Oakland Police Department

The legacy of racism

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steve@sfbg.com

The legacy of brutal racism in this country, particularly against African Americans, shapes the events of today. That’s a notion that much of white America resists accepting, particularly conservatives. But actions create reactions, hatred begets hatred, and those cycles can roll forward endlessly and manifest in unpredictable ways.

That’s one of the most compelling lessons in local journalist Thomas Peele’s gripping and insightful new book, Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist (2012, Crown), which grew out of covering the aftermath of the 2007 murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey by members of Your Black Muslim Bakery.

Bailey was killed to prevent him from writing a story in the Oakland Post about the violence and financial crimes perpetrated by followers of the late Yusuf Bey and his sons, including Yusuf Bey IV (aka Fourth). Peele and other local journalists and media outlets (including the Bay Guardian) formed the Chauncey Bailey Project to build on the work Bailey began and investigate his murder, which Fourth was convicted last year of ordering.

“The free press on which the public depends to keep it informed had been attacked,” Peele wrote. While such murders are rare in the U.S. — the last was a Mafia hit on a reporter from Arizona in 1976 — Peele and his brethren considered it important to send the message that, “A story could not be killed by killing a journalist.”

But the story that emerges from Peele’s years-long investigation goes well beyond Bailey’s murder, its flawed investigation by the Oakland Police Department, the violence and hypocrisy of the Your Black Muslim Bakery “cult,” or its long and complex relationship with Oakland’s political and community leaders.

Peele delves deeply into the 80-plus-year history of the Nation of Islam and Black Muslim ideology, dissecting its turbulent evolution and belief system that white people are “devils,” created by a mad scientist named Big-Headed Yakub, who use “tricknology” to hide the truth that African Americans are superior beings who will be spared during a coming Armageddon inflicted by a spaceship that has long circled the earth — a belief system that Malcolm X rejected after taking a hajj to Mecca and shortly before his assassination.

Peele dismisses the entire religion — which has very little in common with true Islam — as a deceptive scam from its inception, devised by the “con man” W.D. Fard and promoted by Elijah Muhammad simply to enrich its leaders by manipulating poor African Americans. Similarly, Yusuf Bey spoke the language of black empowerment in founding his own breakaway Black Muslim sect in North Oakland then used it as cover for criminal enterprises and raping the women under his control over a period of decades.

But to understand the appeal of Black Muslims preaching hatred of white devils, you have to look at the African American experience and horrible racism and violence that black people have endured in this country, as Peele does. He starts in Depression-era Detroit, where Fard and Muhammad met amid the virulent racism against Southern blacks who migrated north to work in Henry Ford’s automobile factories.

“This is the question of the psychology of race,” legendary attorney Clarence Darrow said during the Detroit murder trial of blacks defending their home against an attacking white mob, which Peele uses to great effect. “Of how everything known to a race affects its actions. What we learn as children we remember — it gets fastened to the mind. I would not claim that the people outside the Sweet house were bad. But they would do to Negroes something they would not do to whites. It’s their race psychology.”

We see Joseph Stephens (who would later become Yusuf Bey) growing up with tales of brutal lynchings in his hometown of Greenville, Texas, and later as a Santa Barbara hairdresser who discovered the Nation of Islam in 1962 after the Los Angeles Police Department had shot up its mosque and Stephens found his calling in the resolute words of Malcolm X and the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.

African American history made Bailey want to become a journalist focused on covering and empowering his community. And this same legacy — mixed with hopelessness, poverty, and broken homes during an upbringing in San Francisco and Richmond — animated Devaughndre Broussard, who fired three shotgun blasts into Bailey on a sunny morning in downtown Oakland.

“His life was no accident. Neither was his faith,” Peele wrote of Fourth in the last chapter. “The society that now worked through its flawed laws and imperfect courts to put him in prison for life had only itself to blame for the terror that Fourth and his fellow believers had inflicted upon it. The backlash against centuries of enslavement of Africans and the subhuman treatment of their descendants had seen to that. The stick figure hanging from a loose that Elijah Muhammad had ordered displayed in all the Nation of Islam mosques, the symbol of the boyhood lynching of his friend Albert Hamilton, showed that some could never forget, or forgive. Neither could Yusef Bey forget the stories of cotton fields his parents brought west from East Texas along with the story of a Negro burned to death as white people gathered in the square of a horrible place called Greenville and cheered. Some wounds are too deep to heal.”

But Americans have short memories for even our recent history, coupled with a growing sense that society’s have-nots somehow deserve to be that way and a lack of understanding of the many ways that racism and its legacy still affects this country.

“I don’t think white America understands it at all. White America has this attitude of: get over it,” Peele told me when I asked about that “racism’s backlash” theme. “How long can you oppress people and treat them like utter garbage before there is a rebellion?”

Gauged by poverty or incarceration rates, or by the poor quality of many of its schools, much of black America still faces tough struggles. It wrestles with a lack of opportunities and an understandable sense of hopelessness that can easily breed resentment or even violence. One example that Peele includes were the Death Angels (aka the “Zebra murders”), in which a small group of militant black ex-convicts randomly shot dozens of white people in San Francisco and Oakland in the early 1970s.

Peele closes the book with a chilling suggestion that Broussard, who is serving a fixed 25-year prison sentence because of his cooperation in the prosecution of Fourth and co-defendant Antoine Mackey, is studying to become a spiritual leader and may follow familiar patterns. “Look at where he came from? Have things changed that much?” Peele said of the lack of opportunities that Broussard faced growing up, and will face again when he gets out of prison in his mid-40s.

Peele has long been an award-winning investigative reporter rooted in deep research, which he combines with a colorful and dramatic narrative style. Yet he sometimes oversimplifies and harshly judges events and people, even Bailey, who Peele deems a lazy journalist and bad writer.

“The truth speaks for itself,” Peele told me. But the truth is often a matter of perspective, and Peele can’t escape the fact that he’s a white guy who has worked out of Contra Costa and Alameda counties since 2000. Perhaps that’s why he’s so quick to label poor urban areas with substantial African American populations as “ghettos.” Or, sometimes even more dramatically, as a “sagging, blood-splattered ghetto,” a phrase that a Los Angeles Times reviewer singled out as an example of how “Peele’s prose occasionally overreaches.”

I was repeatedly struck by the same thought, almost physically cringing when Peele labeled San Francisco’s Western Addition, my old neighborhood, as a violent ghetto. Or when he wrote, “Richmond is one of the most hopeless and violent cities in America, an oil-refinery town of 103,000 people, littered with shanties where shipyard workers lived during World War II ,” as if it were a cross between an Appalachian coal town and Third World hovel rather than a clean, modern Bay Area city well-served by public transit and a Green Party mayor.

Peele got defensive when I asked him about the labels, telling me, ” I stand by characterizations,” although he admitted that maybe Western Addition isn’t really a ghetto. “I think you’re nitpicking,” he told me.

Perhaps, and I do think that Peele’s flair for the dramatic is one of the things that makes Killing the Messenger such a page-turner, in the tradition of great true-crime novels such as Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. But in a book that bravely takes on the complexities of racism and its backlash, I think this is more than a trivial “nit.”

It’s tempting for white America to dismiss such details, treat racism is a thing of the past, and malign racial sensitivity as political correctness. But as Peele and his book remind us, the wounds of not-so-distant indignities can run deep. And the collapsing opportunities for social and economic advancement in this country will create a backlash if we try to ignore it.

Oakland police keep track of “anarchists”

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Oakland Police Department’s internal communications about the Occupy Oakland movement, which the Guardian obtained through the California Public Records Act, reveal interesting patterns of what officers deem important to note about protesters.

Officers’ reported observations of the crowd generally concern activity, movement, and sometimes mood. However, there are also mentions of the percieved political affiliations of protesters. In an Oct. 24 briefing, a plainclothes officer, having strolled through the encampment, reports that “the group is diverse, made up of persons including self proclaimed anarchists, labor unions, long term homeless individuals, special cause supporters and others.” 

But by Nov. 2, it seems, all other categories fall away and officers seem interested in reporting on only one perceived type of protester: anarchists. 

Police make several reports in the notes of where and when they’ve noticed “anarchists” or “anarchist behavior.” 

In activity logs reporting “major events” throughout Oct. 25, police include anarchist sightings in that category. In the afternoon, there is “black block (sic) spotted, approximately 12.”

When protesters briefly occupied the Travelers Aid Society building on Oct. 25, police reported “10 anarchists on the roof and inside.”

In an afternoon planning meeting Nov. 3, an officer describes the scene on the streets: “there have been reports that there were 5000 people with relatively no injuries. There seem to be people dressed in regular clothing displaying anarchist behavior.” 

A press release from Nov. 2 also states that “the Oakland Police Department has identified a small group of anarchists roaming through the crowds. OPD is focused on preventing illegal activity while affording the majority their rights to assemble and march.”

It seems that those officers reporting on the crowd equate anarchists with illegal activity, and believe they can identify adherents to anarchism based on appearance and behavior.

Anarchism is a political ideology, and not illegal. Yet officers apparently count out individuals that they perceive as anarchists. 

While popular stereotypes associate illegal activity such as vandalism with anarchism, many who identify with anarchist principles have not broken laws in that fashion. In fact, these documents imply that police may be associated with another illegal activity; targeting some of those they protect and serve based on political belief.

After the tear gas clears

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yael@sfbg.com

After a chaotic day of marches and confrontations between police and protesters Jan 28, I was arrested along with about 400 others who were trapped by police in front of the downtown Oakland YMCA. Seven of us were journalists.

The goal of the march was to take over an abandoned building — an the vacant Kaiser Convention Center, a city-owned building that’s been closed since 2005, was a prime target.

I have not yet been able to retrieve my property, including my recorder and notebook, which is being held by the Oakland Police Department. What follows is a pieced-together account and a perspective on what the events of Jan. 28.

I spend 20 hours behind bars, and missed the later parts of the action. But I was able to observe what happened in jail and make some sense of what happened.

Occupy people are constantly debating tactics and goals, and for many, the idea of occupying a vacant building made sense. When Occupy Oakland had a camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza, also known as Oscar Grant Plaza, and commonly shortened to OGP, it created a strong community. That community bridged divides between the homeless and the housed, between students and labor organizers, and between Oakland residents of different races, genders and levels of ability in an unprecedented fashion.

The camp had a kitchen that fed hundreds of people everyday and a network of shared tents and blankets which welcomed in hundreds who otherwise would have slept on the streets, often feeling isolated from other residents of their city and made to feel inferior.

The camp was repeatedly raided, Occupiers were tear gassed and shot with rubber bullets, and when OGP was cleared out, the community no longer had a home. And the police started that violence.

That was the practical reason for wanting to occupy a vacant building: to have a social center for Occupy Oakland.

Of course, there are other reasons. There’s the question that many squatters and homeless advocacy groups have been making for decades: why let buildings lie vacant while people freeze on the street?

Remember: The building that Occupy wanted to occupy is public property, and right now nobody is using if for anything.

In one exchange in jail, a guard asked a protester why the activists thought they had the right to take over a vacant building. “I mean, it’s not yours,” he insisted. The protester replied that many vacant buildings are government-owned and therefore public.

“So it’s the government’s,” the cop said.

“But I pay taxes,” the protester responded.

“Me too!” replied the cop. “It’s mine!”

“It’s both of ours,” smiled the protester. “It’s all of ours.”

That’s what made the convention center action such a clear and easy political decision.

A lot of people in Occupy would go further, saying that at a time of a severe housing crisis, it’s perfectly legitimate to take over privately owned buildings that are sitting there vacant. It’s part of the central argument of Occupy — that corporations and the rich unfairly own and continue to acquire much more wealth than the majority of people. For many people, owning a vacant building and doing nothing with it, while hundreds freeze on the streets, is a crime itself.

 

UP AGAINST THE COPS

Then there’s the question of the police — and violence.

The word “nonviolent” has a specific meaning in the history of political movements. Martin Luther King Jr. defined it in his essay “The Meaning of Non-Violence”: “If you are hit you must not hit back; you must rise to the heights of being able to accept blows without retaliating … But it also means that you are constantly moving to the point where you refuse to hate your enemy. You are constantly moving to the point where you love your enemy.”

It’s a philosophy but also, in political terms, a tactic.

Many of the people who make up Occupy Oakland get their start as activists organizing against police brutality in a city that has longstanding problems with violent and undisciplined officers.

Police Chief Howard Jordan said in a press release that “It became clear that the objective of this crowd was not to peacefully assemble and march, but to seek opportunity to further criminal acts, confront police, and repeatedly attempt to illegally occupy buildings.”

It was certainly clear that the intent of the crowd was to illegally occupy a building. And any honest assessment of Occupy Oakland would have to acknowledge that some members are not wedded to King-style nonviolent civil disobedience. (Neither, by the way, were a lot of the protest movements of the 1960s.) Many protesters wore masks and bandanas to disguise their identities and protect them from tear gas and pepper spray, and the march was led by protesters with makeshift shields, which suggests that they expected to be attacked. You could certainly argue that what those people were doing wasn’t confrontation; it was self-defense.

Frankly, it made sense to be prepared: In other Occupy Oakland actions, police have attacked with batons, tear gas, pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, and smoke bombs. And for quite a few Oakland residents, the police have always been seen as an outside force that can’t be trusted.

In fact, violence did break out. Many, including myself, have eyes still stinging from tear gas. I saw several wounds caused by rubber bullets shot at protesters. I spoke individually to at least a dozen people — one of them a pregnant woman — who were struck with police batons.

And protesters did not remain peaceful while this violence was being used against them.

Some picked up tear gas canisters and threw them back towards police; that much I saw. I also saw protesters throw empty plastic bottles at police.

According to the police, they also threw metal pipes, rocks and bricks. According to the protesters, they threw mainly empty plastic bottles and fruit at police. But as protesters often say of the police, “They’re the ones who showed up with the guns.” If the cops didn’t want violence, why unleash such an arsenal of weapons?

People got hurt, protesters and police alike. Several bystanders who had nothing to do with the situation were swept up in the mass arrest.

The city of Oakland, already in dire financial straits, likely spent hundreds of thousands of dollars reacting to the protests. Police claim that they were unable to sufficiently respond to violent crimes over the weekend, including five murders, because they were overwhelmed with Occupy troublemakers.

