The Coup featuring Boots Riley – What the Po-Pos Hate

This is that shit that the po-po’s hate
When we talkin’ to our folks and they love and relate

This morning, Laleh Behbehanian of Occupy Oakland’s Antirepression Crew appeared on KPFA Letters and Politics [segment begins at 00:39:25] to discuss the latest tactics used by the Oakland Police Department against OO. She neatly tied together a lot of loose threads that I have been following for the past couple of weeks and have mentioned in a couple of recent diaries.

Laleh is one of our devoted comrades who goes to arraignments, secures bail and keeps hope alive for occupiers who have been jailed. She said that OPD has conducted police raids almost nightly for the past two weeks and has arrested “dozens and dozens of people on bogus, conflated charges” with high bail – but these charges never end up being filed in court. Police are particularly fond of raiding on Friday nights so that they can arrest and hold people over the weekend, since arraignments don’t happen until Monday or Tuesday. Over and over again, Laleh and other volunteers sit in court all day, only to discover that no charges have been filed by the DA.

As Laleh says: Read the rest of this entry →

Last night OPD raided Oscar Grant Plaza again, bringing at least 17 cruisers and 40 to 50 cops in riot gear. I am still trying to get the details but this is what I know so far:

12 to 14 arrests were made; our NLG attorney says that all but two of those people are apparently being charged with obstruction. Two have more serious charges, at least one involving possession. On OakFoSho/Spencer’s video above, one of them yells out that the police have planted ecstacy on him. These two people – both African-American men who have been arrested previously at OO – are a couple of the more visible and outspoken occupiers and clearly were targeted. None of us who have spent hours and hours with them over the past three months has ever seen them using drugs. I find this incredibly suspicious.

The person you see on the KTVU video below is another regular who says that he just showed up with his camera and thus had not been doing whatever illegal thing the occupiers before had supposedly been doing. He is arrested in short order even though he says he was following police instructions to move back.

http://www.ktvu.com/videos/news/oakland-occupy-protesters-arrested-in/vFgyB/

According to a Facebook account from one of the occupiers of the Interfaith tent:

Police in riot gear advanced and gave no order to disperse, no warning and no explanation of what was happening.

People were told to move or be arrested.

The two African-American men I mentioned above had crossed the street but police went after them anyway. Read the rest of this entry →

Police raided the latest Occupy Oakland encampment in West Oakland this evening around 5 PM. Occupiers were handcuffed, led out of the fenced camp, then cited and released. The bleak dirt lot they chose for the camp had been unused for a decade. Occupiers had researched tax records and had been unable to determine who owned the lot. OPD says the owners – who bought the property at auction in 2006 – came forward and asked that occupiers be removed.

The first tents had gone up on December 22. Occupiers had been enforcing a strict no-alcohol/no noise policy in the camp and doing neighborhood outreach,  even though the area is almost completely industrial. A total of about 20 people were quietly occupying this tiny patch of no-man’s-land and, as usual, feeding and sheltering the hungry and homeless. Approximately 25 members of Oakland’s thinly-stretched police force were dispatched to handle this insurrection. As well, numerous officers are always available to routinely harass the handful of people who are keeping up a vigil at Oscar Grant Plaza, where members of the Interfaith Group have traded in their tent for a beach umbrella (which has also been deemed an illegal structure). Read the rest of this entry →

From Occupy Berkeley‘s Facebook page:

Occupy Berkeley received notice that we are going to be evicted tonight. We are asking for all willing bodies to come out and support us in our time of need. We will be updating this page regularly and be posting updates during the eviction. BPD said they would began to enforce the no camping policy of Pro Bono/MLK Park. Share the message.

I don’t have any details just yet beyond that FB post. The situation has obviously escalated in the week since Berkeley City Councilman Jesse Arreguin handed out a letter to Occupy Berkeley last Wednesday that included a Zero Tolerance Policy and increased enforcement of every law except actual removal of the encampment, which would only be considered as a last resort:

Some people have asked why, if there has have been so many problems, doesn’t the City just remove the encampment?

Immediate physical removal of the encampment is not a viable option at this time. Given that Berkeley’s Occupy encampment is one of the last major encampments in the Bay Area, all eyes are now on Berkeley to see what we will do. We have seen how other cities have responded to encampments. Oakland, for example, has had a series of police actions to remove encampments after the initial eviction that involved excessive use of force. Oakland and San Francisco’s removal of their encampments only emboldened the occupiers to set up more camps and to occupy space even longer, complicating any resolution and increasing costs. Read the rest of this entry →

UPDATE: This was Oakland’s 101st homicide of 2011. That information comes via this Open Letter to OO From OPD. Good luck following their logic.

At about 5 PM this evening, a man was shot and killed in the plaza near the Occupy Oakland encampment. There were numerous witnesses who saw the man involved in a fight with several other men and then saw him get shot in the head. Medics from the camp rushed to his aid and attempted to resuscitate him before police and paramedics arrived, and other occupiers shielded the man from people and helped with crowd control. The gunman and the others scattered and are still at large. The most accurate account seems to be that although some people knew the men, they were not part of the camp. The comment in the video about the fight being “over a bag of weed” may or may not be true.

What was going to be a 30-day birthday party this evening for the encampment has now become a vigil for this latest young African-American victim of Oakland gun violence, whose name has yet to be released. I wasn’t there but I’ve been talking to people who say that it was a horrific and traumatic scene; occupiers who were  awaiting another rumored police raid were already filled with anxiety and dread. Read the rest of this entry →