the state level. The Guardian made a public records requests of the SFPD and the OEMS, which have yet to be fulfilled. Huston told us the OEMS is slammed with records requests for this information.

“The majority of the documents we have are paper in boxes,” Huston told us, describing the agency’s problem with a rapid response. “This is not an automated system.”

The Guardian obtained federal grant data through 2011 from the OEMS, but with a caveat: Some of the grants only describe San Francisco County, and not the specific agency that requested equipment.

Some data of police gear requested under the 1033 loan program up to 2011 is available thanks to records requests from California Watch. The New York Times obtained more recent 1033 loan requests for the entire country, but it does not delineate specific agencies, only states.

Available data shows equipment requested by local law enforcement, which gravitates from the benign to the frightening.

 

TOYS FOR COPS

An Armament Subsystem is one of the first weapons listed in the 1033 data, ordered by the SFPD in 1996. This can describe mounted machine guns for helicopters (though the SFPD informed us it has since disbanded its aero-unit). From 1995 to 1997, the SFPD ordered over 100 sets of fragmentation body armor valued at $45,000, all obtained for free. In 1996, the SFPD also ordered one grenade launcher, valued at $2,007.

Why would the SFPD need a grenade launcher in an urban setting? Chief Suhr wouldn’t answer that question, but Downing told us it was troubling.

“It’s a pretty serious piece of military hardware,” he said. “I’ll tell you a tiny, quick story. One of the first big deployments of SWAT (in Los Angeles) was the Black Panthers in the ’60s. They were holed up in a building, well armed and we knew they had a lot of weapons in there,” he said. “They barricaded the place with sandbags. Several people were wounded in the shooting, as I recall. The officers with military experience said the only way we’ll breach those sandbags and doors is with a grenade launcher.”

In those days, they didn’t have a grenade launcher at the ready, and had to go through a maze of official channels to get one.

“They had to go through the Governor’s Office to the Pentagon, and then to Camp Pendleton to get the grenade launcher,” Downing told us. “[The acting LAPD chief] said at the time, ‘Let’s go ahead and ask for it.’ It was a tough decision, because it was using military equipment against our citizens.”

But the chief never had to use the grenade launcher, Downing said. “They resolved the situation before needing it, and we said ‘thank god.'”

The grenade launcher was the most extreme of the equipment procured by local law enforcement, but there were also helicopter parts, gun sights, and multitudes of armored vehicles, like those seen in Ferguson.

By contrast, the grants programs are harder to track specifically to the SFPD, but instead encompass funds given to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the Sheriff’s Department, and even some schools. That’s because the grants cover not only allow the purchase of military surplus vehicles and riot gear, but also chemical protective suits and disaster-related supplies.

But much of the requested gear and training has more to do with active police work than emergency response.

San Francisco County agencies used federal loans to purchase $113,000 “command vehicles” (which are often armored). In 2010, the SFPD purchased a $5,000 SWAT robot (which often comes equipped with cameras and a remote control), as well as $15,000 in Battle Dress Uniforms, and $48,000 for a Mobile Communications Command Vehicle.

In 2008, the SFPD ordered a Bearcat Military Counterattack Vehicle for $306,000.

The Lenco website, which manufactures Bearcats, says it “may also be equipped with our optional Mechanical Rotating Turret with Cupola (Tub) and Weapon Ready Mounting System, suitable for the M60, 240B and Mark 19 weapons system.”

Its essentially an armored Humvee that can be mounted with rotating gun turrets.

police embed 2

Department of Homeland Security grants were used to purchase Type 2 Mobile Field Training, which Department of Homeland Security documentation describes as involving eight grenadiers, two counter-snipers, two prisoner transportation vans, and 14 patrol vehicles.

All told, the Bay Area’s many agencies were awarded more than $386 million in federal grants between 2008 and 2011, with San Francisco netting $48 million of those rewards. Through the 1033 loan program, San Francisco obtained over $1.4 million in federal surplus gear from 1995 to 2011.

But much of that was received under the radar, and with little oversight.

“Anytime they’re going to file for this equipment, we think the police should hold a public hearing,” Matthews, the ACLU spokesperson, told us.

In San Francisco, there is a public hearing for the procurement of military weapons, at the Police Commission. But a Guardian analysis of agenda documents from the commission shows these hearings are often held after the equipment has already been ordered.

