I heard that a 19 year old was shot and killed by police in SF for skipping out on a subway fare. Anyone from around there know what's going on in terms of protests there?
Jul 18 2011 16:07
Jul 18 2011 16:39
See this:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2015645214_shooting18m.html
Looks like the cops are saying the guy "possibly" has been involved in killing someone, though certainly they didn't know that when he was killed running away from cops trying to nick him for dodging his fare. Make of it what you will: an Oakland transit cop was recently released from prison after 6 months for having killed in cold blood, and having been filmed doing it, a guy held down on a train platform. The fact that there've not been riots after his release might have encouraged this summary injustice.
Jul 18 2011 18:22
Video of dying man shot by pigs
I live on the other side of San Francisco and I have intermittently worked in the area, at the Bayview Campus of City College of San Francisco -- which is a couple blocks from where the shooting took place, on 3rd Street between Oakdale and Palou.
The shooting happened on the street-level platform of the T-line streetcar (it's only a subway when it runs under Market Street downtown), a recently completed $660,000,000 boondoggle to connect San Francisco's Financial District with Bayview-Hunter's Point -- the last predominately African American neighborhood in the city. The trains run along the Embarcadero, past the Giants baseball stadium, then along 3rd Street to Bayview. The latter has been declared a "Redevelopment Zone," meaning zoning laws are altered, property taxes are diverted to the Redevelopment Agency to act as corporate welfare for real estate speculators, and the plan is simply ethnic cleansing as African Americans are pushed out of the area to make way for homebuyers to live in the newly built yuppie live-work lofts -- and have a 20-minute public transit commute to their downtown jobs.
This despite African Americans -- until recently -- in the neighborhood having some of the highest home ownership rates in the city due to many family's roots dating back to the World War II era, having worked at the massive naval shipyards at Hunter's Point.
So the race and class tensions in the neighborhood are incredibly high. Additionally, the transit agency (Muni) targets the commercial stretch along 3rd Street for random fare evasion inspections -- while this rarely if ever happens in more upscale white neighborhoods. But the demographics of the neighborhood are changing and many Asians are moving to Bayview, leading to some senseless attacks by local kids on elderly people, like the Chinese man beaten to death near the same T-line stop, one of two fatal attacks on Chinese at that location last year.
Muni created new goon squads of fare inspectors who usually do the checks for fare evaders, but in the case of the shooting victim it was the regular pigs of the SFPD.
Here's the latest story I could find, from today's San Francisco Chronicle, but it's full of the usual blame-the-victim lies and demonization of the murdered as a "sex offender" to justify his cold blooded murder (since he was shot in the back 5 times):
SF Chronicle wrote:
Parolee, 19, is IDd as man shot by S.F. policeHenry K. Lee,Jaxon Van Derbeken, Chronicle Staff Writers
Monday, July 18, 2011
(07-18) 09:01 PDT SAN FRANCISCO --
The man shot and killed by San Francisco police after he allegedly fired at them during a foot chase in Bayview-Hunters Point was identified today as 19-year-old Kenneth Harding, a Washington state parolee sought for questioning in the slaying last week of a pregnant woman in Seattle.
Harding, who was killed Saturday afternoon, had recently been released from a prison in Washington after serving time for convictions stemming from a King County sex offense, said San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr.
Seattle police were seeking Harding as a person of interest in a shooting Wednesday that killed Tanaya Gilbert, 19, and her unborn child and wounded three others, authorities said. A day after the shooting, gunfire marred a vigil for Gilbert.
In San Francisco, Harding was stopped at 4:44 p.m. Saturday by two uniformed officers who, while patrolling Third Street between Oakdale and Palou avenues, conducted a fare inspection on a Muni light rail platform.
When the officers tried to stop Harding for not paying, he drew a gun, ran into Mendell Plaza and fired indiscriminately over his shoulder, police said.
The officers fired back, hitting Harding.
An amateur video has surfaced online showing the mortally wounded Harding and what appears to be a gun on the pavement nearby. The weapon disappeared from the scene, but Suhr said a .45-caliber pistol that police think was Harding's gun was found Saturday night with the help of informants.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/18/BA0H1KBQDA.DTL
A demo occurred in San Francisco's Mission District last night (the over-the-top rhetoric about "war" is a little juvenile); another demo is planned for the Mission tomorrow night.