Of course, city officials were the ones who decided to arrest 400 people — with all the expense that involves.

There are, at this point, no reports of serious injuries to any police officers. However, at least a dozen protesters had welts on their faces or bodies from being beaten by clubs or shot with rubber bullets. One woman was shot in both arms with rubber bullet; one man was shot in the face with rubber bullets while holding a video camera to document the events. Several protesters were shoved to the ground and received wounds on their faces while being arrested. Police raised their rubber-bullet rifles to the faces of protesters throughout the day, threatening attacks. A rubber bullet to the face can cause brain damage and blindness.

 

 

DID IT HAVE TO HAPPEN?

How could this have been prevented?

Police say that “while peaceful forms of expression and free speech rights will be facilitated, acts of violence, trespassing, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be tolerated.” But 40 people were arrested during an ongoing Occupy Oakland vigil in the first weeks of January for having “illegal property” at OGP in what many saw as clearly a peaceful expression of First Amendment rights.

On KGO radio Jan. 29, Chief Jordan said that he has allowed Occupy Oakland to protest without a permit and would continue to do so, but those early January raids were ostensibly due to permit violations — violations of the terms of a permit that Occupy Oakland did in fact have.

There’s no question: The police response to Occupy Oakland over the past few months has caused some people in the movement to get more radical.

Many Occupy Oakland-affiliated medics condemned those who threw objects at police, saying that they provoked a backlash that caused more injuries. Many Oakland residents who might be in line with the socio-economic critique presented by the Occupy movement feel endangered and confused by marches that result in the massive use of police weapons in broad daylight. A lot of people would rather protest in a lot of ways that less resemble urban warfare.

On the other hand, there are also ways that Oakland officials could have prevented the consequences of weapons deployed and 400 arrested Jan. 28. They could, for example, have allowed protesters to occupy the vacant building.

When protesters seized a building Jan. 20 in San Francisco, police first attempted to prevent them. They lined up in front of the targeted building. They deployed pepper spray and struck several protesters with batons. When they were unsuccessful, and protesters entered the building from the back, they opted to block the surrounding streets and wait until the time seemed right to enter the situation and make arrests. Police spokesperson Carlos Manfredi told me that the cops were not going to rush into the situation and were trying to prevent injury and violence.

The Kaiser Convention Center has been vacant for years. The city of Oakland recently made plans to sell it to its Redevelopment Agency, but that plan fell into legal limbo when Gov. Jerry Brown signed AB26, a bill that dissolved all California redevelopment agencies.

At this point, nobody at Oakland City Hall has any plans whatsoever for the big, empty structure.

Why not allow Occupy to use the convention center? It’s not downtown, where Mayor Quan says businesses have been adversely affected by Occupy Oakland’s presence. It would give the movement a chance to stop focusing on trying to occupy spaces and start focusing on benefiting the community with food, shelter, and community programs that they provided when they had a camp. It would give the building tenants who could be held responsible for maintaining it. It might even help get Occupy Oakland and the Oakland Police Department out of the cycle of violence that they have been spiraling into for months.

Each time arrests occur, each time violence occurs, both sides blame the other. Both sides are correct that they were provoked. Both sides are correct that something that they think is worth defending was violated — for the cops, it’s the law. For the protesters, it’s the right of the people to assemble.

In fact, many Oakland residents have experienced violence at the hands of the Oakland Police Department for years before Occupy began. There was already a mass movement formed around the murder of Oscar Grant, and thousands of people fed up with police murders of unarmed, often black, suspects.

In recent decades, other radical groups, notably the Black Panthers, insisted that their community lacked basic needs because the city of Oakland refused to prioritize them. The Black Panther free breakfast program served food in a strikingly similar way to Occupy Oakland. Black Panthers were also notorious for carrying guns to defend themselves against police violence.

Occupy Oakland protesters (unlike Tea Party members) certainly don’t carry guns. But, more and more, they cry “fuck the pigs” as much as any Panther.

For much of the Occupy movement’s 99 percent, unjust actions by banks, corporations, and the government officials that they have often bought and paid for are the worst problems facing the United States today. For others, particularly the poor and people of color, these problems are magnified and exacerbated by the fact that they feel the threat of police harassment every day. For years, they’ve understood that police disproportionately do not investigate or solve crimes that happen to them and their families.

 

 

THE RADICALS AND THE BROADER MOVEMENT

The Oakland General Assembly Jan. 29 was the biggest it’s been in weeks. While there were still over 300 people in jail, 300 more came out to get involved with the meeting. That happened at the same time that many who felt that inexcusable violence and property destruction occurred Jan. 28 and concluded they could no longer have anything to do with Occupy Oakland.

It’s a challenge for the movement nationally, too: How do you accept and encourage the people whose legitimate anger at economic injustice and police abuse turns them toward more radical responses — and at the same time make room for a people who want nothing to do with the black bloc Fs, vandalism, and confrontation with the police?

There are tactical issues with the way the building occupation was planned. Many who were completely in line with the concept felt unsafe and uncomfortable with the secretive nature of the organizers who planned it. The location of the building targeted for occupation was kept secret for practical reasons; police could easily prevent a successful takeover. Supporters must often be led to the locations of planned takeovers without knowing where the action is and how they’ll get there. But how do you reconcile this with the transparency required when organizers are leading more than 1,000 people who want to use tactics they feel comfortable with and make their own choices?

Occupy Oakland is asking the people to imagine a world where property rights wouldn’t prevent them from doing all the good that they could do with a building like the Kaiser Convention Center. They must also ask themselves to imagine a world in which goals like a building occupation can be achieved in a way that everyone involved is able to consent to their involvement.

These debates continue to occur at Occupy Oakland. Some will leave the movement, some will join. Some will take the ideas and try to manifest them in new and different ways. Participants in Occupy Oakland desperately want basic needs of food and shelter met for their community members, and for the system that governs the city to do so in a way that allows people to thrive when it comes to health, education, and opportunities for creativity and growth. They think that they have the beginnings of a community and a process that can achieve those visions, better than the city government ever has, and they care more about achieving it than respecting the property rights of the owners of abandoned buildings.

Inside the Occupy Oakland protest

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UPDATE: We’ve corrected a few factual mistakes. We originally reported that protesters forced open the door of the YMCA; in fact, they asked to be let in and they were. We regret the error.

An Occupy Oakland march that turned violent Jan. 28 led to the arrest of 400 people, including me.

The march, which peaked at about 2,000 protesters, was organized with the intention of entering a vacant building — the Kaiser Convention Center — and turning it into a new “Social Center” that participants in Occupy Oakland hoped to use to gather, teach, and organize.

The move was more than symbolic. Occupy activists have engaged in constant debate about tactics and goals, particularly when it comes to violence and property destruction, and it’s hard to argue at this point that Occupy Oakland is a nonviolent movement.

But many thought that the goal of occupying a vacant building made sense. When Occupy Oakland had a camp in Frank Ogawa Plaza, also known as Oscar Grant Plaza, commonly described as OGP, it created a strong community. It’s a community that bridged divides between the homeless and the housed, between students and labor organizers, and between Oakland residents of different races, genders and levels of ability in an unprecedented fashion.

Besides that, the camp had a kitchen that fed hundreds of people everyday. The camp had a network of shared tents and blankets that welcomed in hundreds who would have slept freezing on the streets, often feeling isolated from other residents of their city and made to feel inferior. Now, they had a place to stay that was warmer, more safe and secure, and was embedded in a community bound together by ties of solidarity.

That community was able to thrive in it’s centralized camp location.

That was the practical reason for wanting to occupy a vacant building: to have a social center for Occupy Oakland.

Of course, there are other reasons. There’s the question that many squatters and homeless advocacy groups have been making for decades: why let buildings lie vacant while people freeze on the street?

The march set off from OGP at 1 p.m. Jan. 28. There was no ambiguity about group’s goal: Many pushed carts stacked with furniture, hoping to furnish the new center; others held a large banner reading “Vacant? Take it!” 

Many other Occupy groups around the world, including protesters in Washington DC, London, England, and Belfast, Ireland, have taken over vacant buildings in an attempt to create social centers, house homeless community members and protest injustice symbolized by buildings lying vacant while people live on the street.

In Oakland, the attempts were staved off when riot police lined up in front of the march and declared unlawful assemblies.

In front of the  Convention Center, police threw smoke bombs into the crowd and warned that those who refused to disperse would be arrested. The march continued around the corner to 12th St and Oak, where protesters and police were involved in another confrontation. Police shot smoke bombs and “pepper bombs,” canisters of pepper spray that explode on impact, into the crowd. Some in the march responded by throwing canisters, along with plastic bottles, back at police. Masked protesters in the front of the group brandished makeshift shields. Protesters say the shields were there to protect them from rubber bullets and bean bag rounds.

The cops had a different perspective. “It became clear that the objective of this crowd was not to peacefully assemble and march, but to seek opportunity to further criminal acts, confront police, and repeatedly attempt to illegally occupy buildings,” said Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan in a press release.

In a tense moment, hundreds knelt to hide behind the frontline shields while police fired rubber bullets into the crowd.
When police began to advance at both the front and back end of the group, protesters retreated, marching on 12th St back to Ogawa/Grant Plaza.

As they marched on 12th street, Occupy Oakland-affiliated street medics treated injuries from tear gas, pepper spray, and rubber bullets. Police followed in the rear of the march, continuing to project exploding flash-bang grenades at the crowd.

At about 5:30, another march left from the plaza, again with the stated attention of occupying a building. Police marched behind protesters. When the march cut through Fox Square in Oakland’s Uptown neighborhood, police filled in all surrounding sides of the march. Protesters have used the term “kettling” to describe a situation in which police line up on all sides of a group, blocking anyone in the group from leaving.
After “kettling” hundreds of protesters at this location, police began to deploy tear gas. Some protesters with makeshift plastic and metal shields, many marked with the “circle-A” anarchy symbol, advanced towards police. Several police beat the shield back with batons and struck some protesters.

One 19-year-old woman who was struck with a baton to the kidneys was brought to the hospital and treated for internal bleeding.
At Fox Square, police announced that the gathering was an unlawful assembly. Minutes later, some protesters knocked over a line of chain-link fencing, allowing the march to exit the “kettle.” The march continued on Telegraph.

When the march arrived at Broadway between 22nd and 23rd streets, protesters asked to be let into the YMCA and someone who was in there opened the doors. Police later closed in on both sides until they had formed a line preventing the approximately 400 protesters from exiting.

On Broadway, there was no dispersal order issued. This is in violation of the Oakland Police Department’s crowd control policy, which states that “If after a crowd disperses pursuant to a declaration of unlawful assembly and subsequently participants assemble at a different geographic location where the participants are engaged in non-violent and lawful First Amendment activity, such an assembly cannot be dispersed unless it has been determined that it is an unlawful assembly and the required official declaration has been adequately given.”

About 6:30 p.m., police announced that all of the blocked-in group was under arrest.

It was more than six hours before the sidewalk was cleared of all detainees. Most are charged with failure to disperse. Some, such as those who entered the YMCA, have been charged with burglary.

Dozens of protesters who had avoided arrest marched back to City Hall. There, they illegally entered the building and committed several acts of vandalism. According to a press release, these included “breaking an interior window to a Hearing Room, tipping over and seriously damaging the historic model of City Hall, destroying a case containing a model of Frank Ogawa Plaza, and breaking into the fire sprinkler and elevator automation closet.” Protesters also report setting off fireworks in the counsel chambers.

Some protesters took an American flag from City Hall and burned it in front of the government building.

Oakland officials have complained about the cost of the protests. The city had reportedly spent $2.4 million policing Occupy Oakland protesters as of November 15, just weeks after announcing the decision to close down five elementary schools to save $2 million.
Occupy activists say the huge — expensive — police presence is an overreaction.

“The amount of property damage by protesters has been minimal next to Mayor Quan’s destruction of the humanitarian Occupy Oakland community and excessive force against peaceful people, said Wendy Kenin, an Occupy Oakland spokesperson. “The City of Oakland’s commitment to militarism far outweighs its investment in schools. 

Kenin said she was back at Occupy Oakland outside City Hall, with her four children, the day after the incidents.
There were no arrests made in the City Hall incident, partly because so many police resources were deployed at the YMCA.

Cities and counties that provided police reenforcements to handle the mass arrests include Alameda County, San Mateo County, Santa Clara County, San Francisco County and Marin County and the cities of Fremont, Hayward, Berkeley, Pleasanton, San Francisco and Union City/Newark; and the University of California-Berkeley, according to an Oakland Police Department press release. 

Dozens of those detained were brought to Glenn Dyer jail, which quickly filled up; the rest were brought to Santa Rita jail in Dublin.
Several members of the press, as well as passers-by who were on their way to work in the area, were swept up in the arrests.

In jail, those detained debated tactics involved in the day’s demonstrations and discussed the future of Occupy Oakland.

The number of injured protesters is unknown, but in the 19-person sampling of arrestees with whom I spent 20 hours, two had bruises from baton strikes, one suffered from an injured foot after a pepper-bomb exploded upon impact with her ankle, and most had irritation in their eyes, ears, and throat from exposure to tear gas and pepper spray.

Oakland police report that three officers were injured.

As of the morning of Jan. 30, about 100 remained in Santa Rita.

Obstructions of justice

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The uneasy relationship between OccupyOakland and the Oakland Police Department has resulted in a troubling spate of controversial arrests recently.

At a press conference last month, Police Chief Howard Jordan stated, “The plaza area outside of City Hall is a public area. We do not have any legal right to remove you if you’re standing there, at any time during the day, if you’re exercising you’re First Amendment rights. If you’re not breaking the laws, we’re not concerned about your presence.”

But now, Oakland police have arrested dozens of people who were doing little more than “standing there, exercising their First Amendment rights” — and one man even faces life in prison for it.

There have been 40 arrests in the last couple weeks, including two incidents at Frank Ogawa/Oscar Grant Plaza. In each episode, police say they were just doing their job, enforcing laws surrounding permit violations. But many supporters and lawyers associated with OccupyOakland say that police have created a targeted and discriminatory campaign to wipe out the movement.