Squeezed between a “status report” and “routine administrative business,” a March 2010 agenda from the commission shows a request to “retroactively accept and expend a grant in the amount of $1,000,000.00 from the U.S. Department of Justice.”

This is not a new trend. In 2007, the Police Commission retroactively approved three separate grants totaling over $2 million in funding from the federal government through the OEMS, which was then called the Emergency Management Agency.

Police Commission President Anthony Mazzucco did not respond to the Guardian’s emails requesting an interview before our press time, but one thing is clear: The SFPD requests federal grants for military surplus, then sometimes asks the Police Commission to approve the funding after the fact.

Many are already critiquing this call to arms, saying violent gear begets violent behavior.

 

PROVOCATIVE GEAR

A UC Berkeley sociologist, with his small but driven team and an army of automatic computer programs, are now combing more than 8,000 news articles on the Occupy movement in search of a pattern: What causes police violence against protesters, and protester violence against police?

Nicholas Adams and his team, Deciding Force, already have a number of findings.

“The police have an incredible ability to set the tone for reactions,” Adams told us. “Showing up in riot gear drastically increases the chances of violence from protesters. The use of skirmish lines also increases chances of violence.”

Adams’s research uses what he calls a “buffet of information” provided by the Occupy movement, allowing him to study over 200 cities’ police responses to protesters. Often, as in Ferguson, protesters were met by police donned in equipment and gear resembling wartime soldiers.

Rachel Lederman is a warrior in her own right. An attorney in San Francisco litigating against police for over 20 years, and now the president of the National Lawyers Guild Bay Area chapter, she’s long waged legal war against police violence.

Lederman is quick to note that the SFPD in recent years has been much less aggressive than the Oakland Police Department, which injured her client, Scott Olsen, in an Occupy protest three years ago.

“If you compare OPD with the San Francisco Police on the other side of the bay,” she told us, “the SFPD do have some impact munitions they bring at demonstrations, but they’ve never used them.”

Much of this is due to the SFPD’s vast experience in ensuring free speech, an SFPD spokesperson told us. San Francisco is a town that knows protests, so the SFPD understands how to peacefully negotiate with different parties beforehand to ensure a minimum of hassle, hence the more peaceful reaction to Occupy San Francisco.

Conversely, in Oakland, the Occupy movement was met by a hellfire of tear gas and flash bang grenades. Protesters vomited into the sidewalk from the fumes as others bled from rubber bullet wounds.

But some protesters the Guardian talked to noted that the night SFPD officers marched on Occupy San Francisco, members of the city’s Board of Supervisors and other prominent allies stood between Occupiers and police, calling for peace. We may never know what tactics the SFPD would have used to oust the protesters without that intervention.

As Lederman pointed out, the SFPD has used reactive tactics in other protests since.

“We’ve had some problems with SFPD recently, so I’m reluctant to totally praise them,” she said, recalling a recent incident where SFPD and City College police pepper-sprayed one student protester, and allegedly broke the wrists and concussed another. Photos of this student, Otto Pippenger, show a black eye and many bruises.

In San Francisco, a city where protesting is as common as the pigeons, that is especially distressing.

“It’s an essential part of democracy for people to be able to demonstrate in the street,” Lederman said. “If police have access to tanks, and tear gas and dogs, it threatens the essential fabric of democracy.”

Did Big Soda swing a key endorsement by a progressive democratic club?

Erica Hanna
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Did Big Soda swing a key endorsement by a progressive democratic club?

Did the soda industry buy a prominent progressive political endorsement? Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle raised the question in a story by Heather Knight, who goes on to air a number of rumors propagated by the soda tax supporters against the Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club.

First things first: the sugary beverage tax already has a lot of progressive support. Unions, health groups, and loads of other San Franciscans have backed the two cents per ounce tax on sugary beverages, Proposition E, which is slated to appear on this November’s ballot. The endorsement of “No on E” by the Milk Club is certainly a bit out of left field, and rightfully raised eyebrows in political circles.

That’s the argument Knight uses in her Sunday article, using a few quotes from the soda tax’s paid public relations’ people to take a big swing at Sup. David Campos, alleging this is a big ole scheme he’s orchestrated in order to get Coca Cola’s money to fund the Milk Club’s slate card, which would also feature Campos, giving him a boost in his Assembly race against Sup. David Chiu.

