Social Factory Ateneo 3-28-15

Compañerxs,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Social Factory Ateneo, Saturday, March 28th 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 March 24, 2015 the Bay Area Stop the Impunity collective locked down the San Francisco Police Department on 17th and Valencia Street in the Mission for four hours and fifteen minutes to challenge the impunity that police officers enjoy for officer involved shootings and for the failure to indict any of the four San Francisco police officers implicated in the murder of Alex Neito on March 21, 2014 in Bernal Heights. Organized with the family of Alex Nieto at the center, the direct action included a mock trial for Roger Morse, Nathan Chew, Richard Schiff, and Sergeant Jason Sawyer, the officers who shot Nieto. In the center of the blocked off street, The People’s Trial issued their own verdict: guilty. The mock trial and lockdown followed a procession two days prior that had retraced Nieto's steps the day he was shot a year ago just down the hill from Bernal Heights Park.

The People’s Trial reflects a growing movement to confront forms of state-organized justice and to find alternatives that do not rely on the state to mete out justice. In collectively thinking through our struggles in the present, we recognize the possibility when the community gathers to confront the violence of the police, assemble to determine how the community will be safe, and to create an alternative to justice much in the same way that escraches, or community direct actions, have emerged from the Global South as in the case of the work of H.I.J.O.s. The escraches organized by H.I.J.O.s serve as an example of communities increasingly seeking their own solutions for justice and refusing to wait for the state to police itself. In this way, the direct action on March 24th can be seen as a kind of escrache, or according to Colectivo Situaciones, a space that "is undertaken in those places that the representative justice of the state has deserted. It is a practice of self-affirmation created to confront a brutal act of judicial marginalization and it is not inscribed in a frustrated desire for inclusion but in its opposite: a desire for justice that persists in spite of this frustration” (Colectivo Situaciones, Genocide in the Neighborhood, 105).

Similarly, earlier in March several groups from across the Bay Area launched a People’s Investigation into the SFPD killing of Asa Sullivan on June 6, 2006. Although the courts and police department were content with the recent verdict that exonerated the Department and in particular the two police officers who took Asa's life eight years ago, family and friends of Asa refused to accept the defense’s argument in support of the officers that asserted the fabrication that Asa intended for the police to shoot him. Current efforts include support for the family to purchase the transcripts from the October 2014 trial where the court affirmed the police justification of their own violence, claiming Asa desired to die by “suicide by cop.” The transcripts are critical for the successful appeal of the case to challenge the duplicity of the state. The People’s Investigation seeks to expose the state's efforts to "cover-up" the shooting and is therefore a collective process to refuse this lie and refuse a justice organized by the state. It is supported by several community groups from across the Bay Area including Idriss Stelley Foundation, Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy (CCRA), SF Mission Copwatch, Inter Council for Mothers of Murdered Children, and others.

The direct actions, investigative efforts, and creation of counter narratives for Alex Nieto and Asa Sullivan are among several grassroots investigations underway across the Bay Area. Others include a community initiative into the March 9th attack on Jabari Shaw, his daughter, and Mary Carmen Valencourt. The collective effort to respond to the March 9 attack is being advanced by Community Ready Corps (CRC), Anti-Police terror project (APTP), Eastside Arts Alliance & Black Power Network (BPN) who name the agencies involved and make visible how “increased collaboration between OPD and federal agencies like the FBI and U.S. Marshals is part of the militarization of local law enforcement.” Similarly, direct actions combined with grassroots investigation have been organized by APTP in response to the February 3rd killing of Yuvette Henderson by Emeryville Police. 

The proliferation of direct actions and investigations help us to collectively hone shared strategies to create communities free of police and paramilitary forces that threaten the community. These are abolitionist perspectives that draw links between prisons and policing. In The Undercommons, Fred Moten and Stephano Harney affirm this abolitionist perspective, “not so much the abolition of prisons but the abolition of society that could have prisons, that could have slavery, that could have the wage, and therefore not abolition as the elimination of anything but abolition as the founding of a new society.” (Moten and Harney, Undercommons, p. 42). In this moment we can hear the voice of the Zapatistas “we are here to build a whole new world.”

Zapatista struggles and the movement to remember the 43 missing students of Ayotzinapa continue to emphasize the centrality of families mobilized around justice struggles in our efforts to demilitarize our communities. Caravana43, an effort designed to bring the "parents and classmates of the 43 Normalista students who disappeared on September 26, 2014" to the US will be in San Francisco April 4-6. These projects advance our own community safety, organized around an autonomy that highlights justice, defense, care, and the assembly as a tool to tie these moments of self-organization together. As we struggle to demilitarize, we continue to build spaces of assembly across the Bay Area and state and prepare for the upcoming People's Movement Assembly on militarization in late June as part of the US Social Forum in San Jose. Smaller assemblies begin to feed into larger assemblies to create a prefigurative space of politics in the present. 

North Bay and South Bay Crew

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