Jul 18 2011 17:49
Hieronymous: when the cop imprisoned for killing the young guy on a train platform in Oakland was recently released after only 6 months I heard that there was no reaction. True or not?
btw, the link to your video lasts about 2 seconds then cuts off.
Jul 18 2011 18:26
I think the video is fixed; try it again.
When BART pig Johannes Mehserle was released in June there were some protests in Oakland but they were largely subdued, with a massive police presence, and amounted to not much more than a press conference and a march and rally. The Oakland pigs had previously announced something amounting to "zero tolerance" regarding street protests getting violent.
Jul 18 2011 19:06
Hieronymous - thanks for that. And for the interesting context in which you put the recent shooting. Do you get any feeling at all that these things could suddenly spring into something big? I know that's pure speculation, but from conversations you've heard or been in...? or what?
Edit: just saw your link:
Quote:
About 100 of us gathered, donned masks, and marched down Valencia St. toward the Mission Police Station. We attacked the first pig car that approached. We attacked ATMs and a Wells Fargo as well. We upturned newspaper boxes and trash bins, throwing them into the streets at the encroaching riot cops. We screamed in the pigs faces and confronted them at their front door. By 1AM we had dispersed without arrest.
So it does seem things might be moving a little, no? Or do you get the feeling that those involved in the above were just the usual suspects?
Jul 18 2011 19:56
Samotnaf wrote:
So it does seem things might be moving a little, no? Or do you get the feeling that those involved in the above were just the usual suspects?
Maybe, but as you allude to it was most likely the usual activists, most of whom have absolutely no connection with rioting blacks in Bayview.
I grew up in urban Los Angeles, but moved to the Bay Area in the mid-1980s. I was visiting L.A. in the early spring of 1992 and could viscerally feel that something was about to happen. You could literally see the writing on the wall -- in the graffiti on overhead freeway signs, which seemed to be everywhere. And the class tensions did blow, in the Rodney King Rebellion that began on April 29, 1992.
Back then, the L.A. economy had been devastated by the deindustrialization of industries like auto, aerospace and aircraft manufacturing -- bringing about massive changes in the economy and class composition of all of urban California. The difference today is that the African American working class (including lumpen elements) across the West Coast has never recovered from mass unemployment over the last 20 years; some of the only ways out of the ghetto for African Americans are joining the military or going to prison.
Bayview-Hunter's Point, where the guy was murdered, has a history of urban riots, going back to 1968 with the revolt after Martin Luther King's assassination. Unlike the yuppie zone of conspicuous consumption along the Mission District's chic Valencia Street (where last night's demo occurred), Bayview could more accurately be described as an occupied war zone. The police presence, in the midst of gut-wrenching poverty and human suffering, is palpable and the hatred of the pigs is barely beneath the surface.
All that is to say that yes, this is like a powder keg ready to blow. But sadly, given the recent anti-Chinese violence, I'm afraid that lacking a perspective of the true class enemy, a possible uprising in San Francisco might become racialized. Bayview, in my opinion, is less politicized than Oakland where the cross-fertilization with bordering Berkeley has a deeper tradition of cross-race unity and finding class targets during riots.
Jul 18 2011 20:48
Thanks for the answer - interesting as always (almost always anyway ........well,I don't want to sound too flattering).
Jul 18 2011 21:20
Thanks for the interesting comments, the latest articles in the news seem to take it as fact that the victim fired his gun at police. http://www.foxreno.com/news/28583798/detail.html
I can't really look into it more now as I am at work but I hope that people will continue to post updates
Jul 18 2011 21:56
I'm skeptical that he had a weapon since they said that they had to recover the weapon from the scene with police informants. They have not produced any casings.
He may have had a gun and thrown it in which case he was gunned down without a weapon. I'd give 50:1 says he didn't fire any weapon.
Jul 18 2011 22:16
Some news reports claimed one casing was found, in addition to the gun that was later "turned in" (more likely, unlocked from an evidence locker), but in the video I linked to people are screaming about him being "unarmed."
Another video taken from the opposite direction had young guys recalling the 5 shots, all going into his back, and yelling at the pigs to ask why they shot him so many times. YouTube subsequently censored it, probably to protect the pigs' story (was here).
I doubt there was a gun as well.
