Jeremy Tully and Emily
Birnbaum report on the latest effort by the Stop Urban Shield Coalition to a
kick the weapons and SWAT-training expo out of Berkeley.
July 3, 2017
MORE THAN 500 people filed
into a special June 20 meeting of the Berkeley City Council, where they were
scheduled to vote on the Berkeley Police Department's continued participation
in Urban Shield, a weapons expo and SWAT training convention based in the Bay
Area.
The Stop Urban Shield
Coalition (SUSC), made up of grassroots community and social justice
organizations committed to fighting the militarization of the police, organized
a broad campaign so that the packed meeting was united in opposition to Urban
Shield.
Dozens of community members
addressed the City Council for hours, speaking powerfully against the racist violence
that conventions like Urban Shield promote both at home and abroad.
When the City Council members
finally voted at the end of the night to allow the BPD to attend the convention
this year, protesters rushed the stage holding a banner reading "Stop Urban
Shield, End Militarization of Our Communities."
As the mayor and City Council
members left the stage, police ran in to arrest the protesters who had dropped
the banner. Outside, Berkeley police attacked peaceful protesters, hitting one
older activist over the head with a baton.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
THREE ISSUES were up for vote
at this meeting: Berkeley's participation in Urban Shield, its participation in
Northern California Regional Intelligence Centers (NCRIC)--which it uses to
search license plate numbers--and the department's request to purchase an
armored van.
During his presentation,
Berkeley Police Chief Andrew Greenfield emphasized one of Urban Shield's
incidental aspects--its training of police in the provision of basic first
aid--as the program's main benefit.
Mayor Jesse Arreguin attempted
a last-minute agenda change to move Stop Urban Shield Coalition's presentation
up to precede rather than follow presentations opposing Urban Shield by Council
of members Kate Harrison and Cheryl Davila. But when SUSC representatives Lara
Kiswani and Tash Nguyen protested, with the support of 500 people, they forced
Arreguin to abide by the original agenda.
When the hearing was opened to
public comment, one person after another spoke powerfully against Urban Shield.
Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) member Sharif Zarkout condemned it
as an Islamophobic and racist program. Zarkout challenged Berkeley's hypocrisy
in claiming to be a progressive city while participating in Urban Shield:
Urban Shield would not even
have the tools, weapons and technologies it uses were it not for the warfare
happening in Arab homelands. Berkeley cannot say it stands with Arabs, Muslims
and immigrant communities while simultaneously giving our police tactics and weaponry
tested on the bodies of people in Palestine and Iraq.
Catalyst Project
co-coordinator Dylan Cooke challenged the claim that Urban Shield prioritized
first-aid training:
I was out at Standing Rock for
five weeks this past fall. Part of what I did there was offer my skills as a
medic. I've been a first responder to exactly the kind of militarized police
violence that Urban Shield brings to our community. I was there the night of
November 20, when the police fired water cannons on people in sub zero temperatures,
when an elder woman lost her eye because police fired rubber bullets at her at
close range, and when a young woman lost most of her forearm because police
fired concussion grenades directly into the crowd. The police want to talk
about how they were trained to apply pressure dressings to injuries. I can't
tell you the number of pressure dressings I had to apply to people that were
injured by the police.
Five hours into the meeting,
City Council members Kate Harrison and Cheryl Davila presented their proposal
to end Berkeley's participation in Urban Shield. Yet it was clear from the
beginning of Harrison's remarks that a majority of the council would vote to
continue Berkeley's participation in Urban Shield.
Harrison began by defending
the City Council's integrity, saying, "Regardless of the vote tonight,
this council has allowed you to speak loudly and clearly. This is not an
attempt to cover up."
Davila spoke more sharply
against Urban Shield, pointing out how the program feeds into the racist logic
of the war on terror, and how it has been used to train law enforcement in the
suppression of political dissent. Past Urban Shield training scenarios have
included police confrontations with Occupy style protest encampments.
Following Davila and Harrison,
Stop Urban Shield Coalition representatives Kiswani and Nguyen made their case
against the program. Kiswani argued, "Urban Shield cements a militarized
approach to emergency response," and invoked the 2013 in custody death of
Kayla Moore, a Black transgender woman, as an example of the danger of this
militarization.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
URBAN SHIELD was started in
the Bay Area in 2007 by Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern as a regional
project, but it has grown to become one of the largest weapons expos and SWAT
training conventions in the world.
It is largely funded by the
Department of Homeland Security's Urban Areas Security Initiative, which grants
over $500 million every year to cities across the country for counter-terrorism
trainings, organization and equipment.