 

VIGIL TURNS VIOLENT

About 100 protesters were present at a permitted vigil on Dec. 30. An OccupyOakland participant had been issued a permit for a teepee and one table, but police showed up at noon to explain that they were in violation of that permit, claiming people were sleeping, eating, bringing in trash cans, and storing belongings in the teepee

Protesters say they were cleaning up the plaza when police started making arrests; police say they refused to comply. But both parties say that the scene turned violent.

“Who instigates the violence? I don’t know,” Matt Perry, a movement supporter, told us. “A cop tells you to back up and you don’t back up, he’s gonna use his baton on you.”

But many of the arrests and citations had nothing to do with assault. Carly says she was arrested for “having a yoga mat under her arm.” She was later charged with obstruction of justice. In an even more puzzling case, 23-year-old Tiffany Tran was arrested and charged with “lynching.”

“The taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer is a lynching,” reads California Penal Code 405a, a felony charge punishable by two to four years in prison.

The law attempts to prevent white mobs from forcibly taking African Americans from police custody to kill them, but police have a history of using it against protesters, stating that anyone trying to stop an arrest is guilty of lynching.

Tran says she was held in a pitch-dark police van for seven hours before she was booked at Santa Rita Jail, where she was held in 22-hour daily lockdown due to overcrowding. She was held for four days without being told why.

On the fourth day, she was finally arraigned, but prosecutors opted not to file charges and she was released. But Tran said the tactic left her uneasy because prosecutors said charges could still be filed until the statute of limitations expires in a year. As she told us, “Now I feel I can’t go out and express myself as I should be able to.”

 

ON THE GROUND

When I arrived at 10pm on Jan. 4 to investigate the situation at the vigil, the scene was calm. About 40 people sat and talked, a few worked on computers.

“Some of the people here were arrested mainly for contempt of cop, or being against the government. And then charges of lynching or obstruction of justice were brought after the fact to substantiate an unlawful arrest, to allow the wheels of so-called justice to turn a few more times,” Svend La Rose, an ordained minister and member of OccupyOakland’s tactical action committee, said of the Dec. 30 arrests.

Suddenly, the cry of “riot police!” rang out.

Police cars had pulled up on 14th street, and a line of police exited. In unison, they started advancing, brandishing batons. Many who were at the scene grabbed their possessions and fled. Most just backed away as the cops advanced. A handful stood in front of the teepee, and were arrested on the spot.

Twelve were arrested, including La Rose. Also arrested was Adam Katz, a photographer from the media committee who was documenting events. Katz said that police told him to back up, and when he complied and backed up “probably 50-60 feet,” he was still arrested.

“I took one picture and I was told to back up,” he said. “I repeatedly asked ‘Back up to where?’ as an army of police pushed me out of the plaza. They said, ‘Back up behind the line.’ I kept saying, ‘What line? I don’t see a line.'”

Then there’s Chris, another occupier arrested Jan. 4. According to Katz and other witnesses, Chris had already left the plaza and gone across the street when he was arrested for somehow delaying the police who were trying to clear the plaza.

 

DISCRETION

On Jan. 7, OccupyOakland held an “anti-repression march,” claiming that recent arrests are an overt attempt to repress the movement. The National Lawyers Guild issued a statement demanding an end to the “ongoing violence, harassment, and unconstitutional arrests of Occupy Oakland protesters.”

“There is evidence that would go to show that they were targeting people based on First Amendment activity, and not for illegal activity,” said attorney Mike Flynn, president of the NLG-SF. “Police charged into the plaza and grabbed whoever they could, and also targeted selective people who withdrew and didn’t even linger there.”

But OPD spokesperson Johnna Watson told us these arrests were perfectly legal. “The law allows us to use our discretion,” she said.

A person’s history with the movement is factored into this discretion. Many of those Perry deems “regulars” are, according to the police, “repeat offenders.” As Watson said, “There may be knowledge of a past history, like a repeat offender. If an officer has knowledge that a crime is occurring, has occurred, or is about to occur, we have the right to issue a citation or arrest. If we have someone constantly continuing to break the law, we may not issue a citation.”

In other words, involvement with this political movement can get people arrested who might otherwise not be.

“That police have escalated their attacks on people is pretty disturbing. It looks like they really think they can drive this movement out of Oakland with violence and repression,” said Dan Siegel, a former legal advisor to Mayor Jean Quan who resigned over her handling of OccupyOakland.

Siegel is now representing Marcel Johnson, aka Khali, one of the several protesters arrested Dec. 30, who faces life in prison. A homeless man who became an OccupyOakland regular, Khali was arrested when he tried to hold on to his blanket, which police wanted to throw away, saying that it was unpermitted property.

While in jail, he was charged with felony assault on a police officer, his third strike. A protester called Black Angel who knows Khali said he was transformed by the movement. “He came here and found a family,” he said. “He was like, I’m going to protect this. It gave me some sense of myself.”

But now, Siegel said, “He faces life in prison because of his status of being poor, homeless, and with mental health issues.”

Juries may decide whether OccupyOakland defendants are guilty, but Siegel said the arrests aren’t just: “You still have to ask yourself, why are the police doing this when we have 100 unsolved murders in Oakland?”

12 arrested in raid of occupied Oakland home

There were 12 arrests in West Oakland today, Dec. 29, after police raided a foreclosed home on 10th Street that Occupy Oakland activists had taken over to use as housing for the homeless and meeting space, according to a press release just issued by Causa Justa :: Just Cause, a housing and immigrant rights organization based in Oakland and S.F.

Here’s a link to live footage shot earlier today: http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/19454451

Organizers are asking supporters to contact the Oakland Police Department and demand the release of those in custody, the press release noted.

Activists took over the Fannie Mae-owned vacant property on Dec. 6, on the National Day of Action, “as a call to stop fraudulent lending practices and illegal evictions by banks,” according to CJJC.

Activists provided two reasons for taking over the property:”To demand that Fannie Mae turn it into low-income housing,” and “In support of the Ramirez family, whose home in East Oakland was improperly foreclosed on by Fannie Mae in May of 2011. Bank of America acting on behalf of Fannie Mae sold the Ramirez home while the bank was supposed to still be working with them. The family is now renting the home they once owned.”

Oakland occupiers respond to second police raid

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By Shawn Gaynor

Angered yet undeterred by an early morning police raid, several thousand protesters came out in support of Occupy Oakland and marched from the Oakland Public Library back to the encampment site at Frank Ogawa Plaza — renamed Oscar Grant Plaza by the occupiers — a little after 5 p.m. on Nov. 14. The atmosphere of the march was festive as the crowd made its way through the streets of Oakland, chanting and waving signs and banners.

The Oakland Police Department had a small presence of regularly uniformed officers in the plaza as of 5:30 p.m., but they did not interfere with protesters streaming into the square, where tents were dismantled by police earlier that day. However, city officials made it clear in the hours following the raid that they would not allow protesters to remain in the plaza overnight.

According to a text message update, an emergency general assembly was being convened at the amphitheater of the plaza to determine future plans.

Protesters were also circulating petitions calling for a recall of Mayor Jean Quan.

Check back here for more.

Alerts

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alert@sfbg.com

WEDNESDAY 9

Student Day of Action

ReFund California begins its Make Banks Pay week of action by organizing a protest to shut down a local branch of Wells Fargo, a contributor to the financial collapse of 2008 and the current foreclosure crisis. Students from City College and the San Francisco State University will join forces to call for banks to help restore the deep cuts to higher educations that they helped cause.

Noon, free

Gather at SFSU Quad to take the M bus to West Portal and march to the bank

www.makebankspaycalifornia.com

 

THURSDAY 10

Poor People’s Decolonization

Join Occupy Oakland, POOR Magazine, and other groups for a march on four government offices that promote the criminalization and deportation of poor people from around the world: the Oakland Police Department, Oakland Housing Authority, Alameda County Social Services, and U.S. Department Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Noon, free

Gather at the OPD

455 Seventh, Oakl.

www.occupyoakland.org

 

 

Picket Hotel Frank

Wells Fargo and its Hotel Frank management company, Provenance, refused to recognize the Unite Here Local 2 contract, increased the workload for employees, and haven’t paid any medical or pension coverage. The National Labor Relations Board has found Hotel Frank guilty of violating federal labor laws, including firing and disciplining workers for engaging in union activities, but only this daily picket seems capable of making a difference.

3-5:30pm, free

Hotel Frank Geary and Mason, SF

www.hotelfranksf.info

 

FRIDAY 11

Bay Area Resilience

Help formulate regional plans by community groups, social movements, and public planners for a strong economy, climate adaptation, and emergency preparedness. Bay Localize, Communities for a Better Environment, Global Exchange, and other groups are coming together for this Bay Area Convening on Resilience and Equity. Come and join the movement.

9am-3pm, $7-10 (includes lunch)

California Endowment Conference Center 1111 Broadway, Oakl

leanne@baylocalize.org

colin@baylocalize.org

 

SATURDAY 12

OccupySF Teach-In

Learn about the OccupySF movement and what it’s all about by attending the General Assembly at noon followed by a march to downtown at 3pm. Meet at the “SF Free School” poster.

Noon- 4:30 p.m., free

Justin Herman Plaza

Embarcadero and Market, SF

www.occupysf.com

 

Mail items for Alerts to the Guardian Building, 135 Mississippi St., SF, CA 94107; fax to (415) 437-3658; or e-mail alert@sfbg.com. Please include a contact telephone number. Items must be received at least one week prior to the publication date.

Powerful, mostly peaceful Oakland action ends badly

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After a long day of mostly peaceful demonstrations by thousands of protesters who joined OccupyOakland’s General Strike and Day of Action yesterday, it’s still unclear why the Oakland Police – which had stood down the entire day, leaving the movement to self-police – massed in riot gear around midnight and used tear gas and other projectiles to clear the streets and make a reported 80 arrests.

Spokespersons for the Oakland Police Department and Mayor Jean Quan haven’t returned Guardian phone calls, and reports in the Oakland Tribune and other media outlets don’t indicate exactly what prompted police to change tactics and aggressively confront the demonstration. Protesters had taken over a vacant building and erected barricades in the streets shortly before riot police showed up, and it appears from a Tribune video that a dumpster was set on fire after the police showed up.

Before the standoff between city officials and demonstrators in Oakland again took a violent turn, the day was notable for its lack of police presence around the occupied Oscar Grant Plaza and nearby 14th and Broadway epicenter. And despite a small number of masked agitators who broke bank windows and sprayed graffiti – much to the chagrin of most protesters who actively opposed such tactics – the movement was remarkably nonviolent and self-policing, particularly given a crowd of what seemed to be around 10,000 people at its peak. Protesters even handled traffic control, using a megaphone to help motorists through intersections congested with passing demonstrators.

“This is an extraordinarily peaceful collection of diverse people,” Sen. Loni Hancock (D-Oakland) told the Guardian just after 5 pm as a massive march left the encampment to shut down the Port of Oakland. “I feel like they’re doing what no elected person can do: they’re putting economic equity issues in front of the American people.”

“This is beautiful and powerful. This I love,” agreed Oakland City Council member Libby Schaaf, beaming as the peaceful march took off, although she told us that she was disappointed to see Oakland businesses vandalized, including her beloved Noah’s Bagels. “Fight greed, not bagels.”

Most of the crowd condemned the violence, and many openly worried that it would undercut the positive demonstration of people power and the airing of frustration with economic injustices in the country. But even Hancock said a few bad apples shouldn’t spoil people’s understanding of what an important day it was.

“I’m very grateful to them for calling attention to economic inequality. It is in the interests of cities that this issue take center stage,” Hancock told us. “There are so many things that have been talked about that are now on the stage and it’s a very important conversation to have.”

But many in the movement were disappointed nonetheless, despite the myriad successes in shutting down business nonviolently. Around 3 pm, a crowd of thousands marched past a Chase Bank at 20th and Berkeley streets where the front window had been shattered, as was the case with at least six other businesses. Taped to the windows were signs reading “We are better than this” and “This is not the 99%. Sorry, the 99%”.

As the huge crowd repeatedly chanted “peaceful protest,” Ryan, a 31-year-old Oakland resident, expressed his frustration over vandalism he blamed on out-of-town instigators. “People from Oakland would not damage their city like that,” he told me. “Last week was beautiful, we were dancing and singing in the streets,” he said, referring to the largely nonviolent response to police violence, “but this is bullshit.”

Large protests almost always have members who want to escalate the conflict and who see breaking windows as a legitimate tactic, and yesterday there were sometimes tense conflicts between protesters who disagreed on the issue. Another complex issue is how to now view Oakland Mayor Jean Quan, whose support for last week’s violent police crackdown prompted calls for her recall or resignation, although her subsequent apology, the re-encampment of Frank Ogawa Plaza, and yesterday’s police stand down caused some to rethink whether to actively oppose her.

“My goal for today is to spur the international movement forward and to show what we’re capable of,” said 23-year-old Iris Brilliant, who got more actively involved in OccupyOakland after the crackdown and said she was happy to see the police kept at bay. “It’s important to push this forward.”

But Tania Kappner, a 41-year-old teacher from Oakland, still hadn’t forgiven Quan or the police for the violent excesses in last week’s raid. She was camped out in Oscar Grant Plaza in a tent with the sign “Mayor Quan Must Go!”

“It’s good she’s not sending them in on us today, but she never should have done it in the first place,” Kappner told us. “We’re calling for her to go and the police who did it to be jailed.”

With the decision to again unleash the riot police and tear gas and arrest big numbers of people – which was the very thing that prompted such huge numbers of people to turn out yesterday, giving OccupyOakland the numbers and power to easily shut down the port and dozens of businesses – Oakland and the larger Occupy movement might again find itself back at square one.

The National Lawyer’s Guild, which had observers on hand to witness the late-night police crackdown, issued a statement today condemning the city’s actions and saying they violate a crowd control police the NLG helped the city write to settle lawsuits stemming from the OPD’s use of rubber bullets to clear anti-war protesters from the Port of Oakland back in 2003.

