Democracy Ateneo Announcement 5-09-15

Compañer@s,

We will convene the Universidad de la Tierra Califas' Democracy Ateneo, Saturday, May 9, from 2 - 5 p.m. at Casa de Vicky (792 E. Julian St., San Jose) to resume our regularly scheduled reflection and action space and to explore some of the questions and struggles mentioned below.

On April 25, 2015 San Jose Copwatch (SJCW) and Acción Zapatista (AZ) coordinated the deployment of the Community Safety Situation Tent (CSST), a shared effort to support copwatchers in the Roosevelt Park neighborhood. The CSST was an initial effort to monitor anticipated police abuse directed at San Jose's ethnic Mexican community during Cinco de Mayo celebrations, specifically the street energy the length of Santa Clara street. Scheduled for Sunday, May 3, during what was expected to be the height of celebrations for the Cinco de Mayo weekend, the CSST was intended to facilitate a convergence space for the community to replenish with food and drink, fortify with around the clock Know Your Rights Trainings, support veteran and novice copwatchers in the field, and document police deployments from the San Jose Police Department's (SJPD) various nearby staging areas. At the center of the planned CSST was to be a screen projecting a map monitoring incidents of police movement and excess. The map was developed through Ushahidi Crowd Map. Swahili for testimony, Ushahidi is a platform that supports iHub and BRCK as well as other crowd sourcing tools such as the web page that mapped the political violence following the 2007 elections in Kenya. Appropriating this technology the Community Safety Tent hot spot monitoring station would have facilitated on the spot recording of incidents as well as map patterns of abuse from Roosevelt Park.

Unfortunately, the CSST scheduled for Sunday, May 3 was disrupted by the SJPD and the City. Marchers on San Jose's annual May Day march, Friday May 1, discovered Roosevelt Park fenced off from park users and pedestrian traffic. The SJPD shut down the entire park for Cinco de Mayo weekend, including the grassy knoll designated through scouting the week before when the CSST had its trial run. The city fencing made it impossible for groups to access or use any portion of the public park. Police efforts of containment also coincided with a very public announcement of a "gang crackdown.” (see, D. Trujillo, "Police Crackdown on Gangs in the South Bay.”)

Police efforts, whether directly targeted or not, only temporarily detained the CSST, and mark a moment of "policy" imposed on the "fugitive planning" unique to what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten recall as "the undercommons." In this instance of "Black study," the CSST was to convene an open space of learning about our capacities, recognizing our resources, facilitating the articulation of our questions, and documenting our initiatives that celebrate what we know coming from "the wealth of having without owning." (see, S. Harney & F. Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.) At the center of the "undercommons" are tools and toys as well as the spaces we convene to learn how to use or play with what we invent to confront forces and to carve out our own space, a prefigurative space where, as the Zapatistas remind us, the ends and the means are the same.

While the City's fences prohibited CSST from deploying at Roosevelt Park, Acción Zapatista, San Jose Copwatch, and SF Mission Copwatch convened at a alternate site and coordinated a vigorous copwatching effort on Sunday, making use of the Ushahidi crowd mapping tool. The monitoring efforts made possible through the Community Safety Tent web infrastructure was a critical moment of tool making. These efforts are evident in sites where the community has taken back the streets refusing the status quo of police impunity and the imposition of policies that manage a system of apartheid. Consider the street research recently convened in Baltimore following the horrific violence directed at Freddie Gray on April 9th, 2015 that cost him his spine, his larynx and ultimately his life at the hands of Baltimore Police Officer Caesar Goodson; Lt. Brian Rice; Sgt. Alicia White; Officer Garrett Miller; Officer William Porter; and Officer Edward Nero. In one instance of “research from below” in this context a community member creatively engaged Fox News' Geraldo Rivera taking him to task for the sensationalized news coverage of the mainstream media and its deliberate criminalization of Black and Brown subjects. (see, "Geraldo confronted about Fox News coverage Baltimore" and "Geraldo vs Baltimore.")

These tools are generated through networked spaces of refusal and research in a circulation of struggle recently ignited in Ferguson as people refused to leave the streets in August of 2014 following the shooting of Michael Brown by Officer Darren Wilson, and now again refusing to leave the streets of Baltimore in the name of Freddie Gray. A taking back of the streets against state impunity and apartheid persists night after night despite a full arsenal of military grade equipment aimed at the community and militarized legislation like “state of exception” curfews. And as the San Jose Police Department initiated its “gang crackdowns” in advance of Cinco de Mayo, what emerges from the struggle from below in Baltimore are points of agreement between the Crips and the Bloods to unite against police violence in a truce brokered by the Nation of Islam, to form an allegiance against police brutality (See, M. David, "Baltimore ‘Bloods’ and ‘Crips’ Call Truce and Unite To Fight Police Brutality.") As with the LA Rebellions of 1992 and the California Prison Hunger Strikes of 2013, the truce acts as a tool of the “undercommons”—a place to find each other against the state and breathe outside it.

