A few hundred people showed up in the cold last night at Frank Ogawa Plaza to protest the death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis. The “emergency march and rally” was called by Cat Brooks, who may have been disappointed that it was largely peaceful, to judge from the incendiary tweets she posted prior to the event. She spent days online stoking anger and resentment following the Memphis incident, posting pictures of violent masked demonstrators raising clenched fists—the same “black block” whose mayhem has torn downtown apart on previous occasions dating back to Occupy Oakland days. She called cops “devils,” as the Black Panthers used to do, and referred to her critics as “mfs” (mother fuckers).
She accused “Bay Area cops” of trying “2 front [pretend] like they ain’t just as brutal” as the Memphis police who beat Nichols. She asked, “Any Black folks feeling safe out there with the popo [police]?” And then the summons:“BAY AREA!!! Show up and out. From TN to da Bay.”
This incoherent hysteria certainly sounds like incitement to violence, so we can only be thankful that, for whatever reason—the cold, the presence of police in force—the demonstrators refrained from it.
So what did the march accomplish? First, it was a Constitutional and morally rightful protest of the behavior of the Memphis cops, whom the Tennessee and possibly U.S. justice systems will now deal with, as is proper. That was the march’s overall purpose. Policy-wise, little seems to have emerged from it. The morning news today reported one concrete proposal from protesters: a stop to traffic enforcement in Oakland. Indeed, yesterday there was a rumor circulating that OPD has ceased all traffic enforcement. This turns out not to be true, but OPD’s Traffic Enforcement Squad has been severely reduced, from four squads to one, meaning that only eight officers and one sergeant work around the clock on traffic enforcement for a city of 78 square miles, nearly twice the size of San Francisco.
I don’t want to live in a city in which cops are unable to stop and cite drivers who plow through stop signs, speed on city streets, and otherwise put at risk the health and safety of innocent pedestrians and other drivers. Yet with the current makeup of the Oakland City Council, and the Mayor’s office, not to mention the District Attorney’s office (Pamela Price was at Cat Brooks’ march and rally), we may be looking at an evolving situation in which the police are gradually forbidden to intervene in instances of crime. It started with a refusal to crack down on shoplifting, or on illegal camping on public property. It now may extend to driving violations. And then what? It’s very hard to avoid the conclusion that Cat Brooks wants to prevent the police from having almost any role in public safety—or, even better, for the police to be abolished, and herself to become the Supreme Arbiter of Law in Oakland.
Steve Heimoff