It’s a seemingly convincing scenario, and we’re not soothsayers. Maybe it’s true. But there are a number of reasons to not believe the hype.

First, we at the Guardian heard those same rumors and whispers too, but that wasn’t all we heard. One politico told us the beverage industry might be funding the Milk Club with $300,000 in campaign funds for their November ballot fliers. Our reaction was “um, what?!”

That’s more money than techie-billionaire Ron Conway spent backing Mayor Ed Lee’s major pet projects on the June ballot. Hell, it’s more money than some candidates raise in their entire races. That should’ve been the first red flag for the “soda milking the Milk Club” theory, but it wasn’t the last.

Second, though the club did accept money from the American Beverage Association, it wasn’t anywhere within spitting distance of $300,000. Tom Temprano, co-president of the Milk Club, told us they accepted $5,000 from the beverage industry to put on their annual gala. For context, SEIU Local 1021 donated $4,000 to the dinner. This is all data that would come out publicly in a few months through ethics filings anyhow, but long after the rumor of big beverage industry money would’ve caused its damage.

“All you get for sponsoring our dinner is a mention in the program and a plug on the stage,” Temprano told us. “If the [beverage industry] paid us anywhere near what the rumors are, I would’ve flown out Elton John to serenade [Assemblymember] Tom Ammiano in person.”

Though the $5,000 is not chump change to the Milk Club, its leadership doesn’t make endorsement decisions, which are enacted by a vote of the club’s members. In a heated exchange last week, Milk Club political wonks batted soda tax points back and forth like a beach ball. There was hardly a consensus on the matter.

“They didn’t vote the way I wanted but the process was very democratic,” Sup. Eric Mar told us. Mar was one of the authors of the soda tax, and even he doesn’t believe the Milk Club’s palms were greased by big soda’s big money.

“I feel that there are rumors being spread to undercut the integrity of the Harvey Milk Club, the strongest progressive voice and political leadership in the city right now,” he said. “I stand behind them even though they voted no on [the soda tax].”

Laura Thomas, co-president of the Milk Club, told us she is actually in favor of the soda tax. It’s easy to see why. As Deputy State Director of the Drug Policy Alliance, she has day-to-day experience with public health, and she sees the far reaching affect of soda’s loads of sugar on San Francisco’s kids.

“I do support [the tax], and I’ve spoken passionately for it in our meetings,” Thomas told the Guardian. “I’d say it’s something we’re passionate on all sides about.”

The last stickler in the money-influence theory is a bit trickier. Many we talked to traced some of these rumors back to Chiu’s campaign spokesperson, Nicole Derse. When we spoke to her, she pounced on the subject like a hyena on carrion.

“The Harvey Milk Club has sold out to the soda industry,” she told us. “What would Harvey Milk think of this gross display of hypocrisy? David Campos needs to answer some serious questions on his position on the soda tax and his campaign.”

Notice how she shifted the Milk Club assertion, which we asked her about, straight into a Campos critique. She’s affable, she’s smart, but in that moment, Derse also sounded gleeful.

We then asked Derse if the rumor about the Milk Club and Campos came from her.

“I am not the person that started this rumor. But do you really think it’s a coincidence David Campos is broke and needs a vehicle to fund his campaign? I think it speaks for itself, if it happens,” she said. “If the Milk Club does not take hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American Beverage Association, I will happily be wrong.”

Actually, when it comes to spreading rumors through news outlets, being right or wrong doesn’t really matter. All you need to do is raise the question of impropriety, proof or no. It’s grandma’s classic recipe for a good political smear, as old as the hills, and very, very easy to do.

Update [8/26]: This story stirred up quite a bit of controversy, and folks called, emailed, Facebooked and Tweeted at us with one point: sure the Milk Club didn’t take all that much money from the American Beverage Association for the gala, but what about the future? Would they take a large sum from the ABA? Tom Temprano answered: “I find that completely unlikely. I’m going to say that’s not a situation we’re going to be in. But I haven’t had a conversation with anyone with anybody about money yet. Our entire board and PAC chair make decisions on fundraising.”

So there you are. If a donation in the tens of thousands of dollars should land on the Milk Club’s doorstep, Temprano is now on the record.

Researcher explores police and protester violence in the Occupy movement

Erica Hanna
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Researcher explores police and protester violence in the Occupy movement

As the nation’s eyes watch police officers in Ferguson firing rubber bullets and tear gas into crowds of protesters, one UC Berkeley sociologist is exploring how and why such violent conflicts erupt in the first place.