Jul 19 2011 03:46
Some report said that in the youtube video you could see a gun near him on the ground as he lay dying. I couldn't see it at all. The spectacle tries to make us disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes, like in the Emperors New Clothes.
Jul 19 2011 04:18
Samotnaf wrote:
Some report said that in the youtube video you could see a gun near him on the ground as he lay dying. I couldn't see it at all. The spectacle tries to make us disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes, like in the Emperors New Clothes.
To be fair, human memory is very dodgy and prone to errors. So it's more like the spectacle takes advantage of our human frailty.
Jul 19 2011 05:17
Samotnaf wrote:
Some report said that in the youtube video you could see a gun near him on the ground as he lay dying. I couldn't see it at all. The spectacle tries to make us disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes, like in the Emperors New Clothes.
I saw that video about 5 times; frankly, it looked like a shiny plastic package of junk food. A kid picked casually picked it up, so it might have been the murdered guy's snack.
Jul 19 2011 05:20
Tojiah:
Quote:
To be fair, human memory is very dodgy and prone to errors. So it's more like the spectacle takes advantage of our human frailty.
To be fair, human memory is very dodgy and prone to errors essentially because of the spectacle:
Quote:
"what is everywhere repressed in this society is history : one's own, with others, that of the whole, and above all the mediations among the three"
(Chris Shutes, Two Local Chapters in the Sppectacle of Decomposition).
If we suffer memory loss, it's partly due to the enormous irrational pressures, plus inundation with distractions and lies, plus our own lies to ourselves, all of which destroy a critical memory. Certainly the spectacle takes advantage of what it also produces, but it's in the dialectic of our own unnecessary evasions, the spectacle we're complicit with, and the spectacle "out there". In this case, it's not even a question of memory - but a question of looking again at the youtube video (though maybe it's been censored, as Hieronymous said about one of them). But even if people look at it again, they doubt themselves so much, assume it's their own frailty, the dodginess not just of their memories but of their eyesight. As the Great Guru himself put it, the spectacle is
Quote:
a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialised mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly)
- Society of the Spectacle, thesis 18.
Jul 19 2011 14:40
Yes, I guess the spectacle made me forget that everybody had eidetic memory before evil modern society came along. 
Jul 19 2011 15:08
A communique from some anarchists in the area: http://burntbookmobile.wordpress.com/2011/07/17/san-francisco-war-on-the-police/
Jul 19 2011 21:08
Here's the previously censored video clip, supposedly showing a gun -- but it looks to thin to be a pistol. Judge the spectacle for yourself:
Jul 19 2011 21:43
(still from the youtube video, tidied up in Photoshop - click for full size)
I have to say, while i'm no expert that looks a lot like a compact pistol to me. That doesn't mean the shooting was legit of course.
Jul 20 2011 10:02
i've been told there was a demo today, but that's all i know.
Jul 21 2011 21:38
Notes Concerning Recent Actions against the Police
Taken from Indybay
Quote:
On Tuesday July 19th, hundreds of people took to the streets of San Francisco in order to demonstrate their rage against the recent murders of Charles Hill and Kenneth Harding in the city by BART police and SFPD respectively. We marched behind a banner reading “they can’t shoot us all; fuck the police” as an expression of our intention that police murder will be met with resistance and retaliation every time they rear their ugly heads in our city.IT DEFINITELY WENT DOWN
The march began at Dolores Park where nearly 200 of us departed and began moving towards the Castro. The route followed MUNI rail lines, obstructing the functioning of the rail system as it proceeded. Upon reaching the Castro MUNI station, all hell broke loose. While approaching the intersection (home to the underground MUNI station as well as the crossing of several MUNI rail lines) a significant portion of the march had donned masks and hoods.
What had now become a mob moved effortlessly past the bewildered cops and descended into the station. Down below on the mezzanine level, trash was set alight and thrown down onto the tracks below, followed by advertisements and signs. The ticket machines, the fare checkpoints and the agent booth were all smashed with hammers and flags – totally ruined. Smokebombs and fireworks were thrown throughout the station, adding to the chaos as the group resurfaced. The march then moved back through the Castro, hurling bricks over the heads of riot police and through the windows of Bank of America before heading into the Mission.
