Feature Archives

Terrie Best of San Diego Americans for Safe Access writes: On March 1, the prosecution began its case against John Mazula, who was being charged with manufacturing medical cannabis concentrates. The case came down to whether the process John used to extract cannabis concentrate made use of butane gas or not. Without hesitation each juror at the table one-by-one pronounced John not guilty. Then they discussed why. The jurors blamed the police. They knew the case was poorly put together with no evidence to convict John.

Since August 2015 the residents of Midtown Park apartments in the Fillmore district have been on a rent strike. Theirs is the largest rent strike in San Francisco since 1978. The residents are fighting the city who claims to own the property, they are fighting the non-profit Mercy Housing California who manages the property, and they are fighting the larger forces of displacement that have left only 5.8% black population in the city.

With the hope of nudging the city forward toward making good on its months-old public promise to initiate permanent investment in the Beach Flats Community Garden, and under imminent threat of legal proceedings against them, on February 16 the gardeners of Beach Flats decided to sign a city letter acquiescing to temporarily leaving the garden plots they have tended so carefully over the past two decades.

This month the downtown post office in Santa Cruz was cleared by police of what had been a large and regular presence of sleepers at night. The post office had been used as shelter for 6-12 people a night for some time. A homeless man who was sleeping outside of Bookshop Santa Cruz and cited with two other sleepers for trespassing this month said he thought the police were ticketing at increased rate recently to get homeless people to move along before the next rains arrived.

Norman “Wounded Knee” DeOcampo (Miwok), a long-time resident of Vallejo, will be taking part in the Longest Walk 5 beginning February 13 at La Jolla Shores in San Diego, California. Wounded Knee is the Founding Executive Director of the Vallejo based organization Sacred Sites Protection and Rights of Indigenous Tribes. (SSPRIT). He is the only person who will have participated in all five Longest Walks.

On February 9, hundreds of people marched through downtown Santa Cruz from the Beach Flats Community Garden to the City Council meeting. Gardeners, along with a large coalition of supporters, are seeking a creative solution to preserve twenty five years of cultivating food and culture in the heart of the Beach Flats.

Freedom Sleepers writes: Beginning last July 4th, advocates for people experiencing homelessness have been working to directly address the criminalization of homelessness and for the repeal of the city’s camping/sleeping ban. Activists have been consistent in their position that ordinances prohibiting and criminalizing lying, sitting, and sleeping in public are unconstitutional and such laws pose a grave danger of being selectively enforced against an entire class of people. In August, this position found unexpected support from the Obama Administration.