Feature Archives

On Black Friday 2014, following the grand jury announcement it would not recommend indicting police officer Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, fourteen Black activists chained themselves together on a BART transit platform “to prevent trains from moving at the West Oakland station, in response to the seemingly unending war against Black communities.” District Attorney Nancy O'Malley and BART pursued criminal charges and originally $70,000 in restitution. Now, after a year-long campaign by the Black Friday 14 and a broad coalition of allies, the DA has dropped all the charges.

San Francisco police murdered another African American man in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood on December 2. At least five police officers surrounded Woods on a sidewalk and proceeded to shoot him over fifteen times. Three different videos of the killing, taken with cellphone cameras, were made public. The videos spread widely, triggering protests and a fiery town hall meeting. A federal civil rights lawsuit has been filed on behalf of Mario's family. Another protest has been called for December 18 downtown.

In September 2003, Lakota Sioux Richard Iron Cloud and Armando Black Bear, novice swimmers from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation near the Badlands of South Dakota, swam from Alcatraz Island to the San Francisco shore in the first PATHSTAR Alcatraz swim. That tradition continued on Oct. 19, 2015, when Native Americans made the crossing from the “Rock” to San Francisco to conclude this year’s annual PATHSTAR Alcatraz Swim Week.

Before dawn on November 15th, about 700 cars showed up to an “LA to the Bay” sideshow in East Oakland. An OPD patrol car was smashed as those gathered chanted, "Fuck the Police!" Later that same day, responding to another sideshow just after dark at about 5:30pm, Oakland police were in the process of impounding several motorcycles when they killed Richard Perkins near 90th and Bancroft Avenues in East Oakland. The killing has been protested with a student walk-out and march from Fruitvale BART.

Eleven people who were clubbed, teargassed, slammed to the ground, shot with impact munitions or groundlessly arrested by the police during a December 6, 2014, Berkeley demonstration filed a civil rights lawsuit against the City of Berkeley, then-City Manager Christine Daniel, Chief Michael Meehan, the City of Hayward, and Berkeley and Hayward officers in federal court on November 23, 2015. The plaintiffs include journalists who were covering the demonstration, as well as demonstrators.

Led by those inside California prisons, who often put their lives on the line, a settlement was reached on September 1 in the federal class action Ashker v. Governor of California that will mostly end indeterminate, long-term solitary confinement in all California state prisons. Subject to court approval, the agreement will result in a dramatic reduction in the number of people in solitary across the state and a new program that could be a model for other states going forward. Over a thousand people are set to make it out of Security Housing Units (SHU).

August 27 marked the sixth officer-involved shooting by Oakland police in 2015, and the fourth resulting in death. This does not count Richard Linyard, who police claim suffocated to death after he squeezed himself between two buildings during a police chase. All of OPD's victims this year have been of African descent. The victim was Yonas Alehegne and it's been reported that he was homeless and an immigrant, possibly from West Africa.