Those at the front of the march, made the spontaneous decision to continue onwards to the Mission police station on Valencia street. As the march approached, the pigs moved into formation to protect their sty. This didn’t stop us from throwing flares, a paint bomb, and a hammer at the façade of the building and at its defenders. The crowd, now swelled to almost 300, stayed in front of the police station for a while, screaming in the faces of the scum that patrols our streets and kills and imprisons the people we love. After making it abundantly clear that we wanted them the fuck out of our neighborhood, we continued through the Mission . At this point, the march dwindled slightly but continued down Mission St. Things escalated again when CBS news began harassing the crowd. People grabbed the big ass camera and smashed it on the ground. Police moved to make an arrest, but were repelled by the stick-wielding crowd.
After leaving the Mission, the crowd took Market St. and began moving through downtown toward Civic Center Station (the site of Charles Hill’s murder) and then onto Powell Station. At this point the number swelled again to more than they had been at any point, as countless onlookers joined the anti-cop demonstration. The crowd was big enough to block both sides of Market (a rare occurrence). The police began issuing dispersal orders from their sound truck tailing the march. Not giving a fuck, however, hundreds of us drowned out their orders screaming “SHUT THE FUCK UP” over and over. As the march turned up Powell (where we had intended to disperse) riot cops were able to surround and kettle about 30 people. As they filled in to enforce their kettle, hundreds of people pushed against them, hurling projectiles and screaming at them to let them go (and die). Skirmishes broke out as a handful of friends were unarrested and several more attempts were made to free those trapped inside police lines.
When it became clear that it would be impossible to free the 30 or so friends caught by the police, the strategy shifted to outright fighting. As the police began moving the vans containing the arrested, our crews and others did everything we could to stop them. The vans were chased and blockades attempted. The police and their vehicles were pelted with rocks, bottles, D-batteries and whatever else could be thrown against them. All-out brawls broke out leading to police injuries and a handful of arrests. Several police motorcycles were knocked over and stomped on. The night ended with a tense standoff against police. At this point, hundreds of people from the surrounding area had flooded the scene, screaming at the police or just looking on in awe. More shit got thrown at them and eventually people left, as we had word that several of the arrested were already being released.
It is the humble opinion of these participants that this last round of events was marked by some of the most wild physical fights with police at a demo in a long time. By the end of the night, all but one of the arrested had been released with misdemeanors (for disobeying orders and/or battery). One person remains in jail, being charged with Felony Assault with a Deadly Weapon and Felony Vandalism. (Updates soon)
RESISTANCE IS SPREADING:
Yesterday’s attacks come in the context of a growing campaign of diffuse attacks against the MUNI system in retaliation for the murder of Kenneth Harding. On Saturday, within moments of his murder, people on scene began attacking the police with bottles and trying to disrupt the T-train. In the subsequent days various crews of people in and around Bayview have spontaneously and diffusely taken up a campaign against the MUNI system: blocking tracks, breaking the windows on trains and busses, attacking agents, fighting with the police. Most of this resistance, of course, has gone unreported by the scum media. At a press-conference held in Bayview on Monday, many family-members of police victims and other angry people gathered to denounce the most recent murders, share stories about how much they fucking hate the pigs, and articulate a strategy of resistance.
The message at the conference and in people’s actions is clear: “We want pigs off the MUNI system and we want the system to be free, or there will not be a system at all.” People vowed to continue their attacks and blockades against the trains and buses operated by MUNI until they are fare-free and cop-free. As austerity takes its toll on poor people in the Bay Area, it is becoming increasingly clear that the only solution is attack, and that these attacks are the clearest way to demonstrate our solidarity.
It is in following the lead of those struggling for freedom in Bayview that we decided to trash the MUNI station in the Castro. This is only one contribution in what is mounting up to be a wave of chaos against a system that values a 2$ fare over our lives.
SYSTEMIC DISRUPTION AND SABOTAGE:
Last week, over 100 of us disrupted the BART system by blockading trains and vandalizing stations. This activity resulted in 3 hours of solid obstruction and delays through the BART system caused by several station closures. This was called for in response to the killing of Charles Hill on the Civic Center platform by BART police. Once again, we disrupted the transit system in an act of vengeance against the slaughter at the hands of the armed enforcers of fares. Last night, in addition to putting the Castro MUNI station out of commission, we blocked tracks, buses, and trains. Police went on to close at least three BART stations for fear of the destruction at the Castro station being brought on other stations throughout the system. Through our actions and the response of the police, we brought the transit system in the heart of the financial capitol of the West Coast to a grinding halt for the second time in as many weeks.