“Like we saw last Tuesday, the OPD actions in the late night hours violated numerous provisions of the Crowd Control Policy and the Constitutional rights of activists,” explained NLG’s San Francisco Bay Area chapter president Michael Flynn. “Our legal observers did not disobey any police orders and neither did many of the other arrestees.”
“The Crowd Control Policy clearly prohibits shooting munitions into a crowd,” added NLG attorney Rachel Lederman. “While the police are allowed to use tear gas, they are supposed to use a minimum amount and only where other crowd control tactics have failed.  It is not at all clear that less violent and less provocative measures would not have sufficed to achieve any legitimate law enforcement objectives last night.”

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Mayor Ed Lee has reportedly assured OccupySF that he won’t follow through on threats to raid the camp if tents aren’t removed, at least not anytime soon (many observers speculate that he’ll at least wait until after next week’s mayoral election). But Lee has been unwilling to make a clear public statement that raids are now off the table.

When we sought to clarify Lee’s position and get his reaction to a Board of Supervisors resolution calling for the city to allow a 24/7 encampment, his Press Secretary Christine Falvey wrote: “The mayor has not focused on the resolution, but has been focusing on meeting with clergy, labor, occupysf demonstrators and his department heads to make sure that the site is kept clean, safe and accessible for everyone. He remains concerned about overnight camping and the public health and safety issues that brings. That said, he has seen some good progress over the last few days because of his open communication with the group. DPW cleaned up the site over the weekend and the demonstrators helped facilitate the cleanup. Tents were moved off the Bocce Ball Court as well. The group is working with Fire and Public Health officials to make some improvements. The dialogue is ongoing.”

Photos by Steven T. Jones

Mehserle’s free, but some protesters could still face jail time

 Johannes Mehserle, the former BART police officer who shot and killed Oscar Grant while he was lying face down on the Fruitvale station train platform on New Year’s Day 2009, was released from a Los Angeles jail June 13 after serving a total of 365 days for his involuntary manslaughter conviction. He was sentenced to two years behind bars, but Judge Robert Perry granted him an early release due to credit for time served and good behavior.

The same date of his release, the National Lawyers Guild filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of 150 protesters who were mass-arrested during the Nov. 5, 2010 demonstration in Oakland in the wake of Mehersle’s sentencing. Meanwhile, a handful of individuals who engaged in the Jan. 14, 2009 and July 8, 2010 protests launched by Grant supporters — which morphed into riots after community rallies came to an end — are still battling court cases.

Two of the protesters arrested last July initially faced serious felony arson charges for igniting a trash can, which could have led to incarceration for a longer duration than Mehserle served for fatally shooting Grant.

“There were several felony arrests last July, and people were facing charges that could lead to more than a year, no question about that,” noted attorney Dan Siegel of the Oakland-based firm Siegel & Yee. Siegel is currently representing Todd Lister and Adrian Wilson, the two defendants who were accused of arson. The codefendants now face attempted arson charges, carrying a minimum penalty of eight months, with a midterm of one year. “Theoretically, that’s what they’re still facing,” Siegel said, but added that he was confident the as-yet unresolved case would result in a more lenient outcome.

Meanwhile, some of the burglary charges stemming from the looting that occurred in Oakland last July could potentially lead to multi-year sentences, Siegel added, leading to more time in jail than Mehserle served.

Some of the hundreds arrested over the course of the three protests who had prior criminal convictions had their probation or parole immediately revoked as a consequence, said Rachel Jackson, a member of the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant and one of the organizers of the Nov. 5 community rally in downtown Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza.

Of the hundreds of arrests made in Oakland during waves of protests launched by Grant supporters, just a small number were on serious charges such as burglary or arson. The mass arrest of 150 individuals last November was initially made on charges of unlawful assembly, yet nearly all of the arrestees were cited and released after spending up to 24 hours in jail, and all had their charges dropped.

In that instance, Oakland police corralled 150 demonstrators who had been participating in a lawful march through the streets into a residential block in East Oakland. Once they were surrounded, Oakland police — who were aided in the streets by 32 other law-enforcement agencies that night, according to National Lawyers Guild attorney Rachel Lederman — placed them all under arrest. No dispersal order was issued prior to making the arrests, and it would have been impossible to comply if one had been issued.

In a class-action lawsuit, the National Lawyers Guild argues that the Nov. 5 protester roundup and mass arrest was a violation of the Oakland Police Department’s crowd control policy, and that it constituted a violation of protesters’ rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. “Even legal observers and a few people who happened to live in the neighborhood were swept up,” Lederman said.

“The policy is clear, and the constitution is clear,” she went on. “You must have probable cause to believe an individual is committing a crime. But in this case, the whole crowd was herded onto a residential street, blocked in, and held on the street for hours. There was never a dispersal order, and all exits were sealed off.”

The Oakland Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Arrestees were held handcuffed in vans, in some cases for hours, without access to a bathroom, Lederman noted. All of the women were subjected to pregnancy tests upon being booked into jail, “which made no sense and was abusive in this particular case,” Lederman maintains, because the short time they spent there didn’t justify the excuse that the test would have been necessary to determine whether anyone needed prenatal care. Several men, meanwhile, were subjected to DNA swabs, which is “only supposed to happen if you’re arrested for a violent felony,” according to Lederman. 

Jackson, who was also arrested that night, said she believed police conduct was “incredibly intimidating, and it has a chilling effect on free speech.”

Chauncey Bailey Project reports

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Following the murder of Oakland journalist Chauncey Bailey in 2007, allegedly to prevent him from exposing the financial dealings of Your Black Muslim Bakery, the Guardian joined with other Bay Area media outlets in an award-winning investigative project known as the Chauncey Bailey Project. The murder trial of two men accused of ordering the killing by admitted shooter Devaughndre Broussard began March 21, and we’ve been running coverage from the project on the SFBG Politics blog. Here are some excerpts, written by Thomas Peele, an investigative reporter with the project who works at the Contra Costa Times (with reporter Josh Richman contributing to some reports).

 

BROUSSARD BURST INTO LAUGHTER DESCRIBING 2007 SLAYING — MARCH 28

Devaughndre Broussard burst into laughter before jurors as he described how he shot and killed the relative of the man who had killed Yusuf Bey IV’s brother.

Broussard described how the man, Odell Roberson, started to run when he saw Broussard come at him with a shotgun in summer 2007.

“I said, ‘Stop or I’m going to fire!’ ” Broussard said, before bursting into laughter, then turning his head and stifling his laughs into his arm.

He said he fired eight to 10 assault rifle rounds into Roberson’s chest. “I think I shot him face forward,” Broussard testified. “He hit the ground. I think he fell backward.”

Broussard is on the witness stand for the second day in the triple-murder trial of Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV and bakery member Antoine Mackey. Broussard said he killed Roberson and a second man, journalist Chauncey Bailey, at Bey IV’s order. Mackey is charged with helping in both those killings and with the murder of a third man, Michael Wills. Bey IV and Mackey, both 25, have pleaded not guilty.

Broussard is the prosecution’s star witness in the case. He has pleaded guilty to killing Roberson and Bailey and will receive a 25-year sentence in exchange for his testimony.

 

CONFESSED GUNMAN BROUSSARD TAKES THE STAND — MARCH 24

Broussard first entered Judge Thomas Reardon’s crowded courtroom at 11:39 a.m. wearing shackles and a red jail jumpsuit. He passed in front of the defense table where Bey IV and codefendant Antoine Mackey sat staring at him intently; he didn’t meet their eyes. Bey IV wore a tan suit and a bow tie — the symbol of the Black Muslim movement that Broussard said he joined in 2006.

During afternoon testimony, Broussard described participating in a 2006 shooting of an unoccupied car with other members of Your Black Muslim Bakery. Prosecutor Melissa Krum contends that shooting illustrates the bakery’s command structure: Bey IV issued orders to others to commit crimes on his behalf.

Broussard described being in a room at the bakery when Bey IV’s half-brother, Yusuf Bey V, came to him, gave him a pistol-grip shotgun, and told him Bey IV wanted a car shot to bits. The car belonged to a man with whom the Bey brothers had a dispute.

“I fired it until it was empty five or six times,” Broussard said of the shotgun. He would later use it, Broussard told a grand jury in 2009, to kill Bailey, also on Bey IV’s order.

 

LOADED SHOTGUNS TAKEN FROM BAKERY COMPOUND, OFFICER SAYS — MARCH 23

A police officer is testifying in the murder trial of journalist Chauncey Bailey that he seized two loaded, sawed-off shotguns from the bedrooms of key players in the case.

One, a 12-gauge Remington, was under a bed in defendant Antoine Mackey’s bedroom, Officer Bruce Christensen of the Oakland Police Department, told jurors.

The other, a 12-gauge Mossberg, was found outside a bedroom window. Bailey’s confessed killer, Devaughndre Broussard, told a grand jury that was the Bailey murder weapon. It was loaded with five rounds, Christensen said.

 

MURAL FOR SLAIN JOURNALIST UNVEILED AT HIS ALMA MATER — FEB. 26

As a teenager with a stutter, Bailey spent a lot of time in the library at Hayward High School immersing himself in books so he wouldn’t have to talk to people.

The stutter went away, but Bailey’s love of the written word did not. He spent nearly 40 years in journalism before being gunned down as he walked to his job as editor of the Oakland Post on Aug. 2, 2007. 

Compiled by Guardian staff. View more at www.chaunceybaileyproject.org

Prison for killer cop

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

On Nov. 5, former BART Police officer Johannes Mehserle was sentenced to two years in state prison for fatally shooting Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American rider, on the Fruitvale train platform on New Year’s Day 2009.

Mehserle, who is white, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in July in an incident that has become charged with racial undertones. He received credit for 292 days served in jail so far, which will considerably reduce his time in prison. It was the lightest prison sentence he could have received for the crime.

Grant supporters gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland to express anger and sorrow upon hearing news of the sentence. “I’m not shocked,” said Cat Brooks, who helped organize an afternoon rally for the Coalition for Justice for Oscar Grant. “But I’m disgusted and distraught. It seems like the justice system didn’t work.”

After the rally came to a close and night fell, protesters spilled into the streets and marched toward the Fruitvale BART Station, the scene of the crime. But after a dozen car windows were smashed along the way, police officers in riot gear corralled the group into a residential neighborhood. Police then placed 152 protesters under mass arrest, mostly on charges of unlawful assembly. Roughly two-thirds of those arrested were Oakland residents, according to the Oakland Police Department, while others were from Berkeley, San Francisco, Hayward, and other local cities.

 

COMMUNITY RESPONDS

A stage outside Oakland City Hall was transformed into a venue for personal expression in the wake of the sentencing. Community members lined up to air their frustrations and resolve to keep fighting. They piled flowers onto a shrine that had been created with a picture of Grant’s face. Some painted pictures, while others gave spoken word or hip-hop performances. Several told stories of loved ones who’d died in police shootings.

Cephus Johnson, Grant’s uncle, was at the Los Angeles courtroom where Mehserle was sentenced, but shared some thoughts with the Guardian beforehand. Asked what he’d thought when the verdict had been announced, Johnson said, “My first thought was that we’re witnessing the criminal justice system failing to work as it should have worked.” If the sentence fell short of the 14-year maximum, he said, “it will be another slap in the face, signifying that black and brown men are worthless.”

East Bay labor organizer Charles Dubois was among those attending the Nov. 5 rally. “Every black parent, every brown parent, lives with this nightmare of their children being killed by some cops because they thought they had a gun,” Dubois said in an interview with the Guardian. “It’s been happening since I was a kid. It’s been happening then and it’s happening now, and it’s going to keep happening until we do something.”

California Assemblymember Tom Ammiano (D-SF) also weighed in during a phone call with the Guardian. “This verdict is outrageous,” he said. “It’s Dan White all over again.”

 

JUDGE DROPS GUN ENHANCEMENT

Judge Robert Perry sided with arguments presented by Mehserle’s defense attorney, Michael Rains, when he levied a reduced punishment. Mehserle could have served up to 14 years prison for involuntary manslaughter committed while wielding a gun, but Perry tossed out the firearm enhancement.

“No reasonable trier of fact could have concluded that Mehserle intentionally fired his gun,” the judge was quoted in media reports as saying. But that appears to be what the jury found, as the prosecution argued in a presentencing memorandum.

“The evidence was presented regarding the use of the gun, and in discussing the use of the gun in the jury room, somehow or another the jury decided he had used the gun illegally,” criminal defense attorney and National Lawyers Guild observer Walter Riley told the Guardian. “One has to believe the jury expected him to have exposure to a greater amount of jail time because of that.”

Perry said he believed Mehserle suffered a “muscle memory accident” that led him to draw and fire his service weapon instead of his Taser, a cornerstone of the defense’s case.

Rains wrote to the court prior to sentencing that jurors should never have been allowed to apply the firearm enhancement to an involuntary manslaughter conviction “because in this case, there is no logical way to square a verdict of involuntary manslaughter and a finding that Mehserle intended to use his gun.”

Prosecutor David Stein of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office countered that the jury’s conviction showed they believed Mehserle intended to shoot, but not to kill, Grant. Yet Perry agreed with the defense, conceding he had mistakenly permitted the jury to enhance Mehserle’s sentence.

Riley said he sympathized with frustrations over the gun enhancement getting dismissed. “The use of guns is too prevalent in circumstances where law enforcement comes in contact with young black people,” he said. “Our society — our civil society, our judicial authority, and our communities — have to hold government and law enforcement officers to a higher level of accountability in their interactions with citizens. When people with guns shoot an inordinate number of people of one group, it’s worth tremendous scrutiny.”

 

ANOTHER NIGHT IN JAIL

Twice before, activists took to the streets in furious protest over this case. In January 2009, things escalated to the point where cars were set ablaze. In July 2010, a street rally gave way to rioting and looting. So on Nov. 5, many downtown Oakland storeowners boarded up and closed business early in anticipation of a third wave of vandalism.

Yet the turnout was smaller than the previous events. And while there were reports of smashed car windshields and other instances of vandalism along the circuitous path of the march, there was far less property destruction.

The community affair outside Oakland City Hall ended around 6 p.m., when the permit expired. Soon after, activists spilled into the intersection of 14th and Broadway streets, then began advancing down 14th Street chanting “No Justice! No Peace!” and “The whole system is guilty!” The march turned right onto Madison Street, then left onto 10th Street.

