Update on Fruitvale BART Protest

Adrienne Maree Brown

Update on Fruitvale BART Protest

As I write this there are no less than 6 helicopters circling overhead in downtown Oakland. On the first day of the 10th year since Amadou Diallo was brutally gunned down by police in New York City, Oscar Grant was fatally shot in the back by a BART police officer, and the event was caught on video.

As I write this, rumors are flying and media is fanning the riot flames - car and trash fires, police in riot gear and tanks, restaurant windows being smashed, tear gas and rubber bullets being used. We won't know the full picture till the night is over and the smoke clears, but the story of the successful nonviolent protest earlier this evening has been overshadowed by this angry chaos.

What is absolutely clear is that folks are furious about the murder of Oscar Grant, furious that a week has passed with no statement or acknowledgment of what happened. What is clear is that we currently don't have community accountability over our police here in Oakland. In this bubble of progress we are hampered by the same brutal power dynamics that plague the rest of the nation. Racially driven policing that allows the use of lethal weapons in the pursuit of justice is a failed model.

What we need:

- we need police to be accountable when they participate in brutality against us. In this situation, BART police should have issued a statement acknowledging what we all saw, including an apology from Johannes Mehserle, the officer who pulled his gun and shot Grant in the back. There also needs to be a transparent process for the officers involved to be charged and held accountable for what happened. Otherwise, this is just another brick in the wall between police and the communities they are paid to protect.

- we need community justice processes that allow us to address moments of tension and unrest without the lethal presence of police. In Detroit, Ron Scott and others are working actively on Peace Zones, where the community comes together to assess community crises and mete out restorative steps for the guilty party. They are not the only ones piloting this model.

- In addition, if police hope to gain our respect and trust in their process, they need to commit to disarming themselves of lethal weapons immediately, and learn the skills of negotiation and community engagement. There is a BART board meeting TOMORROW Thursday, Jan. 8, 9 a.m., at the Kaiser Center, Third Floor - they need to hear our voices.

- We need ongoing supported focus on police brutality and accountability, even as we develop our own peace zones. It's no longer sufficient to get furious when a civilian is killed by police, and maintain that fury until the officers are acquitted or resign. For the past 10 years it has been nearly impossible to get sustained support for this kind of work from the foundation world, so as organizers we have to sustain this work in other more community-based ways. I definitely want to shout out The Gathering, who have picked up this unpopular issue as it relates to juvenile justice, with the commitment of Harry Belafonte - they are joining the Oakland community for actions next week. I have also heard that Uhuru will be hosting a meeting tomorrow evening to discuss accountability and healing.

- we need to express our gratitude to groups like Community Justice Network for Youth (CJNY), who identified the gaping hole that exists in the non-profit and organizing community of Oakland in terms of police accountability work. CJNY stepped up in a major way for today's nonviolent action, but they can't maintain this effort on their own. Bay Area groups who focus their work on young people of color, this political moment needs you.

- And I know I am biased by the perspective of working at The Ruckus Society, but we need to engage in the deep training and skill development around pulling off large scale strategic direct actions. There are ways to pull together mass actions in a short time period that gain media, build the power of our positions, and help the community to see and understand the situation and how they can get involved. Over the past few months organizers from directly impacted communities - Bay Area immigrant youth and a multi-racial LGBTQ coalition - have successfully shut down the ICE headquarters building and protested Prop 8 in downtown San Francisco using affinity groups, action teams, brilliant blockading tactics, and police and media liaisons. Those actions were planned and pulled off in VERY short amounts of time, and Ruckus is definitely not the only group that does this sort of skill building. Most importantly, in terms of tonight's events, there are also ways to de-escalate situations, even when people who aren't directly impacted by oppression start losing their composure.

We know how to do this, and must apply that knowledge, or risk losing all credibility in terms of our demands for peace.

At this moment, as Mayor Ron Dellums meets with protesters, and the Oakland Police Department hold a long overdue press conference, we must not sink to the reactive and chaotic level of Officer Mehserle. This is our moment to unite behind a nonviolent call for transparency, accountability and justice from Oakland Police Department. We must model the community we wish to be.

Posted at 8:38 PM, Jan 07, 2009 in Police | Permalink | View Comments

Comments

Adrienne, thank-you for your update and your knowledge of supportive groups. As a member of the Oakland community, I share the frustrations associated with our police force. I can not stress the importance of your last sentence so eloquently written: "we must not sink to the reactive and chaotic level of Officer Mehserle. This is our moment to unite behind a nonviolent call for transparency, accountability and justice from Oakland Police Department. We must model the community we wish to be."

Thank you for offering solutions and not just complaints, and that's not to criticize people who voice complaints because I'm one of them. It's just that the problem usually seems so overwhelming, so deep in the bones of our society, that it's hard to pull away and say "this is what we need to do to solve this problem."