It should be noted that obstructing these systems and destroying their apparatuses takes very little effort. System disruption is a valuable tool, and should be considered for use as a response every time the pigs murder someone in our towns. The economic damage and the disruption to networks of control caused by these actions is deeper and wider than a brick through a window (however lovely the act may be).
WE DON’T CARE ABOUT THE PIG LIES:
Fearing full on rebellion, SFPD and their servants in the media have gone into full spin mode. Each day they make new justifications for their killings. They say Charles Hill had a knife. They say Kenneth Harding shot at them. They talk about Harding’s previous convictions and allude to his connection to the murder of a pregnant woman in Washington State. In each of these cases, it is important for the enemies of the police to not be tricked by these diversions.
The issue has never been the character of Kenneth Harding or what type of weapons the victims of police violence may or may not have been carrying. The issue is that the armed enforcers of Capital and the State have enforced a death sentence on the poor in this city; made themselves the judge, jury and executioner of anyone who cannot afford a fare, is homeless, or breaks their meaningless laws in order to survive. We don’t care if Kenneth Harding had a gun. In fact, we wish he had shot the men who went on to shoot him ten times in the back and throat. Any justification for his murder misses the point that the situation should never have happened in the first place. We shouldn’t have to pay for their trains and the cops shouldn’t exist to enforce fares (or anything at all). To blame Kenneth Harding or Charles Hill or any victim of police violence for the atrocities enacted upon them by the police is to side with the State, always. Kenneth Harding is dead for one reason: because officers shot him ten times in the back and throat and watched as he bled to death on the street.
It is also worth noting that the mythology of black male violence against women is consistently used by the police and other armed white people as a pretense for racist murder, whether at the hands of a lynch mob or by the bullets of a cop’s gun. To counter this narrative, and the entirely false idea that police exist to protect women, a feminist contingent within the march prepared a statement and distributed it, denouncing the police.
IN CONCLUSION:
When the police kill in our cities, we need to respond immediately and to continue and escalate that resistance. This has been the case so far in the response to the recent murders in San Francisco. People throughout the city – victims, family members, angry kids, anarchists, communists, hooligans – didn’t wait for the Left or any Non-Profit groups to begin. We acted without hesitation and constraint, in doing so setting the narrative of the struggle against the police. It is important that we not fall into the traps set out by the State. The struggle cannot be limited to one neighborhood or one “Legitimate” series of concerns or any one part of the population. We need to fight against SFPD throughout the city, against BART Police throughout the Bay, and against policing on a global scale. This weeks events have already demonstrated that angry people are willing to act against the police and the system they enforce in their neighborhoods, and to join the struggles of others and act in solidarity through attack. The struggle that began with the Oscar Grant rebellion is just beginning to emerge from hibernation. People here are just beginning – collectively and diffusely – to resist police terror in our streets. This is just a taste.
In sadness and in rage.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA
JULY 20, 2011
Jul 21 2011 23:07
Idk, a lot of this communique seems fairly childish and self-destructive, for example, saying things like "We shouldn’t have to pay for their trains and the cops shouldn’t exist to enforce fares (or anything at all)." Is really not going to bring political appeal to a mass group of people and provides a lot of fodder for the mass media. Also, a campaign built up of a loose connection of a hundred or so people devoted to destroying things is not sustainable.
All of this said, solidarity with these comrades, I understand their rage and I wish them luck in evading the cops.
Jul 21 2011 23:17
Whilst I share your concerns that usually these are not the tactics to build a mass movement, sometimes they can help. It'd be good to hear what 'mass-movement anarchists' (is that a thing?) in the area think.
Jul 22 2011 00:26
Situation get a bit more bizarre...
Police: Bayview suspect actually shot himself
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F07%2F21%2FBAAU1KDJ6H.DTL&tsp=1
From Facebook
Quote:
"Let's follow this: 1)Reports of an officer involved shooting. Videos leak of the aftermatch 2)HOURS later cops begin to say he fired at officers, conflicting with earlier eye witness reports. They claim they saw him throw the gun on a roof 3)they say that a video shows someone taking the gun- a silver pistol- from near the body and that his hands tested positive for gunshot residue. They later claim to recover this gun. 4)they ID the victim and say that he was a person of interest in the shooting death of a 19 year old pregnant woman and on parole for a sex crime 5) NOW today they say that he was originally in jail for trying to force a 14 yo into prostitution and that the gun they found from the video was NOT the weapon used because he actually shot HIMSELF with a .380 and there was a .380 bullet was in his pocket. WHA???"