A police helicopter with a spotlight kept pace overhead while it progressed, and when protesters reached Laney College, police officers in riot gear blocked them in. So protesters cut through a park and wandered in a pack until they reached the intersection of East 18th Street and Sixth Avenue in a residential neighborhood. Once again, police surrounded the protesters. This time, the crowd was trapped.

Rachel Jackson, an activist who was barricaded in, began sounding off. “We were going to Fruitvale,” she explained. “We wanted to go to the scene of the crime. All night the police have been trying to suppress our free speech.” When a nearby TV news reporter asked her about windows that had been busted along the march, she was incensed. “We will not equate glass with Oscar Grant’s life!” she responded. “If we have to come out ourselves and board up windows, we’ll do that. But what we are concerned with right now is murder.”

Reporters were allowed to exit the confined area, but if anyone else had been inclined to leave peacefully, they were unable to. Police issued a call on a megaphone telling activists, “You are all under arrest. Do not resist arrest.” By the time the mass arrest was underway, public information officer Jeff Thomason told a group of reporters that there were more police officers on the scene than protesters.

“When the rocks were being thrown, it was declared an unlawful assembly,” Thomason explained. He said a dispersal order had been issued simultaneously. Yet it would have been impossible for the trapped crowd to comply with such an order.

Meanwhile, a resident of the Oakland neighborhood who had come outside when the commotion began told the Guardian that she sympathized with the protesters. “The only thing I don’t condone is the vandalism,” said Dyshia Harvey, who surveyed the scene from behind a fence with her six-year-old son.

Harvey had been anticipating word of Mehserle’s sentencing. “I was upset. I was frustrated, angry, and hurt” by the outcome, she said. But she wasn’t surprised. “I already knew we weren’t going to get no justice,” she said. “For taking a life, 14 years isn’t enough. It makes you feel like there’s no justice in the justice system.”

 

NOT OVER YET

Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley has not stated whether her office will appeal Perry’s ruling. Rains told reporters in L.A. that he would appeal Mehserle’s involuntary manslaughter conviction.

Meanwhile, the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice released a statement indicating that a federal investigation is in the works. “The Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have been closely monitoring the local prosecution of this case,” a USDOJ prepared statement notes. “Now that the state prosecution has concluded and consistent with department policy, we will thoroughly review the prosecution and its underlying investigation to determine whether further action is appropriate.”

BART settled a civil lawsuit filed on behalf of Grant’s daughter in January that is likely to total $5.1 million, according to civil rights attorney John Burris’ website. Two other lawsuits, one on behalf of Grant’s mother and one on behalf of five other men on the Fruitvale station platform that night, have been consolidated into a single trial that will begin in May 2011, Burris told the Guardian.

Meanwhile, Grant’s death marked just one of three police shootings that occurred Jan. 1, 2009 — the other two cases also sparked allegations of civil-rights violations, since both victims were African American men. Adolph Grimes, 22, was fatally shot 14 times, including 12 times in the back, by a group of New Orleans police officers, who erroneously believed he was a suspect who’d fled the scene of a shooting.

The same night, Robert Tolan, 23 — the son of a Major League Baseball player — was shot and seriously injured outside his home in an upscale Houston suburb by a police officer who mistakenly believed Tolan had stolen the vehicle he was driving. Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton, the white officer who shot him, was ultimately acquitted.

 

CREATIVE OUTLET

Not everyone in Oakland reacted to Mehserle’s sentence by charging through the streets. The Oscar Grant Foundation, which facilitated live art performances at Frank Ogawa Plaza Nov. 5, is calling for youth groups, Bay Area schools, and adults to participate in an art and poetry showcase inspired by Grant. Information can be found online at IamOscarGrant.org. The foundation is advertising a $1,000 grand prize. Three artists from the Trust Your Struggle Collective didn’t wait to join a contest, however, and spent the afternoon of Nov. 5 adorning plywood covering the Youth Radio building windows at 17th Street and Telegraph Avenue, a few blocks from Frank Ogawa Plaza.

The mural displayed a prominent image of Grant holding his daughter, Tatiana, who was four years old when Grant was killed. The pair are flanked by the names and figures of more than 20 people killed by police.

“We asked the youth inside what they wanted to see,” Miguel Perez, an artist with the Trust Your Struggle Collective, told the Guardian as he looked over the mural. “They said they wanted to see the names of people killed by police nationwide, not just in the Bay Area. The list is so huge, it’s hard to pick out specific names.”

Perez said Trust Your Struggle is a group of artists and educators with social-justice backgrounds who create art as activism. “Being a person of color, I’ve had racist stuff said to me by the police,” Perez said. “It seems like it’s slowly been changing for the past hundreds of years, but it’s still not enough — enough being fairness.” *

National Lawyers Guild pushes back against OPD

Shortly after filming a protester being arrested by police in riot gear near 12th street and Broadway in Oakland, the Guardian caught up with Dan Siegel, a legal observer for the National Lawyers Guild, who had also witnessed the incident. The protester, who is at this time unidentified, was featured on the cover of this week’s San Francisco Bay Guardian, squaring off with an officer in the police line shortly before being arrested.

Siegel described excessively forceful tactics employed by police officers that created more confrontation with protesters than was necessary in the hours of largely peaceful protests that gave way to shattering glass and trashcan fires when the sun went down. The unidentified protester was arrested at least an hour before police declared the assembly to be unlawful and ordered the crowd to disperse.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvMvi7mqdl8

The San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the National Lawyers Guild has publicly condemned police conduct at the scene of the July 8 protests that turned to riots, and the organization is considering legal action against the Oakland Police Department, according to a news release posted on the guild’s website yesterday.

Carlos Villarreal, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild SF Bay Area Chapter, told the Guardian that possible legal action against the OPD was in very early stages, but NLG attorneys have met with many of the people who were arrested or otherwise detained or hurt by law enforcement. Villarreal confirmed that NLG attorneys have met with the unidentified protester in the video.

“If someone is in the streets, and they’ve been ordered to disperse, the method to get them to disperse is not to hit them in the head or the back with batons,” Villarreal said. “Law enforcement potentially has a role to play if there are unlawful assemblies that become violent, but it shouldn’t be the kind of involvement that deters people from completely lawful protest and assembly, which I believe by and large was what was going on.”

Oakland considers limiting and licensing marijuana growers

7

Updated info below

The medical marijuana community – everyone from small growers to Harborside Health Center, the biggest dispensary in Oakland – are reacting strongly against an ordinance proposed by Oakland City Council members Rebecca Kaplan and Larry Reid to limit and license marijuana cultivation, a proposal that will be heard tonight (7/13) at 6 p.m. by the council’s Public Safety Committee.

They say the measure is an affront to medical marijuana patients and the small growing operations that have been at the forefront of the long struggle to legalize pot for medical uses. While the measure stems from concern about growing weed in residential areas – it would allow only a few large growing operations exclusively in industrial areas – critics characterize it as an attack on patients that violates Prop. 215, the 1996 measure that legalized medical marijuana and explicitly allows patients to grow their own medicine.

“It’s a disturbing turn of events for the usually forward thinking Oakland City Council,” medical marijuana consultant Gaynell Rogers, who works with Harborside, the city’s premier dispensary, wrote in a press release. It went on to quote Harborisde executive director Steve DeAngelo as saying, “This ordinance would deprive hundreds of patient-farmers of their livelihood. It seems a very unfair way to repay them for the years during which they courageously stood up to the federal government, and faithfully supplied patients with the medicine they could not get anywhere else…I’d rather see Harborside’s own opportunity to produce on a centralized efficient-scale basis reduced, than to see the small patient-farmers who are the backbone of this movement driven to extinction.”

Kaplan did not immediately return a Guardian call seeking comment, and neither did Oakland City Attorney John Russo, who is one of the few active law enforcement officers and elected officials to come out in support of Prop. 19, the fall ballot measure that would legalize marijuana for even recreational use by adults.

In addition to regulating growers for the first time, the proposed legislation would also increase the number of licensed dispensaries from four to six. San Francisco, a trailblazer in regulating medical marijuana, currently has more than 22 licensed dispensaries and no licensing program for growers, although Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has said there is a need to better protect growers from prosecution and even to explore having the city grow medical marijuana.

While medical marijuana advocates welcome regulations as a necessary step toward legitimizing the industry, they generally oppose anything limits a patient’s rights to grow their own weed. “We support local regulation but not when it’s at the expense of patients,” Mike Meno, a spokesperson for the DC-based Marijuana Policy Project, told the Guardian.

The hearing will be held in council chambers, with this item last on the agenda for a meeting that begins at 6 p.m.

Update: Kaplan has been in a closed session on Oakland Police Department issues all day, but her staffers just got back to me and clarified that the measure allows small grows of up to 96 square feet or 72 plants (Oakland’s standard for the needs of three patients) to continue unlicensed, although they say the intention is to eventually set standards and a legal framework for all medical marijuana growers.

Policy analyst Ada Chan said Kaplan is concerned about commercial grows in residential areas and its related crime and fire risks and “she feels we need to move it out of residential areas.” She said Harborside and other medical marijuana players were consulted in drafting the legislation, which she said would likely be subject to more staff work before being approved: “This is just the first step.”

But Harborside attorney James Anthony told us that he had not seen language or specifics on the legislation until it was publicly released last week, he’s still concerned that small growing operations will be hurt by the measure because of ambiguity in the legislation, and he fears the council intends to move quickly on an unworkable policy: “This thing is on track to go to the full City Council next week and pass.”

The inside angle

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rebeccab@sfbg.com

Josh Wolf’s second spell in the hot seat — and other penalties brought down against independent journalists documenting California’s defiant student movement — raise some important questions about the freedom of the press at civil disobedience protests.

Wolf, a student at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, faces a possible academic suspension for violating the student conduct code during a Nov. 20 student occupation of a campus lecture hall. But Wolf says he was there to document the moment as a reporter.

Brandon Jourdan, an independent journalist who was also inside the hall with Wolf, now faces his own set of misdemeanor charges after capturing footage of a March 4 student protest that broke onto a West Oakland freeway. And David Morse, a journalist and Indybay collective member who reported on a raucous Dec. 11 protest at the UC Berkeley chancellor’s residence, is now fighting the seizure of his camera and a search warrant issued by UC police for his unpublished photographs — something the First Amendment Project maintains is in violation of state law.

The footage that Wolf and Jourdan took on Nov. 20 and March 4 captured police use of physical force against protesters and documented the widely publicized actions from unique perspectives. The reports were broadcast on Democracy Now!, a popular independent news program that airs nationally on satellite television stations, public access channels, and online.

The gutsy camerapersons aren’t the first to face criminal charges. After nine reporters followed several hundred protesters seeking to block construction of the Black Fox Nuclear Power Plant onto private property in June 1979 and were arrested, an Oklahoma court of appeals ruled the First Amendment guaranteed them no immunity from prosecution for trespassing.

“That makes the position of a journalist very difficult, in areas where demonstrators are essentially exercising civil disobedience to make a point,” notes Terry Francke, executive director of Californians Aware, a watchdog organization focused on First Amendment issues. “There’s no free pass for journalists in the crowd recording what’s going on. Their principled position would presumably be yes, like [protesters] risk arrest and consequences for the greater good, they’d risk the same for the sake of giving the public … a close-up picture of what it’s like to be in those circumstances.”

Without that journalistic witness, “When you hear stories about what went on in the middle of a police and demonstrators’ confrontation … you’ll have two irreconcilable versions, from only directly interested parties,” Francke points out.

There’s been no shortage recently of civil disobedience on California college campuses, where operations have been ravaged by budget cuts. The Nov. 20 occupation was staged early in the morning at Wheeler Hall, when students barricaded themselves inside to protest a 32 percent fee hike imposed by the UC Board of Regents. While most reporters gathered outside the building or flew over in helicopters, Wolf was inside, and he’s the only student to claim being there in a journalistic capacity. He says he wore a police-issued press badge.

Wolf, a video journalist, enjoys a sort of celebrity status because he spent 226 days in jail after resisting a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury. It started when he shot a film of a 2005 protest in San Francisco, which police tried to obtain because they believed it could help them pinpoint demonstrators who vandalized a police car and injured an officer. Since the case was pursued at the federal level, he was unable to invoke California’s shield law protecting journalists from being compelled to reveal unpublished material.

Democracy Now! aired a lengthy report of the Nov. 20 occupation featuring footage that the two embedded reporters had captured from the interior of Wheeler, coproduced by David Martinez. Show host Amy Goodman specifically named Wolf as a co-contributor when the report aired.

Now Wolf is facing a possible seven-month suspension by the campus Center for Student Conduct, which charges him with violating the student conduct code on multiple counts. “Their perspective is that I am a student and that I am a journalist,” Wolf explained. “My responsibility is no different from anyone else’s in there, and therein, my punishment should be reflective of that of everyone else.” Wolf said he had the backing of the journalism school, which confirmed to the Guardian that the dean wrote a letter of support for Wolf.

David Morse, 42, is a journalist who has covered hundreds of Bay Area protests on Indybay, an online news site that spotlights grassroots movements and protests. In a motion filed against UCPD, the First Amendment Project charges that Morse was arrested and had his camera seized Dec. 11 despite repeating six times that he was a journalist and displaying a press pass. “They told me, ‘You have a camera, we want your camera,'<0x2009>” Morse recounted. The next morning, as reports of angry, torch-wielding students storming the chancellor’s home and smashing windows made headlines, Morse was still sitting in jail in Santa Rita. “My voice as an eyewitness was completely silenced,” he said. His charges were dropped, but now he is challenging the search warrant to get his memory discs back.

When the police department sought a search warrant for Morse’s unpublished photos, they didn’t mention that he had identified as a journalist, the FAP charges. The legal nonprofit filed a motion to quash the warrant on grounds that it violates a provision in the penal code barring search warrants for journalistic work products, invoking the state shield law.

Jourdan, meanwhile, faces five misdemeanor charges after filming the March 4 freeway protest and subsequent police response, which many have characterized as excessive. (In one clip, an officer can be seen striking an individual who doesn’t appear to be resisting with a baton.) He was arrested along with two other videographers who also face criminal infractions. Footage Jourdan and Martinez captured from March 4 aired on Democracy Now!, and Jourdan’s report was also featured as a lead story on the Huffington Post. Jourdan says he wore press credentials.

