Feature Archives

On Tuesday, January 15th, hundreds of community activists from groups including Stop the Injunctions Coalition and Justice for Alan Blueford gathered at Oakland's City Council Public Safety Committee meeting to protest Oakland's plans to hire former NYPD and LAPD police chief William Bratton as a consultant to the OPD. Bratton is well known for the implementation of aggressive policing tactics known as "zero tolerance" policy which applies aggressive policing tactics such as New York's infamous "stop and frisk" to target minor infractions within the city. Even though the public safety meeting was well attended by those opposed to the contract, the committee voted unanimously to recommend that the city council vote on the proposal.

For the second New Year's Eve in a row, nearly two hundred people chose to forgo traditional evening indoor parties and instead demonstrated in the streets of Oakland against the racist prison industrial complex. After a noisy march with a sound system, a symbolic attack was made against the North County jail by a barrage of fireworks shot high into the air towards the jailhouse walls. Participants marched back to the plaza in time for the midnight count down to 2013, right in the middle of the intersection of 14th & Broadway.

Family and friends remembered Oscar Grant during a January 1st, 2013 vigil at the Fruitvale BART Station where his life was taken New Year's Day 2009. Four years after his murder by BART police officer Johannes Mehserle, Oakland has not forgotten Grant. Over 150 people came out in Grant's memory.

On October 30, the family of Derrick Gaines, the 15 year old who was shot and killed by South San Francisco Police Department officer Joshua Cabillo, filed a federal civil rights action against the City of South San Francisco. Family members, who are seeking $10 million in damages, hired Attorney John Burris to represent them in the wrongful death action. Burris says, "This is a clear case of racial profiling that lead to disastrous results."

Darwin Bond-Graham writes: "All summer long the slaying of teenager Alan Blueford by a police officer festered in the city of Oakland, a metropolis already stained by its troubled police department which for nearly ten years has been spiraling toward federal receivership due to its institutionalized culture of brutality and misconduct. It was no surprise then that the first meeting of the City Council [September 18], in its new session after the Summer recess, was met by over one hundred outraged protesters and the family of the young man whose death at the hands of OPD frustratingly remains a mystery, with all known facts indicating an unjustifiable murder."

On August 19th, the Idriss Stelley Foundation (ISF) and the Kenneth Harding Jr. Foundation teamed up with POOR Magazine and Peoples Community Medics for a day of solidarity in Bayview/Hunter's Point in order to bring attention to the police accountability movement. Idriss Stelley was murdered by the SFPD at the Sony Metreon Theater on June 12th, 2001 at only 23-years-old. Stelley's mother, Mesha Monge-Irizarry, an activist before her son's killing, has become one of the leading figures in the police accountability movement.

A well-known anti-Muslim group known as "The American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI)" began running Islamophobic ads on ten San Francisco buses. The ads read: "In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad." After MUNI announced that it would not remove the ads, local artists took matters into their own hands and began modifiying the ads. Several now read: "In any war between the colonizer and the colonized, support the oppressed. Support the Palestinian right of return. Defeat racism."