Jul 22 2011 01:48
Joseph Kay wrote:
(still from the youtube video, tidied up in Photoshop - click for full size)
I have to say, while i'm no expert that looks a lot like a compact pistol to me. That doesn't mean the shooting was legit of course.
Hmm,
It would be nice to know the origin of this still. It (vaguely) looks like a gun but it looks appear that it is lying well behind the line of on-lookers.
The video of some guy picking something up I could find is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ5mGwrjHKo
But here, the thing indeed looks like a candy wrapper and the guy first points to it and then picks it up, it appears, maybe five feet from a cop clearly facing him directly.
None of the frames resemble your frame. What youtube video was this from?
Jul 22 2011 02:03
Scratch earlier post,
I can see the still at the start of the prev video.
At the same time, it rather dubious how it resemble a gun on the initial shot but hardly looks like in later close-ups.
Jul 22 2011 02:06
But at the same time, from the sfgate link:
Quote:
Today, Biel said that the gun seized by police does not appear to be the same one Harding fired, and asked for the public's help to find that firearm. A $1,000 reward is offered. He also said investigators are still trying to locate the man in the hoodie.
Jul 22 2011 03:23
The San Francisco Police Department deployed at Newcomb and 3rd Streets, Sept. 28, 1966
There seems to be a definite disconnect between African American protests in Bayview and the anarchist smash-'em-ups in the Mission, Castro and downtown. And therein lies the weakness of any potential for this growing into something larger. The communiqué posted above by "what ever" is pretty shallow and ahistorical. There's been lots of resistance and rebellion in San Francisco, much of it makes these recent "actions" seem like picnics put on by the church choir.
National Guard clearing 3rd Street, Sept. 28, 1966
The Bayview is adjacent to Hunters Point and the name often used is Bayview-Hunters Point. The latter was a massive naval shipbuilding and repair complex, opened in 1870 and closed in 1994 as part of a base closures project nationwide. The district until recently had the highest homeownership rates in the city, most of whom were African American families with roots in shipyard work right before and during World War II. Bayview, along with the Fillmore/Western Addition, was among the few areas in the city without racist covenants prohibiting mortgages to black people. Now served by the street-level T-Line streetcar that goes mostly down 3rd Street to the Financial District, the area is also an official Redevelopment Zone -- which means the Redevelopment Agency has unilateral control over a new round of real estate accumulation in the area. Already, the racial/ethnic demographic is changing and Bayview is becoming more Asian and white as African Americans are driven out economically.
Additionally, the 638 acres in the formal Naval shipyard were turned over to the City of San Francisco, who exactly a year ago approved the Lennar Corporation to build 10,500 residential units (mostly single-family detached homes, a.k.a. yuppie housing) on a 704-acre site in what amounts to a form of corporate welfare as they're getting the land for free. But there's a catch, since the land is a Superfund side. From wikipedia:
wikipedia wrote:
The key fissile components of the first atomic bomb were loaded onto the USS Indianapolis in July 1945 at Hunters Point for transfer to Tinian. After World War II and until 1969, the Hunters Point shipyard was the site of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the US military's largest facility for applied nuclear research. The yard was also used after the war when ships from Operation Crossroads were decontaminated. Because of all the testing, there is widespread radiological contamination of the site. In 1989, the base was declared a Superfund site requiring long-term clean-up.The Navy closed the shipyard and Naval base in 1994 as part of the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC). In addition to radioactive contamination, Hunter's Point had a succession of coal and oil fired power generation facilities which left a legacy of pollution, both from smokestack effluvium and leftover byproducts that were dumped in the vicinity. The BRAC program manages the majority of the site to this day, and is engaged in various pollution remediation projects.