“It’s unfair for them to file charges against me when they’ve dropped charges against others,” Jourdan said. The Oakland Police Department confirmed to the Guardian that Jourdan had been charged with crimes such as unlawful assembly and obstruction of a thoroughfare, but did not respond to a message asking what set him apart from other reporters.

Jourdan, who has also contributed to Reuters, The New York Times, and other outlets, has managed to capture a variety of similar events on film, including Amy Goodman’s arrest during protests outside the Republican National Convention in 2009. “Barely a month goes by that some lawyer isn’t calling me up trying to get footage of some one getting beat up,” he said. But he maintains that documenting these intense moments is crucial, not for resolving disputes, but to document these moments in history.

Reporters from mainstream television news programs toting bulky cameras were also filming on the freeway, but were allowed to leave. Guardian news intern Jobert Poblete and multimedia producer Cameron Burns with UC Berkeley’s Daily Californian were arrested on the freeway too, but their charges were later dropped after state Sen. Leland Yee intervened. “Journalists are generally provided greater access to cover news stories than other members of the public,” Yee wrote in a letter to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. “Unfortunately, law enforcement did not provide such leeway in this case.”

Adam Keigwin, Yee’s chief of staff, said the senator’s office got involved on behalf of the Guardian and the Daily Cal because he knew those publications. “We just need to know more about this,” Keigwin said. “Once credentialed media is present, it’s the senator’s perspective that journalists should have the right to cover these things and should not be charged.”

But when asked if there is a deficiency in state law since that right doesn’t technically exist, Keigwin responded, “This may be something we should consider.”

Informing the public

1

news@sfbg.com

Information is power. But too often, those with political power guard public documents and information from the journalists, activists, lawyers, and others who seek it on the people’s behalf. So every year, we at the Guardian honor those who fight for a freer and more open society by highlighting the annual winners of the James Madison Freedom of Information Awards, which are given by the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

This year’s winners are:

Beverly Kees Educator Award

Rachele Kanigel

Rachele Kanigel, an associate professor of journalism and advisor to Golden Gate Xpress publications at San Francisco State University, has been highly involved in student press rights work on a national level. She wrote The Student Newspaper Survival Guide (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), a book designed to empower budding campus reporters. A champion of the free speech rights of her students, Kanigel has gone to bat on several occasions on behalf of student journalists whose work was challenged by interests that didn’t believe students should be afforded the same protections as professional reporters. Kanigel sees part of her job as educating the world about the importance of student journalists and standing up for their rights. “A lot of people won’t talk to student journalists, but they’re doing some really important work,” she said. “A lot of what we have to do is to assure the student journalists and tell the world outside that these are journalists.” The educator award is named in honor of Beverly Kees, who was the SPJ NorCal chapter president at the time of her death in 2004.

Norwin S. Yoffie Career Achievement Award

Mark Fricker

Mary Fricker is the kind of investigative reporter many of us would like to be.

She started out in the 1980s investigating complaints of irregularities at her local savings and loan when she was reporting for the old Russian River News community paper. Her dogged research and hard-hitting stories produced the first major investigation into the toxic problems of financial deregulation in S&Ls. Her work won numerous awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award given out by UCLA and the prestigious George Polk Award, and ultimately led to the book, Inside Job: The Looting of America’s Savings and Loan. The book won Best Book of the Year award from the Investigative Reporters and Editors association.

Fricker did business reporting and major investigative work for 20 years with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat. She retired and joined the Chauncey Bailey Project as a volunteer investigative reporter, researcher, Web site maestro, and general good spirit. Her work included several key investigations that determined that the Oakland Police Department was virtually alone in not taping interviews with suspects in investigations. Her stories changed that practice. She is a most worthy recipient of the Norwin S.<0x2009>Yoffie award, which honors the memory of the former publisher of the Marin Independent Journal, a founder of the SPJ/FOI committee, and a splendid warrior in the cause of Freedom of Information.

Professional Journalist

G.W. Schulz

G.W. Schulz was busy when we got him on the phone. “I’m sending out about eight or nine new freedom of information requests a day,” he said. “I fired off a few to the governor of Texas this morning.”

The relentless reporter is working on the Center for Investigative Reporting’s program exposing homeland security spending. It hasn’t been easy. Since the federal government began making big grants to local agencies for supposed antiterrorism and civil emergency equipment and programs, following the money has required unusual persistence. Homeland Security officials don’t even know where their grants are going, so Schulz has been forced to dig deeper.

“I think this is the biggest open government campaign I’ll ever do in my career,” he said. “We’re juggling dozens of requests, state by state. And it’s breathtaking what some people will ignore in their own public records laws.”

He’s found widespread abuse. “These agencies are getting all this expensive equipment and they don’t even maintain it or train their staff how to use it,” he said. CIR is not only doing its own stories, it’s working with local papers that don’t have the resources to do this kind of work. “Lots of great stories in the pipeline,” he said before signing off to get back to the battle. “I’m really excited.”

Legal Counsel

Ann Brick/ACLU

On the heels of a now-infamous Supreme Court ruling on so-called First Amendment rights for corporate political speech, SPJ is honoring an individual who has made a career devoted to protecting real, individual free speech rights for almost 20 years. Ann Brick, staff attorney for the Northern California chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, has litigated in defense of privacy rights, free speech, government accountability, and student rights in cases ranging from book burning to Internet speech to illegal government wiretapping. “I can’t tell you how much of an honor it is to have worked with the ACLU,” she says, adding, “I can’t think of another award I’d rather get than this one — an award from journalists.” But the public’s gratitude goes to Brick, whose years of service are a shining example of speaking truth to power.

Computer Assisted Reporting

Phillip Reese

Phillip Reese of The Sacramento Bee is being honored for his unrelenting pursuit of public records and for producing interactive databases. Reese was the architect of the Bee‘s data center, providing readers readily accessible information about legislative voting records, neighborhood election results, state employee salaries, and other important information. At one point, the city of Sacramento demanded several thousand dollars in exchange for employee salary data. Reese gathered the city’s IT workers and a city attorney for a meeting, where he argued that organizing records in an analyzable format would insure the system wasn’t being abused, so they chose to provide the records for free. The online databases provide public access to records that are often disorganized and cryptic. “Sometimes these databases go well with a story, and sometimes they can stand on the Internet alone. People can view them in a way that is important to themselves,” Reese said.

Public Official

Leland Yee

State Sen. Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) has been an open government advocate since his days on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and one of his favorite targets is the administration of the University of California. He has fought to protect UC students from administrators who want to curtail their free-speech right and to get documents from university officials.

In 2008, he authored and passed SB 1696, which blocked the university from hiding audit information behind a private contractor. UCSF was refusing to release the information in an audit the school paid a private contractor to conduct. “I read about this in the newspaper and I was just scratching my head. How can public officials do this stuff?” Yee said. He had to overcome resistance from university officials and public agencies arguing that the state shouldn’t be sticking its nose into their business. “But it’s public money, and they’re public entities, and the people have a right to know where that money is going.”

Computer Assisted Reporting

Thomas Peele and Daniel Willis

This duo with the Bay Area News Group, which includes 15 daily and 14 community newspapers around the Bay Area, performed monumental multitasking when they decided to crunch the salaries of more than 194,000 public employees from 97 government agencies into a database. Honored with the Computer Assisted Reporting Award, the duo provided the public with a database that translated a gargantuan amount of records into understandable information. They had to submit dozens of California Public Records Act requests to access the records of salaries that account for more than $1.8 billion in taxpayer money. “It is important that the public know how its money is spent. This data base, built rather painstakingly one public records act request at a time by Danny Willis and myself as a public service, goes a long way in helping people follow the money,” Peele said.

Nonprofit

Californians Aware: The Center for Public Forum Rights

California’s sunshine laws, including the Brown Act open meeting law and California Public Records Act, aren’t bad. Unfortunately, they are routinely flouted by public officials, often making it necessary to go to court to enforce them. That’s why we need groups like CalAware, and individuals like its president, Rick McKee, and its counsel, longtime media attorney Terry Francke. Last year, while defending an Orange County school board member’s free speech rights and trying to restore a censored public meeting transcript, CalAware not only found itself losing the case on an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion, but being ordered to pay more than $80,000 in school district legal fees. “It’s never been easy, but that was going to be the end of private enforcement of the Brown Act,” Francke said. Luckily, Sen. Leland Yee intervened with legislation that prevents awarding attorney fees in such sunshine cases, leaving CalAware bruised but unbowed. “We’ve become active in court like never before.”

News Media

SF Public Press/McSweeney’s

Last year, when author Dave Eggers and his McSweeney’s magazine staff decided to put out a single newspaper issue (because “it’s a form we love,” Eggers told us), they filled San Francisco Panorama with the unusual mix of writers, topics, and graphics one might expect from a literary enterprise. But they wanted a hard-hitting investigation on the cover, so they turned to the nonprofit SF Public Press and reporters Robert Porterfield and Patricia Decker. Together, they worked full-time for four months to gather information on cost overruns on the Bay Bridge rebuild, fighting for public records and information from obscure agencies and an intransigent CalTrans. “We’re still dealing with this. I’ve been trying to secure documents for a follow-up and I keep getting the runaround,” said Decker, a new journalist with a master’s degree in engineering, a nice complement to Porterfield, an award-winning old pro. “He’s a great mentor, just such a fount of knowledge.”

Professional Journalist

Sean Webby

San Jose Mercury News reporter Sean Webby won for a series spotlighting the San Jose Police Department’s use of force and how difficult it is for the public or the press to track.

The department and the San Jose City Council refused to release use-of-force reports, so Webby obtained them through public court files. He zeroed in on incidents that involved “resisting arrest” charges, and even uncovered a cell phone video in which officers Tasered and battered suspects who did not appear to be resisting.

Webby has won numerous awards in the past, but says he is particularly proud of this one. “Freedom of information is basically our mission statement, our bible, our motto,” he said. “We feel like the less resistance the average person has to getting information, the better the system works.”

Webby said that despite causing some tension between his paper and the San Jose Police Department, the project was well worth it. “We are never going to back off the hard questions. It’s our job as a watchdog organization.”

Public Service

Rita Williams

KTVU’s Rita Williams is being honored for her tireless efforts to establish a media room in the San Francisco Federal Building that provides broadcasters the same access to interviews as print reporters.

Television and radio equipment was banned from the federal pressroom following 9/11, but Williams solicited support from television stations, security agencies, the courts, and the National Bar Association. After a six-year push, they were able to restore access.

Williams and her supporters converted a storage unit in the federal building into a full-blown media center, which was well-used during the Proposition 8 trial. “I only did two days of the trials, but every time I walked into the room, I would just be swarmed with camera folks saying thank you, thank you, thank you,” she said. “I’m getting close to retirement and I was in the first wave of women in broadcasting, and I’m proud that almost 40 years later, I can leave this legacy.”

Citizen

Melissa Nix

With her Betty Page looks, dogged sense of justice, and journalistic training, Melissa Nix became a charismatic and relentless force in the quest to find out how her ex-boyfriend Hugues de la Plaza really died in 2007. Nix began her efforts after the San Francisco medical examiner declared it was unable to determine how de la Plaza died and the San Francisco Police Department seemed to be leaning toward categorizing the case as a suicide. Using personal knowledge of de la Plaza and experience as a reporter with The Sacramento Bee, Nix got the French police involved, who ruled the death a homicide, and unearthed the existence of an independent medical examiner report that concluded that de la Plaza was murdered.

Editorial/Commentary

Daniel Borenstein

Contra Costa Times reporter Daniel Borenstein wasn’t out to deprive public worker retirees of yachting, country club golf, and rum-y cocktails at tropical resorts. The columnist was only trying to figure out how, for example, the chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District turned a $185,000 salary into a $241,000 annual pension. Borenstein’s effort to unearth and make public, in easily readable spreadsheets, the records of all Contra Costa County public employee pensioners led the Contra Costa Times to a court victory stipulating just that: all records would be released promptly on request without allowing retirees time to go to court to block access. The effects have been noticeable: “I get scores of e-mails most weeks in reaction to the columns I’m writing on pensions, [and] public officials are much more sensitive to the issue,” Borenstein says. It is a precedent that has carried into the Modesto Bee‘s similar pension-disclosure efforts in Stanislaus County.

Student Name Withheld After a photojournalism student at San Francisco State University snapped photographs at the scene of a fatal shooting in Bayview-Hunters Point, police skipped the usual process of using a subpoena to seek evidence, and went straight into his home with a search warrant to seize this student’s work. But with the help of his attorney, the student quashed the warrant, arguing California’s shield law prevents law enforcement from compelling journalists to disclose unpublished information. He won, and the case served to demonstrate that the shield law should apply to nontraditional journalists.

The student is being recognized because he resisted the warrant rather than caving into the demands of law enforcement. Invoking the shield law in such cases prevents reporters from being perceived as extensions of law enforcement by the communities they report on, enabling a free exchange of information. The student remained anonymous in the aftermath of the shooting because he feared for his life. Based on his ongoing concerns, NorCal SPJ and the Guardian have agreed to honor his wish to have his name withheld.

SEIU vs. UHW, a ringside seat

15

Guardian intern Joe Sciarrillo was at Friday’s takeover of the UHW by SEIU and has these words and images:
seiu-sign.jpg
Friday afternoon at the United Healthcare Workers headquarters, eight Oakland Police officers mediated a dispute between UHW members resisting the takeover by Service Employees International Union and SEIU representatives who showed up to take custody of the building. Both sides sought to convince the police to let their respective groups stay in the building.

Lover Joyce, a former UHW Executive Board member and medical assistant at Kaiser Walnut Creek, explained to reporters what the SEIU representatives had done around 11am. “They broke into the building, pushed our members” after using bolt-cutters to open the doors. Joyce and several other members had been sleeping at the office for a little over a week, so when SEIU leaders arrived, they called the Oakland Police Department. “We have the deed to the property!” he continued to assure the police and reporters. “It belongs to the Unity Healthcare Workers Corporation, not UHW or SEIU.”

Tara Gorewitz, a contract specialist for UHW at Walnut Creek Kaiser, later explained the history of why the building was legally given to the Unity Healthcare Workers Corporation and not to UHW or SEIU. She noted that Shirley Ware, the late Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU UHW- West Local 250, set up the deed in this manner so that the members, rather than the union, could retain rights to use the building in the case of a split.

