Social Factory Ateneo 10-25-14
Compañerxs,
We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, October 25th from 2 - 5 p.m. at Obelisco (3411 E 12th St Ste 110; Oakland, CA 94601; b/t 35th Ave & 34th Ave close to Fruitvale BART) to continue our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below. The space is fully accessible and we can share and support childcare.
On September 29, 2014 US Attorney General Eric Holder and Congresswoman Barbara Lee announced in simultaneous press conferences the inauguration of the Violence Reduction Network, a new Department of Justice anti-violence project aimed at five U.S. cities—Oakland and Richmond (California), Chicago (Illinois), Detroit (Michigan), Wilmington (Delaware) and Camden (New Jersey). Despite a well-documented steady decrease in crime rates nationally over the past decade, Holder asserted that “too many U.S. cities are inundated with poverty, unemployment and an overall lack of opportunity that can often ‘trap people in lives of crime and incarceration.’ ” To this end, the Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) has allocated $124 million to cities across the US, including a $1.8 million federal grant to Oakland to hire an additional fifteen police officers. Outside of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building in downtown Oakland, Barbara Lee stated her commitment to “get guns off the street” and “invest in community programs” by providing greater access to federal resources as part of a concentrated crime-fighting strategy that highlights increased use of technology, specialized regional training, “smart policing,” and “evidence based policing strategies,” as well as the development of enhanced prosecution strategies at both the local and federal level. (See Lena Dakessean, “Oakland to participate in national program to curb violence”).
At the same time, in a federal courtroom just above the press conference, the family of Asa Sullivan listened to testimony in a month long case that they had fought for eight years to bring to court. Asa Sullivan was killed in 2006 when several SFPD officers entered the Parkmerced residence where Asa was staying without a warrant. In response to a neighbor that suspected the residence was a “drug house,” the officers entered and pursued Asa once in the residence. Officers Michelle Alvis and John Keesor shot Asa seventeen times in an attic crawlspace. (See Kahlil Sullivan, "In that attic I saw my brother’s blood covering the floor and walls.")
The morning’s witnesses included SFPD Officer Yukio “Chris” Oshita, who had been at the Parkmerced residence that evening and described for the court how the SFPD enters a building: “When clearing an attic or a room, you want to do it as quickly as possible. The attic needed to be cleared. That’s what we are trained to do.” (9th Circuit Court room testimony, Officer Oshita, September 29, 2014). Oshita's testimony was followed by Alexander Jason, a ballistics and blood spatter expert who commented on enlarged photographs that were repeatedly displayed before the court with the family present exposing Asa’s lifeless body slumped in the attic, his long, carefully braided hair soaked in his own blood. As one of several expert witness for the defense, Jason was hired and paid over $100,000 by the SFPD legal team to defend the officers who assassinated Asa. The SFPD legal team argued Asa's death was “suicide by cop.”
While the jury determined after short deliberation that there was no grounds for wrongful death or any compensation for the family’s loss, the eight year struggle for justice waged by his mother Kat Espinosa, and the mother of Little Asa, Nicole Guerrero, and Asa's brother Kahlil, is one marked by profound moments of resilience. The 2006 police killing of Asa provoked a number of responses from the community over the eight year period. Through the support of institutions like Idriss Stelley Foundation, the SF BayView newspaper, and others a number of protests and collaborative resistances emerged, including online organizing networks and spaces for grieving and remembering Asa, as well as editorials in local papers along side ongoing investigative moments. The sustained efforts of the family and community insured that the details of Asa’s story could emerge and the police responsible for killing Asa be made to account for their actions. This resistance revealed much about policing and the intricate strategies of the state to deny any responsibility for police violence. Thus, the spaces inside and outside the court room became moments of intense learning and gave rise to a number of creative, autonomous moments of mutual support from within the social factory, or the community that claims Asa and his family.
In this same political moment, on September 30th families, community members, and media groups in Salinas were able to successfully pressure the Salinas police department to release the names of the officers involved in the deadly law enforcement shootings between March 20th to July 10th of 2014 of four Latino men: Angel Ruiz, Osman Hernandez, Carlos Meija-Gomez, and Frank Miguel Alvarado. The shooting deaths in Salinas involved nine Salinas Police Department officers: Sergeant Mark Lazzarini, Officer Daniel DeBorde, and Officer William Yetter who killed Ruiz; Sergeant George Lauricella and Officer Derek Gibson who killed Hernandez; Sergeant Danny Warner and Officer Josh Lynd who killed Meija-Gomez, and Sergeant Brian Johnson and Officer Scott Sutton who killed Alvarado. (See Monterey County Police News, "Salinas Police Release Names of Officers Who Killed Residents in 2014"). In a context where officer conduct has become increasingly less transparent, particularly since the Copley Press ruling of 2006, community pressure and legal actions pressed forward by families have become one of the most effective ways to insure that Departments are not able to function in secrecy and shielded from public scrutiny (see Ali Winston, “Copley v. Account-ability”).