Thanks to YouTube, it was obviously not just rumor. I'm not in California, however, and so found out via Twitter about the protest turning violent. I saw stories later that mentioned most of the protesters were not violent, but that information gets lost in the spectacle of it all.

I deplore the violence and hope the silver lining here is that more people will realize this is not a "California" problem, but a national issue. We've got the Adolph Grimes case here in New Orleans, and I just read about a Texas case. We saw what happened in NYC with the Sean Bell case, not to mention a longer history of such cases. And yet, there are still people who don't get that this is more than a cops and robbers narrative.

I've added your post as a link to my post that includes other coverage of this story at http://tinyurl.com/7k2mef

Stop the riots and get a job.

I think we need to be careful about how we're using the world violence here. It's awful and indicative that a lack of good options were available to channel rage strategically that the property of citizens and locally-owned stores were vandalized, but using the word "violence" is problematic.

If we call this violence, it equates it with the violence of police murder or even police violence against demonstrators.

I don't necessarily have a problem with the police cruiser that got vandalized and I do have a problem with the vandalizing of a hair salon, but I don't think we can call this violence. Violence indicates a systematic program of institutionally-backed attacks on our communities. If we use that word to refer to boneheaded vandalism carried out in the heat of the moment in a time of justified rage, we risk descending into an argument where we lose sight that the violence of the police is the real issue here. And we can do things like come together after this sort of vandalism to repair windows and businesses. We can't simply repair the lives lost to actual violence by the police.

I definitely support the call for clear avenues of expression of rage in various forms that are effective at winning change.

I really appreciate this post - the dearth of MSM coverage of this has been maddening.

Still, what troubles me more than the shooting of this restrained person is the "Taser" defense. Does that mean it is seriously okay to murder someone (who has a cop's knee on their neck) if their only intention was to TORTURE them with electricity?

What?

We must model the community we wish to be.
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I try and live by this.

Thank you for saying this.

This was a large scale direct action with little to no time planning involved, one that involved no violence whatsoever, one that brought the story to a national/intn'l attention in minutes. There are times when community organizations help build movements and there are times when they are the policemen of movements. Let us not force every action into a box of either good/bad, condemning what we can't control. The commnunity I want to be is one that doesn't allow their members to get killed by pigs and then walked all over; the community I want to be stands up and fights back.

Yes, thank you Adrienne Maree Brown,

And it is constructive. Are you aware of the shooting of Annette Garcia in Riverside county on January 21, 2009?

Are you aware of the statements of John Burris in his first public video interview regarding Oscar Grants shooting? He basically appeared to support the tazer defense. It is completely possible that this event is theatre designed to create precedent that allows police to shoot citizens and not see punishment. The video of the shooting not only documents that, but also create opportunity for pretend surprise to be documented which Burris comments on. Collusion of this type does exist between attorneys, law enforcement and courts over long periods of time and the public needs to understand how. Longer than the average public can remember and act accordingly to protect the slowly eroding rights. It can be completely unconscious and still serve exactly as the puppetmasters intend.
Corporatism has created behaviors that law enforcement is designated to address with violence and incarceration. Corporations have been given the right to lie since 1895. Courts did that. The lies extend to the corruption of communities and families with drugs and alcohol by glorification of lifestyles that dehumanize. The FCC did nothing despite massive public complaint in the 1970's and '80's against the uses of TV for this.
Ever hear of "semiotics"? It is the science of the meanings of symbols. Since 1980 degrees have been given to people who went into; public relations, advertising and film/video production as writers and consultants. The family is eroded spiritually by this and the result is a population that can be used as an excuse for fear and isolation of community from itself. No unity, no ability to use democracy.
My point. We humans need to create ways to influence our own behaviors and correct what corporatism has created. Our human family used to have this through the natural spirituality of tribes and clans that used hypnosis to teach the unconscious mind directly.
If we do not reclaim our natural right to teach and heal ourselves as people we will be slaves. Thousands of years of oppression has been applied to humanity to remove this knowledge so one part of a population can be made fearful of the other whereupon they are taxed to provide funds to control the other part they fear. We witness this as we descend into corporate created anarchy that is controlled by unconscious forces.
I have developed a method where we can begin to reclaim our control over ourselves. Of course courts deny justice in my efforts to see a California county follow state laws, CHS 1370.4, which compel municipalities benefitting from state health plans to work with the public in the development of investigational and experimental treatments. Accordingly this is an area where THEY ARE WRONG, not us the people. If we do unite to see that this is done, and done well, we descend into social chaos where the average human is no more than a slave without rights and freedoms degrading our human existence.
My page on this treatment. http://algoxy.com/psych/thetreatment.html

Peace, love and understanding to all,

Christopher A. Brown