Hellarity burns

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› news@sfbg.com

"The angels in the summertime are ashes in the fall. As Eden fell so heaven shall. I will burn them all."

The sign, written in gothic letters on weatherworn plywood with faded red flames, is nailed to the side gate of a two-story duplex off Martin Luther King Jr. Way in north Oakland. Today, the old sign’s words carry a chilling new meaning, greeting visitors to a house whose insides were scorched by an unidentified arsonist.

The charred house has been a cauldron of contention for more than 10 years. It has been the product of two anticapitalist housing experiments, one started by an environmentalist landlord who sought to create an ecotopia, and the other by a group of anarchists who intended to make it their home. In the process, it became a hub for traveling activists and aspiring hobos, and a headquarters for antiestablishment endeavors such as Berkeley Liberation Radio.

"People would hear about it through the grapevine, hop off a freight train, and show up on our doorstep with a backpack, a banjo, and a Woody Guthrie song," says Steve DiCaprio, a tenant who moved into the house in 2001 with his wife after living in a van out front. "We had an open-door policy. Anyone could come in, no questions asked. They just had to abide by certain rules: no hard drugs, no racism, no homophobia, and no violence. We wanted to emphasize equality — it was a reaction to the closed, materialistic, competitive, dog-eat-dog society we live in."

The house originally was part of the green property owner’s attempt to create a network of sustainable, affordable housing. When his project floundered, the residence was slowly taken over by his tenants, a group of people who one-upped his radicalism. Both sides claimed to be avowed anticapitalists, but their strategies were at odds; his was to produce an alternative to the local housing market by creating a nonprofit that would help tenants own their homes as a collective. Theirs was to make space for themselves in a rent-based housing market by seizing property from investors and absentee landlords.

The owner eventually went bankrupt — drowned in the early stages of the current defutf8g housing market — and the property fell into the hands of a small-time real estate investor, despite the tenants’ attempts to buy it themselves. The tenants refused to leave, transforming themselves into squatters, and fought it out with the buyer in court for three years. As the court case bogged down, housing values plummeted, making the landlord’s investment lose value by the day.

On Feb. 28, when one of many hearings was set to take place, the squatters showed up in court but the landlord hadn’t filed the paperwork needed to move the conflict closer to a resolution. The following night, in the early hours of March 1, someone lit three fires in the empty upper apartment, setting the house ablaze as people slept inside.

WELCOME TO HELLARITY


For years the house has been known as "Hellarity," although its original owner never called it that. In fact, he refuses to. To recognize that name would be to legitimize the people who adorned it with the title — a group he sees as thieves, squatters who disrupted a legitimate project he thought would have a small but tangible impact on a profit-driven housing market.

Born on the Sunrise Free School in northeastern Washington State, Sennet Williams — known by most as "Sand" — spent his early years bouncing between Spokane and "environmental and pacifist intentional communities" in the area. A year after moving to Berkeley in 1990, he graduated from UC Berkeley’s Hass School of Business. With a degree in urban land economics, he wanted to do his part to turn the tide of environmental degradation by developing "nonprofit car-free housing" in Berkeley.

Williams didn’t see attending business school or investing in property as contradictions of his ideals. For Williams, they were strategic moves. He thought that anticapitalist projects lacked an important element — money — and wanted to be a benefactor for alternative forms of housing.

One week after graduating, his dreamy aspirations came to a crashing halt when an SUV plowed into his compact car while he was on a ski trip at Lake Tahoe, badly injuring him and causing brain damage. His goals would have been quickly destroyed, but Williams sued the driver and convinced the court that the accident interfered with his budding career, winning a settlement in 1993 that he says was "almost a million dollars."

While his money was tucked away in mutual funds and he was living briefly at a student co-op in Ann Arbor, Mich., in 1994, Williams solidified his ideas into an ambitious project called the "Green Plan" with some of his housemates. The plan was an elaborate scheme to "end homelessness" by creating "an urban nonprofit dedicated to self-governing and radical environmentalism" that would fund "rural sustainable ecovillages in Hawaii and elsewhere."

That summer, Williams bought five houses on credit in what he calls Berkeley’s "’80s drug-war zones" and brought his Ann Arbor friends to California to turn his rundown properties into co-op material. Over the summer, the Green Plan became an official organization and Williams let its members live in his houses without paying rent. Instead, they were expected to pay monthly dues to their organization — roughly the equivalent of fair market rent — to put toward buying rural land or repurchasing the houses from Williams at cost. Those who couldn’t afford to contribute were allowed to stay free in exchange for working on the houses, doing extra work for the Green Plan, or volunteering in its Little Planet café.

"Sennet (Williams) tried to be clear that he wasn’t a landlord," says former Green Plan member Dianna Tibbs, but relations between Williams and the members quickly disintegrated. Three years after its formation, the Green Plan remained unincorporated as a nonprofit. A former member also said it was still too centered on Williams’ ideas. Williams’ relationship with the tenants soured. "Ultimately there was a rebellion among the people against Sennet," Tibbs says. In 1997 the project disbanded, transferring all of the money they had raised — about $50,000 — to the Little Planet café.

The Green Plan fell apart, but Williams was caught up in the fervor of the mid-90s real estate market. In 1997, he bought the house that would later be named Hellarity for $114,000, with the goal of "making it into a demonstration of an eco-house that would be an educational resource for the city." He says he chose that property in part so it "could be a tribute to the Black Panthers’ goals of providing food in the inner-city," as it was on the same block as the home of Black Panthers founder Bobby Seale.

But shortly after Williams bought Hellarity, he says he became "overextended in real estate." By the time he made his first mortgage payments, he says there were "over 60 people" living in his houses. He owned eight in Berkeley, two in Oakland, and was planning to buy farmland in Hawaii. With Williams tied up in too many projects to fix up Hellarity, he moved in some people to "house sit" in exchange for free rent.

Shortly after people moved in, Williams stopped coming around the house. The housesitters gradually brought in their friends, the walls were slowly painted to suit the eccentric tastes of the occupants, and more people started calling the house theirs. Williams said he didn’t invite them, but admits that he never asked them to leave. He had little contact with the occupants as years passed. "He was just a theoretical person that owned the house," DiCaprio says.

Hellarity took on a distinctly anarchist flavor in Williams’ absence. "People with alternative lifestyles and alternative family arrangements could live without having to dedicate their lives to making money, giving them more time to invest in their homes and their communities," says long-term resident Robert "Eggplant" Burnett, Bay Area punk rock legend, publisher of the zine Absolutely Zippo, and editor of Slingshot newspaper. Hellarity hosted the pirate radio station Berkeley Liberation Radio, a do-it-yourself bike shop, and cooked meals for Food Not Bombs.

It seemed like an anarchist paradise, but it wouldn’t last.

FOR SALE


By 2004, mortgage payments were driving Williams deep into debt, and Hellarity became a burden. The house was being pulled away from him from two sides: by anarchists who increasingly challenged the legitimacy of his ownership, and by creditors who placed liens against his properties.

When Hellarity was eventually sold by the court in a bankruptcy sale, the tenants say the man who would buy the house, Pradeep Pal, had never set foot in it. Pal, who refused to be interviewed for this article, lived in an upper-middle class neighborhood in Hercules and owned two businesses, Charlie’s Garage in Berkeley and European Motor Works in Albany. He wasn’t exactly a freewheeling real estate flipper — he was a South Asian immigrant who, according to Guardian research of property records, never owned real estate in the area other than his own home.

But to the tenants, Pal was a capitalist trying to buy them out of their home. In a recorded meeting with tenants, Pal admitted he hadn’t been inside the house before he bought it, and Williams tells us the real estate agent who arranged the sale also never toured the house before Pal bought it. "He obviously had no interest in moving into the place or contributing to the community if he didn’t even look at it," future occupant Jake Sternberg says. "This was someone who just wanted to make a profit."

The tenants made it clear to Pal that they didn’t want him to buy the house and would make life difficult for him. As soon as it became apparent that Williams would lose the house, Crystal Haviland and a few other occupants started searching for someone to help them buy the house. In the summer of 2004, the house was slated to go up on foreclosure auction, but the tenants hadn’t found a sympathetic donor.

The auction was set to occur on the steps of the René C. Davidson Alameda County Courthouse, and the occupants showed up banging drums and bellowing chants to warn off prospective buyers. "We wanted anyone interested in buying the house to know that the people who had been living at the house for 10 years wanted to buy it," says Haviland, who is now raising a child, studying psychology at San Francisco State University, and volunteering as a peer counselor at the Berkeley Free Clinic. "We didn’t want people to buy it and turn it into an expensive gentrified thing." While people gathered, Williams showed up and announced bankruptcy, a legal move that cancelled the auction.

With more time to search for financial support, Haviland started talking with Cooperative Roots, an organization that bought a couple of Williams’ other houses — now known as "Fort Awesome" and "Fort Radical" — in foreclosure auctions. Cooperative Roots is a Berkeley-based nonprofit organized in 2003 by members of the University Students Cooperative Association. They received money from progressive donors — mainly the Parker Street Foundation — to buy houses that they turned into "cooperative, affordable housing," says Cooperative Roots member Zach Norwood. Anyone who lives in their houses is an automatic member of the cooperative and makes monthly mortgage payments to the foundation.

For Hellarity, Cooperative Roots was a godsend. "Other people would walk into that house and say, "This place is disgusting," DiCaprio says. "But they said, ‘Wow, this is a work of art.’<0x2009>" The Parker Street Foundation was willing to put down whatever was needed to buy the house, Norwood says, but the occupants were limited by the monthly payments they could afford. On Nov. 4, 2004, the house went up for bankruptcy sale, and Cooperative Roots was prepared to bid up to $420,000. "It was exciting to be there with a bunch of crazy Hellarity people, putting out bids for hundreds of thousands of dollars," Haviland says.

No one expected them to show up at the sale. Williams says they had previously offered to buy the house from him but he "didn’t think they were serious." By the time they had the money, Williams no longer had control of the sale. At the courthouse, the anarchists were playing by the rules, bidding with money up front. The only other party interested in the house was Pal and his brother-in-law Charanjit Rihal, who were placing bids against the occupants. The two sides bid against each other, driving up the price until the occupants reached their limit. Pal and Rihal took the property for $432,000.

OWNERSHIP VS. CONTROL


"This sale was symptomatic of a housing market gone haywire," says DiCaprio. "People like Pal and Rihal thought they could just throw a bunch of money into real estate and it would always be a good investment. I’m glad the market finally crashed, because that kind of behavior hurts a lot of people. It ended up driving the price of housing to the point that normal people can’t buy anymore — and that’s absurd."

Pal soon discovered he owned the property on paper only. The occupants didn’t recognize the sale or his authority to tell them to leave. Three months after the sale, the occupants were still there, refusing to go. Pal took the case to court in an "action to quiet title," demanding that they be ejected from the property and that the title be freed from any future claims against it. He claimed the people in the house were squatters, living on his property without permission. But before the police could drag out the occupants, they countersued, holding themselves up in court without a lawyer for three years and living in the house the whole time.

One of the first cross-complaints came from Robert Burnett who — with his contempt for the computerized, cell phone-saturated consumer culture — wrote his cross-complaint on the back of a flyer on an ancient typewriter. When the document appeared in court, one side advertised a benefit for a pirate radio station at the anarchist info shop at the Long Haul with an image of tiny people being thrown out of an upside-down Statue of Liberty. On the other side, Burnett claims that he is a co-owner of the house, which he acquired through "adverse possession." Two other defendants made the same claim.

"Adverse possession transfers the ownership of a piece of real estate to people occupying the house without payment," says Oakland attorney Ellis Brown, an expert in property law. "In the state of California, you have to be openly living in a place for five years without the titleholder trying to make you leave to win an adverse possession case."

"Adverse possession originated to prevent Native Americans from taking back land from homesteaders, but squatters turned it around, using it to protect people who take possession of unused property," says Iain Boal, a historian of the commons who teaches in the community studies department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the author of the forthcoming book, The Long Theft: Episodes in the History of Enclosure. Boal emphasizes the large numbers of squatters in the world, a figure Robert Neuwirth, author of Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, a New Urban World (Routledge, 2004), pegs at 1 billion. "It is only here that squatters are seen as bizarre leftovers from the ’60s," Boal says. "We are in a crisis of shelter, and people need to fill their housing needs."

DiCaprio concurs. Along with Burnett, DiCaprio was the main backer of the occupants’ legal case. As we talk in a dark, live-in warehouse, he sips coffee out of a Mason jar and looks over the court case on his laptop. He says he wants to be a lawyer, but he has never been interested in making lots of money — he says he wants to "fight for housing rights." DiCaprio learned squatter law while cycling through family law court, criminal court, and federal court over a Berkeley house he was squatting and trying to win through adverse possession. The city threw him in jail, and he was released just after Pal sued the occupants of Hellarity.

He says Hellarity was different from other situations he’s dealt with as a squatter. "We never thought of ourselves as squatters [at Hellarity] per se until Pal sued us and start using that language in court," he says. "Before he bought the house, no one was challenging our presence on the property. Sennet [Williams] was either actively or passively letting us stay there. By filing a claim to quiet title, Pal made it apparent the title was in question. By calling us squatters instead of tenants, they lost some claim to the property. So we took the ball and ran with it."

Their use of adverse possession was strategic, DiCaprio says, but they didn’t intend to win the house that way. "We were never under any illusion that we would win ownership of the house in court," he says. "We wanted to use the court as a forum to enable us to buy the house. We were just treading water until Pal got tired and agreed to sell." The occupants say they offered him $360,000 for the house, the price it was originally listed for, but he refused to take a loss on his investment.

DiCaprio says the courts generally aren’t sympathetic to squatters’ cases. "Pro pers tend to be poor, so there is a class bias against them," he says, referring to people who represent themselves without a lawyer. DiCaprio says judges have rejected documents for having dirt on them and refused to give fee waivers to people with no income. "The courts do not like squatters. If you mix pro per and adverse possession, you could not have a more hostile environment against us."