Further north, in Santa Rosa, the family of Andy Lopez and the Justice Coalition formed in response to the killing of Andy by Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Erick Gelhaus on October 22, 2013, organized ten days of actions, including spaces for collective grieving, a community potluck, and a sunset vigil. The family and community also demanded the removal of Deputy Gelhaus from patrol duty.
In San Francisco, struggles intensified in response to three police killings in less than seven months. On August 22, a vibrant march from the site of the murder of Alex Nieto in Bernal Hill Park to the Federal Building marked the filing of another family’s federal civil rights lawsuit against the City and County of San Francisco and in this case, Police Chief Greg Suhr, and unnamed police officers “DOES” 1 -50. Refugio and Elvira Nieto are now entering the court process in response to the killing of their son, Alex Nieto, who was shot over fourteen times by the SFPD on March 21st, 2014. On September 25, Giovany Contreras-Sandoval of San Rafael was killed in the city’s Financial District after being shot six times by six SFPD officers. The incident is currently under investigation. On October 14th a vigil was held for O'Shaine Evans who was shot and killed by San Francisco Police Officer David Goff on October 7th. According to media reports, Goff and other officers were engaged in surveillance and “crime suppression” when they encountered a group of young men one of whom allegedly brandished a gun. According community reports, Goff, claiming to be on “security patrol,” approached a car in plain clothes where Evans and two other young men were sitting. At some point, Goff fired into the vehicle, killing O’Shaine and wounding another passenger, while a third ran and was later arrested. (KTVU News, “One killed in San Francisco officer involved shooting”). O’Shaine’s large extended Jamaican American family including his brother and sister, mother, elders, younger people, and children were at the vigil. The Idriss Stelley Foundation and the Inter Council for Mothers of Murdered Children were in attendance as well. Those present noted a white security truck parked across the street from the solemn gathering. Information was exchanged that the other young man who had been shot had been taken to the hospital and no one, not even his family has been able to see him. As of the time of the vigil, they did not know whether he was dead or alive. The third young man present at the time had also been held for questions. Community members at the vigil learned from O’Shaine’s family, and to the great distress of his mother, that after more than a week since the killing, O’Shaine’s body has still not yet been released. The day after the vigil for O’Shaine, the Justice and Love for Alex Nieto campaign announced “Autopsy report proves Alex Nieto was shot with his hands up!” and called for two days of gatherings close to Giants Stadium where O’Shaine Evans’ family and their supporters had gathered to grieve the evening before.
Justice campaigns across the Bay with families at the center continue to rely on a number of spaces both connected and outside sites of state-organized justice like court rooms and other juridical processes. On November 14th, Anita Wills and Dionne Smith-Downes of the Inter Council for the Mothers of Murdered Children (ICMMC) will host a gathering of families who have lost loved ones to share stories across a network of justice campaigns from Stockton to Oakland to San Jose. As a fundraiser for the ICMMC, the gathering will advance struggles for justice for James Earl Rivera Jr. of Stockton, killed by Stockton Police officers Eric Azarvand and Gregory Dunn and San Joaquin County Sheriff John Nesbitt. In addition, the gathering will also examine the unlawful prosecution of Kerry Baxter, Sr. of Oakland, currently serving the eleventh year of a sixty-six year sentence as a result of questionable policing practices in Oakland. These recent events make visible sustained attacks on the social factory through state-manufactured violence. The grassroots collaborations and pressure from families and community supporters not only undermine the state’s attempts to shield its agents and provide an uncontested narration of its own violence, these efforts waged from within the social factory, or community, generate knowledge critical to our community safety struggles.
These recent cases also point to the role of courts and the legal process as a site of critical scrutiny as we advance our observations around the struggles in the social factory. Rather than simply a neutral space of rational arbitration between street level policing on one hand and punitive institutions on the other, in many cases, the state-organized justice process itself targets family and community bonds in destructive ways. These spaces of encounter that each new shooting provokes into existence function as “temporary autonomous zones of knowledge production” where families and communities exchange information and details about the myriad ways that the state disrupts the everyday functioning and relationships across communities (see Manuel Callahan, "In Defense of Conviviality and the Collective Subject"; Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy’s “Systems of Information,”). This is intensely visible in legal battles that extend for many years and tax family resources in incalculable ways.
We claim our struggles in the “social factory” as community safety struggles that are within, against, and beyond the state (Barbagallo and Beuret, "Starting From the Social Wage"). Relying on the social factory as a category of analysis allows us to recognize together the ways our communities are targeted by the state, the necessity of engaging the state as a critical component of our struggles, and the possibilities we are already living a future present that exists outside the state and its attempt to impose particular relations of capital. Our struggles in the social factory are constantly producing knowledge. Increasingly, as we gather together and develop a shared analysis we see new possibilities for justice and care for each other. These spaces where we share and learn together are integral to our struggles from within the social factory.
North Bay and South Bay Crew
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