Lennar, after being heavily involved in the subprime-loan-fueled housing boom across the U.S., leaving tens of millions empty homes at present, is skirting the issue -- and the costs -- of cleaning up the toxic radiation at the former shipyard, and seems content to cap the hotspots to quickly start building houses. And there's fucking lots of radiation all over the site. From 1946 until 1958 there were 23 detonations of nuclear devices in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. All the ships returned to Hunters Point heavily contaminated. The Navy at first tried to scrub the hulls, to no avail, then they sandblasted them, again without removing the radiation. Finally, they simply chopped the ships into pieces and dumped the remains, but left a great deal of radioactive sludge in the shallows of the Bay around the periphery of the shipyard. There's also a toxic waste field on the south side of the shipyard that occasionally breaks out in subterranean fire -- but which is allowed to simply burn with the hope that it will extinguish itself.
The present situation is pretty similar to the housing squeeze scenario that gave rise to the Black Panther Party in Oakland in 1966, but which also affected most urban areas in the U.S. throughout the 1960s with Urban Renewal projects, that were popularly called "Negro Removal." In California, State Assembly representative Byron Rumford from Berkeley, first African American in the state legislature, passed AB 1240, "the Fair Housing Bill," in 1963 that prohibited housing discrimination based on race or ethnicity. The following year, mostly pushed by "white flight" suburbanites, it the Fair Housing Bill was repealed by Proposition 14, making housing discrimination legal -- until it was overturned in court as "unconstitutional." Author Gerald Horne, in his excellent Fire This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s, claims that the strongest cause of the rebellion that started in Watts and spread throughout South Central Los Angeles (in many of the same neighborhoods as the 1992 Rodney King Rebellion) was the feeling by African Americans that whites had a "concerted plan to keep them locked into the ghetto and locked out of housing opportunity" (p. 224). The situation in Bayview-Hunters Point is exactly the same today.
The photos above are from the Hunters Point Riots, started on September 27, 1966 when a white SF pig shot a black 17-year-old for suspicion of stealing a car. Not unlike last week's cop murder.
But other movements have also erupted from African American communities in San Francisco, like the riots following Martin Luther King's assassination on April 4, 1968 when residents marched from the Western Addition onto City Hall and engaged in day-long battles with police.
4th & Market St., burning police motorcycle during King Riots 1992
Then again after the Rodney King verdicts from Simi Valley, tens of thousands of rioters rose up on both sides of the Bay. Looting and street fighting occurred up and down Market Street.
We have pretty high benchmarks to aspire to, which would be strengthened with a class analysis rooted in the history of previous struggles in San Francisco. Muni workers are currently without a contract and have already voted to strike, effective July 1. The rank-and-file is mostly black and Latina/o, so any actions against Muni should include the drivers and station agents in an attempt to bring interracial class unity to the struggle. Up to now, that has been sorely lacking.
Jul 22 2011 03:20
About the gun on the ground: if you freeze frame that video, it certainly looks like a gun. So what the guy did was shoot himself in the leg, throw the gun a considerable distance, then with another gun, shot himself in the neck, put it into his pocket and slowly died. I'm convinced. Cops are obviously telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I mean, if they were making it up, you'd think they'd be capable of making it sound more credible. Therefore it must be true - nobody in their rightminds would make up such a ridiculous story.
Jul 22 2011 22:15
Hieronymous wrote:
Video of dying man shot by pigsThe shooting happened on the street-level platform of the T-line streetcar (it's only a subway when it runs under Market Street downtown), a recently completed $660,000,000 boondoggle to connect San Francisco's Financial District with Bayview-Hunter's Point -- the last predominately African American neighborhood in the city.
I guess Filmore and the Tenderloin are pretty much gentrified but are holding out in small pockets here and there. SFPD have been gung ho since the 2010 shooting of a pig http://sfappeal.com/alley/2010/06/city-closes-mission-nightclub-after-sfpd-officer-shot.php and a few other ....2006 a cop was shot in the head in the Sunset District of all places....then there was the cop that was killed in the BayView....Espinoza I think his name was....he was mowed down with an AR-15 or something of that nature. Then the recent Oakland pigs...I think 4 of them were killed in one day (after the Oscar Grant murder by the BART pig). There's a lot of tension out there between pigs and the people.
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User: RedHughs put up this link in the 'Why do socialists demonize the police?' thread:
http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/07/police-shoot-individual-bayview
in regards protests, just saw this one:
http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20110717155956581
otherwise, according to indybay there's a press conference on, but outside of that, i'm on the other side of the world; hopefully someone closer has got more detailed information...