Mayor Quan,
Over the past two weeks, my friends and I have camped at, donated food to and joined in the nightly general assemblies of the Occupy Oakland encampment at Frank Ogawa Plaza (also popularly known as Oscar Grant Plaza) off and on. I am a graduate student in city planning at UC Berkeley and am no stranger to or enemy of reasonable governance, public process or the appropriate use of our police force.
Tuesday morning I woke up to discover that my police force, acting with officers from as far as Vacaville and San Jose, had spent the early hours of the morning acting on a directive from your office to clear the plaza out, following reported concerns for sanitation and public safety.
As your spokeswoman put it on Friday afternoon, apparently your office had reached the conclusion that the protesters “cannot maintain the plaza in a safe condition.” I’m still not entirely sure what political calculations led you to see this peaceful assembly that way, but let me tell you what I saw at Occupy Oakland.
From the moment we arrived, my friends and I couldn’t help but be impressed by the organization, orderliness and mutual respect that pervaded the encampment.
I saw food stored in sealed plastic containers and prepared over propane flames located away from trees and tents near the information booth, a bicycle generator-powered media center, lenders library and crafts area.
I chatted with volunteers making the rounds to pick up trash and recyclables and offer first aid. I travelled through the camp on paths of wooden pallets that had been laid out to minimize the wear on our plaza.
I used the several port-a-potties donated by Oakland organizations such as the Oakland Education Association. They were far from the worst maintained facilities I’ve encountered.
I maintained a perimeter around the magnificent old oak tree in the plaza, heeding the many signs keeping the tree’s roots off limits to disturbance out of respect for our environment and our city.
I joined my friends in organizing a conflict resolution training session one evening, which garnered healthy interest and focused on, among other topics, the need for respect and solidarity with the police as fellow-members of the 99 percent of Americans who are just trying to keep a roof over their heads in our dysfunctional economy.
I listened to speakers march up one-by-one in orderly two-minute time slots to address their peers on topics ranging from the ongoing cuts to Oakland city services, to the about 25 percent of national wealth earned by the richest 1 percent of our society, to — again — the need to respect the police and media and maintain a collaborative approach with the city.
I watched city business proceed undisturbed in and out of City Hall throughout the day and evening.
I occupied Oakland’s central plaza and amphitheater with my neighbors and fellow community members for the simple reason that that is what the plaza is there for. I occupied Oakland’s central plaza to deliver the simple message that we are who it is there for. As an urban planner, it was something of a dream to see this space being used so precisely, so beautifully and so naturally for its intended purpose. That’s the Occupy Oakland I saw.
Unfortunately, you turned that dream into a nightmare at around 5 a.m. Tuesday — unfortunately, anyone at the plaza Tuesday morning or night saw something different than what I saw.
During your extended police raid, going on well into Wednesday morning, Oaklanders were met with multiple rounds of tear gas, “bean bag” rounds fired from shotguns, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, police batons, helicopter surveillance, the intermittent closure of Oakland’s City Center BART station and of City Hall, and over 100 arrests of mostly peaceful citizens exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly in a public space designed for that express purpose.
In spite of the Oakland Police Department’s directions to media to turn off their cameras and for journalists and legal observers to move out of sight from the police action taking place in the middle of the night, people around the world saw this Oakland.
However, even in the face of completely disproportionate and unprovoked hostility, the true nature of Oakland’s 99 percent continued to shine through. Oaklanders chanted “You are the 99 percent!” to the police forces even as they again ordered for citizens to disperse.
Three men were seen running back into a thick cloud of tear gas to rescue a woman whose wheelchair had become stuck in the haze. In spite of circling helicopters, nearly 2,000 Oaklanders engaged for four hours Wednesday night in a peaceful general assembly in front of City Hall and decided, through an orderly consensus-based process, to work with communitywide support to organize the first general strike in the U.S. since 1946 in the coming weeks.
Madame Mayor, what public interest is served by this brutality? Why did you choose to abandon your previously collaborative — and reciprocated — approach to my friends and neighbors in favor of this unprecedented escalation? How do you propose to justify the expense of bringing riot police from counties away to deal with a crisis of your own making?
Madame Mayor, you have chosen your side in history. Luckily, so have we!
Jacob Bintliff is a master’s candidate in city planning at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design.