Occupy Oakland participant Joseph
Briones was arrested on Feb. 8. His crime? Walking through a public
square.
The Alameda County Superior Court has
issued a “stay-away” order for Briones and 10 other Occupy
protesters. These individuals are barred from entering Oscar Grant
Park, the public plaza that formerly housed the Occupy Oakland
encampment and that sits directly under City Hall. It is here that
Briones was arrested. The protesters are also banned from entering
the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center, a public building.
The court’s excuse for criminalizing
the presence of the occupiers is that they have been charged with
participating in “illegal” actions on the Jan. 28 Occupy Oakland
Move-In Day, during which occupiers attempted to turn three different
foreclosed buildings into a community center. The police responded
with such brutality—launching tear gas canisters and flash bang
grenades at a crowd that included many families and children—that
some protesters were forced to defend themselves and their loved
ones.
The media, of course, spun this into a
tale of police being forced to contain a “riot.” Such misleading
coverage enables the cops to get away with arresting protesters under
such charges as “battery” and “remaining at the scene of a
riot,” the misdemeanor charges for which Briones was arrested.
The “stay-away” order under which
Briones was arrested appears to be similar to “gang injunctions,”
which Oakland and many other cities have used to target alleged gang
members. Gang injunctions have been in use since the 1980s and
prohibit accused or alleged gang members from associating with one
another in public, congregating in specified public areas and
engaging in other perfectly legal activities, such as wearing certain
clothes or carrying a screwdriver.
The constitutionality of gang
injunctions has been challenged and upheld in the courts. However, in
a dissenting opinion, California Supreme Court Justice Stanley
Mosk warned, “The majority would permit our cities to
close off entire neighborhoods to Latino
youths who have done nothing more than dress in blue or black
clothing or associate with others who do so; they would authorize
criminal penalties for ordinary, nondisruptive acts of walking or
driving through a residential neighborhood with a relative or a
friend.” As of 2010, California has over 150 gang injunctions in
place.
On Oct. 31, 2011, a state appeals court
upheld an injunction against 15 alleged gang members in Oakland.
Under the injunction, these 15 alleged gang members are prohibited
from meeting in the neighborhood, and have a 10 p.m. curfew that
allows them to go out only for work, school, religious worship or a
commercial entertainment event. Violators can be jailed for contempt
of court.
The struggle against the gang injunction in Oakland continues, as
opponents state that the injunctions penalize young people for
innocent conduct, encourage racial profiling and require little proof
of criminal activity.
Once again, the Occupy movement has shined a
spotlight on supposedly ordinary and accepted conduct by the state.
Last fall, police brutality against occupiers from Wall Street to
Seattle to UC Davis and elsewhere, highlighted the daily reality of
people in oppressed communities. Now the Oakland district attorney is
utilizing a dubiously constitutional gang injunction strategy against
Occupy Oakland. The Occupy movement is fighting for the very survival
of the 99 percent. The 1 percent and its state apparatus will use
every tool at its disposal to try to stop it. The struggle continues!