More than 70 vendors attended
last year, selling sniper rifles, armored vehicles, tear gas, surveillance
equipment and drones. Among the vendors was Safariland, which was condemned by
both national and international human rights groups after it was discovered
that the Morton County Police Department used their products against the Dakota
Access Pipeline protesters on November 20, 2016.
The danger that the heightened
militarization of the police poses to political activists is clear in the Bay
Area as well. In 2009, Oakland Police Department's SWAT team won the Urban
Shield competition. Members of that team included Frank Uu and Patrick
Gonzales, both of whom were at the heart of OPD's violent repression at Occupy
Oakland.
On the night of November 2,
2011, Frank Uu beat Army Veteran Kayvan Sabeghi with a club so brutally that it
ruptured his spleen. Although Sabeghi was charged with no crime, he was held
for 18 hours and received no medical attention until released.
Uu's immediate supervisor at
the time was Patrick Gonzales, who has been named in numerous lawsuits,
including wrongful death, excessive use of force, illegal searches and racial
profiling, all of which have led to a combined pay out by the city of $3.6
million.
Images from the 2014 Urban
Shield convention showed a dummy in stereotypically Arab clothing representing
an active shooter. The inherent racism in this scenario is clear, especially in
a country where the majority of mass shootings are perpetrated by white men.
Further evidence of the
contempt with which participants view people of color and political activists
was a controversy in 2015 when it surfaced that one of the most popular selling
items at the convention was a T-shirt that read "Black Rifles Matter"
with a picture of a M-16 assault rifle.
The Bay Area has hosted Urban
Shield since 2007, but it has not gone unchallenged. Grassroots community
organizations including AROC, the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network,
Critical Resistance, the War Resisters League, and many others, formed the Stop
Urban Shield Coalition and have been building a strong and broad resistance to
Urban Shield since its inception.
SUSC has organized rallies
with hundreds of people outside the conventions and at City Council meetings.
They have organized petitions, call-ins, and teach-ins. The protest at the June
20 City Council meeting is the latest examples of their diligent organizing.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
AFTER HOURS of discussion, the
City Council moved to vote. First, it voted to purchase the van, and then it
approved Berkeley's continued participation in NCRIC, with little opposition
outside of Davila.
When it came to making a
decision about Urban Shield, Mayor Arreguin, a self-described
"unapologetic progressive," proposed that rather than terminate
participation in Urban Shield, Berkeley merely suspend its participation for a
year.
Arreguin was quickly followed
by council member Susan Wengraf, who proposed that any suspension should begin
after the next Urban Shield training planned for November. Arreguin, who opposed
Urban Shield as a council member before he became mayor, quickly accepted
this as a friendly amendment to his proposal.
In a Kafkaesque display,
council member Ben Bartlett raised the specter of the alt-right, citing
provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos' planned return to Berkeley in September.
Bartlett defended further Berkeley participation in Urban Shield, arguing that
the program prepares police to contend with violence from the alt-right.
In fact, arrests stemming from
alt-right demonstrations in Berkeley have largely focused on left-wing
activists. Cal Stanislaus student and alt-right figure Nathan Damigo, who was
caught on video assaulting a woman in April, has gone unarrested.
Bartlett proposed that rather
than make any decision about an eventual suspension at this meeting, the City
Council appoint a subcommittee to report back with recommendations in six
months. Arreguin accepted this, too, as friendly. Thus Arreguin's proposal went
from being for a suspension of participation for one year to continued
participation with only the promise of a subcommittee to produce
recommendations in six months' time.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
-
AS ROLL was called for the
vote, and it became clear that the council would vote to continue participation
in Urban Shield, protesters filed to the front of the stage and held out a
large banner reading "Stop Urban Shield, End Militarization of our
Communities."
It was at this point that the
City Council--with the lone exception of Davila--quickly fled the stage, and a
dozen Berkeley police rushed in, putting two protesters holding the banner in
wrist locks and arresting them. In the hallway outside the auditorium, another
half-dozen police stood by in a show of force, replete with a tear-gas
launcher.
As the nonviolent
demonstration moved outside, protesters spilled out onto the street in front of
the school, blocking traffic. Despite BPD representatives having talked at
length about how Urban Shield equips them with vital training in de-escalation,
it only took a few minutes for Berkeley PD to bring out batons.
In the ensuing scuffle, one
older Berkeley resident who had come to speak out against Urban Shield was hit
over the head by a police baton.
Bay Area activists have had
major victories over Urban Shield in the past. In 2014, the broadly organized
Stop Urban Shield Coalition pushed
the Urban Shield training and weapons expo out of Oakland.
Despite the Berkeley City
Council's vote, the campaign to stop Urban Shield will continue. SUSC's
powerful mobilization of more than 500 people to the night's hearing shows that
opposition continues to mount to the program and the militarized policing it
represents.
No comments:
Post a Comment