For more than two years, Pal and the occupants played a cat-and-mouse game, dragging out the case and trying to complicate it in hopes the other side would just give up. Pal’s lawyer, Richard Harms (who did not return Guardian calls seeking comment), objected to the terms "documents," "property," and "identify" when asked to produce evidence related to his claim. "Instead of trying to prove their case, they were just waiting for us to trip up and not file something before a deadline," says DiCaprio.

The occupants didn’t slip, but as the case wore on, he and Burnett grew tired of upholding their side in court. By fall 2007, the two cut side deals with Pal. Burnett settled for $2,000 and DiCaprio for an undisclosed amount. "I realized I couldn’t save it alone," DiCaprio says. "I told them to sink or swim."

ENDGAME


When Burnett and DiCaprio settled with Pal, the subprime housing crisis was splashing the headlines. Pal’s investment was starting to seem more like a loss, but for the first time since he bought the property, it looked like it would finally be his. By November 2007, the remaining squatters dropped the battle for ownership and began bargaining with him for concessions.

By mid-February, Pal was ready to start renovations, and all but two of the squatters had moved out. They made their final plea and Pal gave his last compromise: two more weeks, then they had to go. "He was sure he was going to get the house, so he agreed to let us stay," says a squatter called Frank, who asked not to be named because of his immigration status.

What Pal may not have understood was that he was not the only party still interested in the house. The house was becoming a point of contention among the larger community of squatters and anarchists in the East Bay. Fissures broke around a central question: was it up to those living there to decide the fate of the notorious squat, or did the larger community of radical activists have a say in the property?

As Pal was getting rid of the last people occupying the house, the squatters’ conflict came to Hellarity’s doorstep. A new group of people came to the North Oakland house, among them a few who had previously stayed at Hellarity, ready to renew the struggle against Pal. Frank, who had been living in the house for seven months, was unhappy about the new arrivals.

"I told them that this kind of action would make problems for me," he says. "I already made an agreement with this guy [Pal] to leave by the end of the month." The new group saw things differently. "We own this place," says Jake Sternberg, the new de facto caretaker of Hellarity, who has since been pushing for the squatters to renew their court case. The discord between the squatters split up the duplex: the two old squatters stayed upstairs while the recent arrivals occupied the lower half.

Two weeks after the new crew moved in, a fire was lit in the upper apartment that burned through the ceiling and the floor. But who did it? Was it a disgruntled squatter who would rather destroy the house than hand it back to Pal? Or was Pal connected to the arson, losing his nerve as a newly energized group of squatters took over and the value of his investment crashed?

If not for the squatters, Pal might have been less affected by the subprime crisis than most property owners. He had no mortgage on the house — he bought it outright — so he wasn’t under threat of foreclosure, unlike tens of thousands of other California homeowners. But Pal faced a different threat. It seems likely he bought the house as an investment, and as the market crashed, he was stuck with a house he could neither renovate nor sell, and was left to watch its value tank as he slogged through court proceedings.

For an investor like Pal, the numbers weren’t looking good. In March, median housing prices had fallen 16.1 percent compared with those of March 2007, according to DataQuick Information Systems, and home sales declined 36.7 percent from the previous year. In April — for the seventh consecutive month — Bay Area home sales were at their lowest level in two decades, DataQuick reported. And according to Business Week, national home prices will plummet an additional 25 percent over the next two to three years.

On Feb. 17, the day after the new group of squatters moved in, Pal made an appearance at the house. In early March, Sternberg showed me a video he recorded during Pal’s visit. On the screen, Pal is sitting on a couch in the downstairs living room of Hellarity. At the door, a well-built man who looks to be in his 30s and calls himself Tony leans against the wall with two younger men who call themselves Salvador and Ryan. Sternberg tells me that Pal came to the house demanding they leave his property. Sternberg called the police, accusing Pal of trespassing. As they waited for the OPD to arrive, which took more than 25 minutes, they discuss their conflict over the house.

At the beginning of the video, Sternberg tells Pal why he and his friends refuse to give up the property: "People came over here from Europe and they said, ‘Hey, we’re going to take this place.’ Now they sell land to each other. And how did they get it? They took it…. And just because somebody pays for something doesn’t mean that they get it. And just because somebody sells something doesn’t mean they have a right to sell that."

A few minutes into Sternberg’s video, Pal told the squatters he was ready to take matters into his own hands. "You just have to deal with me now because what I’m saying is, it’s person to person…. And you know what? If it’s gonna get dirty, it’s gonna get dirty. I don’t care. Because you know what? That’s the way it’s gonna be, because this is what I need. I need to have it. I don’t have any lawyer. I can’t afford a damn lawyer. So it’s gonna be me and you. One to one. Man to man."

Pal eventually left the property after the police arrived, but the two younger men, Salvador and Ryan, spent the night upstairs. "[Pal] had them stay there because they thought the people downstairs would squat the upstairs," Frank says. "He wanted to protect the house." Frank, who says he was concerned that Pal would try to evict him with everyone else, initially didn’t protest the presence of the two young men.

The next day, at Frank’s request, Pal told Salvador and Ryan to leave, and for the two weeks that followed, Pal didn’t return to the house. The new group of squatters expected to see him Feb. 28, the date set for a case hearing called by Pal’s lawyer prior to the re-occupation of the house. If the defendants didn’t show up, a default judgment could have been entered, granting Pal his request to have the squatters removed and ordered to pay $2,000 per month in back rent. The squatters showed up for court, but Pal’s side hadn’t filed the necessary paperwork to hold the hearing.

Once again the house hung in legal limbo and the day after the hearing, the remaining people upstairs moved out as agreed. Frank says Pal called him while he was at work that afternoon to make sure they were gone. For the first time in 11 years, the upper apartment was empty, waiting for either Pal or the other squatters to seize it.

But someone was committed to preventing that from happening. The night after the people upstairs moved out, at around 3:15 a.m., the squatters downstairs awoke to fire creeping through the floorboards above them.

"Both of the doors upstairs were locked," Sternberg says. "We broke through one of the doors and threw buckets of water on the flames."

After the fire department extinguished the blaze, the squatters called the police to have an investigator search the scene. "It appears that unknown suspects entered the house through unknown means, and then set three fires in an attempt to burn the house," the police report states. According to the report, all three fires were set in the upstairs apartment; two burned out before the fire department arrived. Officer Vincent Chen found two used matches in the bathroom, where the wood around the sink had been burned, and a gas can hidden in the bushes on the east side of the house.

When I first met Sternberg, he told me the Oakland Police Department’s arson investigator, Barry Donelan, was helpful. Two and a half months after the fire, however, Sternberg says: "I regret having talked to the police."

Initially, Donelan didn’t know they were squatters — Sternberg had told him they owned the house. "Once he found flyers for a fundraiser to defend the squat, he became angry," says Sternberg. "He said he submitted the case to the district attorney, and didn’t expect anyone would be arrested."

Sternberg says Donelan also threatened to have him arrested for a traffic-related warrant and that he would turn Sternberg’s name over to the Federal Communications Commission, which had an open investigation on the house for hosting Berkeley Liberation Radio. In March, Donelan told us he wouldn’t comment on the case and at press time, he hadn’t return Guardian calls about the status of the investigation.

EPILOGUE


Although the arson may never be solved, the squatters have strong suspicions about who was behind the fire. But they have a hard time deciding who, ultimately, is most culpable for the blaze. "No one involved in Hellarity is innocent, and no one is completely guilty," says DiCaprio. The one point of view everyone seems to share is that Hellarity has long been a tinderbox of contention, in which property owners struggling in a beleaguered housing market faced off against a group of people who reject the market outright for its inaccessibility to low-income people. Eventually, it all literally — burst into flames.

When I visit after the fire, people are sitting outside playing guitar, smoking rolled cigarettes, and singing the timeless hobo ballad, "Big Rock Candy Mountain." The sounds drift over the budding vegetable gardens and into the downstairs living room, where a message written on a big green chalkboard suggests that if the fire was intended to drive people out, it was unsuccessful: "WELCOME BACK TO HELL(ARITY). Because bosses, landlords, and capitalists suck, the house has lots of repairs that need to be done before it becomes fully livable."

Upstairs, Sternberg looks up at a charred, gaping hole in the ceiling. "We have to make lemonade out of lemons," he tells me, explaining that they just got a skylight to fill the cavity. "We’re going to continue fighting just like we’ve been fighting. This guy [Pal] has been in court with us for three years. He’s got no case." *

Band together for 21 Grand

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› kimberly@sfbg.com

SONIC REDUCER "Fuck New York. I can stick it out longer. I’ve got a masochistic streak!"

Cue divine, mad laughter. No, this isn’t a disgruntled renter pushed out by another owner move-in or a painter or sculptor resisting the draw of the trad national marketplace — the speaker is Sarah Lockhart, who runs 21 Grand, the jeopardized arts nonprofit and music space around the corner from the Mama Buzz Café, Johansson Projects, and other galleries participating in the insanely popular monthly Art Murmur walk set in what has become the grassroots-art epicenter of Oakland and the East Bay at large.

Going on seven and a half years downtown, Lockhart has been toiling in the trenches of ambitious music and arts programming longer than most. But in the past few weeks she and partner Darren Jenkins have had to close the doors and move shows after a troubling visit by the Alcohol Beverage Action Team, a unit of the Oakland Police Department that also ushered in the closure of underground music venues like the French Fry Factory and Oaklandish. "My thing is to work on this and fight it," the ever-feisty Lockhart continues. "We’re actually going to stay open and maybe provide inspiration for others. I want to have at least 10 years, because Tonic in New York City closed — they lasted nine years — but we’re still here." She chuckles, contemputf8g her tenacity and the vaunted East Coast experimental music club, which closed in April. "I get competitive about weird things! No money, lots of work — let’s see how long it takes before I totally burn out. This is our form of an endurance test."

Consider their current gauntlet the latest in the uncanny, imaginative struggle to provide a place for visual artists, film and video makers, poets, and, notably, musicians — working in every esoteric, noisy, experimental, rockish, improvy, and otherwise unclassifiable stripe — to show, speak, or sound out. Some of the best live music shows I caught in 2007 were at their space: Marnie Stern, the Gowns, the High Places, Lucky Dragons, and Breezy Days Band, which made the programming there the best in Oakland, if not in the running for tops in the Bay. Lockhart and Jenkins have survived nightmare landlords and condo push-outs — first at 21 Grand Avenue, then on 23rd Street — but this new challenge has to be their most frustratingly Kafkaesque.

On Dec. 1, ABAT officials were looking into Shashamane Bar and Grill, whose kitchen door shares the alley entrance with 21 Grand. The latter was closing for the night after a performance. Recycling buckets with empty beer bottles, a tip jar, and a cooler led one of the visitors to give Lockhart a card, saying, she recalls, "We don’t want you to have any problems in the future." Lockhart was alarmed enough to put a halt to most of December’s shows, explaining, "I’m 33 years old. I feel like I’m too old to risk horrible fines from the department and have to call my mother and say, ‘I have a fine for $10,000 — can you lend me money?’ That’s how things began, and then the ball started rolling and things started escautf8g."

It wasn’t enough for Lockhart to simply apply for a cabaret license; she had to navigate a bureaucratic maze of Byzantine proportions while she attempted to get special-event permits from the police in order to continue to put on a few larger shows by artists like Zeena Parkins and Eugene Chadbourne, which led to efforts to get approval from the fire and building departments. "For all they know, we’re a large firetrap that has raves for 4,000 people, so they weren’t signing off on anything," says the exasperated Lockhart, who recently put in 40 to 70 hours of footwork on paperwork and approvals. The nonprofit has been organizing shows for years using grants from the city, but 21 Grand’s hard-to-define, multidisciplinary programming has puzzled bureaucrats.

Still, the onetime Artists’ Television Access programmer is hoping that the few helpful city officials she’s encountered, who are familiar with the closure of spaces like Oakland Metro, can help the nonprofit. Lockhart wants to resume shows next month beginning with a Tom Carter and David Daniell performance Jan. 10, and in the meantime she’s trying to maintain a sense of humor: "the irony is not lost" on her that their recent fundraiser had to be moved to someone’s home and that new legislation allowing the Fox Theatre to be redeveloped as a live-entertainment venue within 300 feet of a school, library, or church might help 21 Grand, which has had its share of developer travails, to get a cabaret permit for their present spot near a Presbyterian church.

Going the private-club route like the 924 Gilman Street Project or heading underground isn’t an option. "Our goal is to have 21 Grand actually have a public presence," Lockhart says. "I want to do something that’s advertised and open to the public so a kid in bumfuck nowhere can see something about it and say, ‘This is cool. I’ll go to this.’ " *

RAPPING DAY

DARONDO


The onetime Bay Area soul-funk-blues cult legend rolls into town — though not in his mythical ivory Rolls. With Nino Moschella and Wallpaper. Wed/19, 8 p.m., $10. Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell, SF. www.rickshawstop.com

CHARLIE HUNTER


Welcome back the ex-Bay guitar-picking virtuoso as he plays with keyboarist Erik Deutsch and drummer Scott Amendola, and sit back and marvel alongside an audience of hotshots like Kirk Hammett. Wed/19–Sat/22, 8 and 10 p.m.; Sun/23, 7 and 9 p.m.; $16–$24. Yoshi’s, 510 Embarcadero West, Oakl. www.yoshis.com

MOTHER HIPS


The proudly hippie group reassembles — surf or no surf — for butt-shaking holiday sets. Fri/21–Sat/22, 9 p.m., $20. Great American Music Hall, 859 O’Farrell, SF. www.gamh.com

ASCENDED MASTER


Take a hit off the bongos of this local experimento-psych combo. With Top Critters and NVH. Sat/22, 9:30 p.m., $6. Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk, SF. www.hemlocktavern.com

Missing person: have you seen Mandy Stokes?

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Getting the word out for a friend whose cousin has been missing for 2 weeks:

Alicia Amanda Stokes, who goes by Mandy, is 33 years old, 5’4″ with blonde hair and green eyes. She was last seen on Sunday, November 25 at her home in Oakland. Her car was found abandoned containing her wallet and cell phone at 5000 Park Blvd, one freeway exit away from her home. If you have any information that could lead to Mandy’s safe
return home to her family, please call 404-931-7044 or 702-318-1590 or the Oakland Police Department who is investigating her case.

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