A tool that has been used widely has been the caravan. Luis Hernández Navarro reports that Caravana 43, the mobilization by parents of the missing 43 students from the rural teacher's college in Ayotzinapa covered more than forty U.S. cities between April 12 and May 2. Hernández reminds us that the caravan not only covered the U.S., but also sent a delegation to the United Nation's Committee on Enforced Disappearances in Geneva and the European Union's Joint Commission "asking for support in order to continue with the investigations and that they be opened to hypotheses about what happened that are distinct from the historic truth decreed by the federal government." There is little doubt as to the success of the efforts by the parents. In one instance, Germany's Commissioner for Human Rights, Christoph Strässer suspended negotiations with Mexico, according to Hernández, "until there is a national strategy for the fight against impunity and protection from enforced disappearances." Remarkably, Strässer publicly apologized to the parents of the missing students recognizing that the weapons used by Iguala's municipal police are made in Germany. "Led by the parents of the victims of Ayotzinapa," explains Hernández, "these international tours have been an effective tool in the struggle against forgetting what really happened and have provided much needed visibility to the critical human rights situation in the country." (see, L. Hernández Navarro, "Mexico-Ayotzinapa: Effectiveness of Caravans by Parents of Disappeared Students.")

Another tool of the undercommons is the People's Justice Summit recently convened by the People's Justice Network (PJN) on Saturday, April 25 in Oxnard. The People's Justice Summit titled, Beyond Protest – Towards Structural Change to Address Police Brutality, and convened by Todo Poder al Pueblo and the PJN continued the efforts of the Justice for Our Communities Conference (April 2013) bringing together groups from Santa Barbara, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Fresno, Oxnard, San Jose, and San Francisco to discuss the expansion of the People's Justice Network. The theme of the summit, beyond protest, highlighted the need for "principled struggle" to more fully understand "the nature of police brutality" while also supporting communities as the focal point of our learning and strategy. One of the proposals put forward by the PJN includes the People's Justice Network's "Structural Demands for Change," a document that outlines a strategy of confronting police violence by holding the police accountable through the city structure.

The Community Safety Database (CSDbase) is yet another tool of the undercommons. Still in development, the CSDbase is a collective, decentralized effort across communities of struggle to expose and intervene in state violence by documenting police excess, advancing grassroots people’s investigation, and engaging direct action in order to reclaim collective efforts of community safety. On one level, the CSDbase responds to law enforcement violations by establishing mechanisms for greater accountability and transparency. Beyond this, the CSDbase contributes to a network of interconnected, autonomous investigative and direct action projects. As such it is part of a larger effort to build with families across the Bay Area and the state to collectively investigate and map the policing strategies, practices, and tactics often linked with counterinsurgency executed by an alphabet soup of law enforcement agencies and state institutions. Thus, the CSDbase works as a space of encounter to connect and proliferate a variety of community efforts underway to de-militarize and de-criminalize our communities.

The variety of tools of the undercommons continues with the People’s Movement Assembly (PMA) against Militarization that will be held on Saturday, May 30, 1.00 to 5.00 p.m. at the San Jose Public Library Alum Rock branch (3090 Alum Rock Ave, San Jose, 95127). The second in a series of spaces, the PMA against Militarization is a “rolling assembly" with the final gathering to be convened during the US Social Forum (June 27th). The "rolling assembly” makes it possible for us to circulate struggle by sharing the critical experience and knowledges we have brought to bear in confronting violence directed at our communities. The goal is to gather and share tools that disrupt militarization and militarism in order to end US investment in war and warfare, change a militaristic culture, tear down militarized borders, abolish militarized policing, and dismantle the prison industrial complex as part of a larger effort to refuse the criminalization of people of color. It will be a space to skill share around a variety of tools, such as people's investigations, caravans, community assemblies, and people's defense projects to name just a few of the tools we currently deploy for justice.

South Bay and North Bay Crew

NB: If you are not already signed-up and would like to stay connected with the emerging Universidad de la Tierra Califas community please feel free to subscribe to the Universidad de la Tierra Califas listserve at the following url <https://lists.resist.ca/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/unitierracalifas>. Also, if you would like to review previous Democracy Ateneo and Social Factory Ateneo announcements and summaries as well as additional information on the ateneo in general please see <http://ccra.mitotedigital.org/ateneo>. Please note we have altered the schedule of the Democracy Ateneo so that it falls on the second Saturday of the month.

###