Nicholas Adams and his team call themselves Deciding Force. Its goal? To prevent violence between police and protesters at peaceful demonstrations through deep data analysis of the Occupy movement.

“There’s a misconception that police have a single style or repertoire to approaching protests,” Adams told the Guardian. “They have a range, and they should know better how to use these tools.”

Adams hopes to facilitate free speech by demonstrating best practices in nationwide police tactics, to allow peaceful protesters to trumpet their message without the threat of violence. The study, he said, is made possible by the variety of geographic locations the Occupy movement took place in. The different municipalities and varying levels of police use of force provided a buffet of data for Adams and his fellow researchers to compile and parse.

A video about the project.

They started with news reports of various Occupy movements nationwide, which were then compared to other local and national news articles for accuracy and to help identify bias. Even that process revealed interesting data, he said.

“Media bias is most often a bias of omission,” he told us. “You go to protest events and what happens most often is a news outlet won’t report on it. Fox News outlets across the country reported on the Occupy movement at drastically low rates. If an ABC affiliate reported on an Occupy (encampment) 100 times, Fox News affiliates reported it three times.”

The researchers then handpick relevant data from those news articles and broadcasts. The next step is even trickier (and wonderfully geeky).

Adams and the researchers trained computer programs to pick similar data from the over 8,000 news reports, automating the process. Articles from Boston, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and more than 200 cities with Occupy movements are parsed for patterns. Did the police wear riot gear? What formations did they use? Were horses present? Assault vehicles? Was the crowd mostly Latino, black, white, Asian, or a mix? Were the Occupiers sitting or standing? These are the few of the hundreds of variables crunched by Adams’ team. 

After the variable compiling, the computer’s usefulness ends and the human element picks up again, as Adams and his sociologists then sift through the patterns to see what elevates conflict between police and protesters. In the end, he hopes to be able to show police departments what specific actions can de-escalate violent situations.

The team has been at it for two years, and already the data is yielding some results. Police skirmish lines, for instance, are a heavy indicator that violence will occur.

“You’re facing off against protesters,” he said. “It’s called a skirmish line for a reason. You’re setting up skirmishes.”

But Adams’ research isn’t just about aiding police forces, it’s about holding them legally accountable for escating violence, he said.

“You can start to, from a legal standpoint, establish liability with research like ours,” he told us. “If we reach out to police departments later on attorneys can hold them accountable for their actions.”

And with that information in hand, maybe future incidents like the clashes in Ferguson may be prevented. At the very least, there may be a stronger legal mechanism with which to hold police accountable for clashes with citizens.

You can read more about Deciding Force’s research here, and support them through their IndieGoGo campaign. 

Hump day music news: The Masonic gets a facelift, that dancey new Toro y Moi side project, and more

Steven T. Jones
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— The venue formerly known as the Nob Hill Masonic Center will re-open next month as “The Masonic,” a 3,300-seat music venue booked by Live Nation (as it was before), with new bars, food options, and a state-of-the-art sound system, after spending much of 2014 under construction. The lineup of shows so far has some pretty big hitters, with the Pixies, Broken Bells, Modest Mouse, and, um, Hall & Oates taking the stage in the coming months. Nob Hill neighbors! Please be chill! Except about the two-night Train stint. We’d be upset about that too.

— If you are a fan of fuzzy, melodic, riot grrl-influenced, lo-fi pop goodness, you should probably go to 1-2-3-4 Go! Records tonight [Wed/20] at 7pm or the Rickshaw Stop tomorrow [Thu/21] at 9:30pm for lovely British weirdos Joanna Gruesome — who may or may not blow up when their upcoming split with Perfect Pussy (plus comic book!) drops later this year.

— Bluesy-rock party starters The Stone Foxes are doing a three-week residency at The Chapel in November, with some pretty sweet openers, including Strange Vine, Annie Girl and the Flight, and the Bhi Bhiman band.

— Everyone is freaking out about this new record from Toro y Moi’s Chaz Bundick, under the Berkeley resident’s dancey side project Les Sins. This new track, “Bother,” is a teaser for Les Sins’ first full-length LP, Michael, out Nov. 4. Bonus: Members of Oakland’s own Waterstrider on backup vocals.

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