A month has passed since Anaheim police shot at three Latino men in one week (two of them unarmed), killing two, and still local government is dodging demands for real justice. Anaheim police recently increased repressive measures under thinly veiled racist justifications, while the Anaheim City Council has attempted to avoid the issue of blatant racism and disenfranchisement.
In the midst of this, AnonFiles.com leaked an explosive document. OC Weekly and Orange Juice Blog reported that the document detailed Anaheim police operations intended to quell demonstrations July 27-30. Liberation News acquired the document through the Orange Juice Blog’s own link. The contents of the document highlight the searing truth about the Anaheim police and their role in the Anaheim community.
Police army mobilized
The document details a “multi-day mutual aid plan” with aid provided by nearly 10 law enforcement agencies from throughout Southern California.
The Orange County Sheriff’s Department, California Highway Patrol and Huntington Beach police offered 10 helicopters and over a dozen personnel for air support despite the fact that Anaheim is one of the only agencies in Orange County that already has helicopters. Officers were imported from the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department and the La Habra, La Palma, Brea, Placentia and Fullerton police departments. Additional SWAT teams were provided by the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and North and West County SWAT.
The report identified 10 ‘hot zones,’ primarily working-class Latino communities, where police patrols would be escalated throughout the operation from 8 a.m. on July 27 to 8 a.m. on July 30, although the main protest was only planned for mid-day July 28.
These tactics are an intensification of the same racist practices that drew the community into the streets in the first place. At any time, a ‘code Charlie’ would unleash the full force of the above listed departments on the people of Anaheim, and the National Guard had already been alerted in case the police army was incapable of smashing the anticipated rebellion.
The demonstrations on July 28 and 29 were infiltrated by at least half a dozen plainclothes police, according to the report, who were instructed to “coordinate arrests.” A “criminal intelligence unit” was tasked with monitoring participants and groups in order to gain intelligence about the activities of the weekend. Further surveillance was provided by units stationed on rooftops, “video downlink capabilities” of air support and videotaping of demonstrators on the ground.
A memorandum to firefighters instructed them to wear “full body armor” and to utilize “hit and-run firefighting” with “limited and no interior attack on structure fires.” In other words, they were told to “let it burn!”
Mickey Mouse employs Anaheim thugs
The experiences of protesters that weekend showed that the police act as thugs for the capitalist class, the richest of the 1 percent. On July 28, as hundreds of protesters marched from an Anaheim police station toward Disneyland to bring their message to a large, international audience, they were repeatedly charged by cops on horseback, and vehicles were driven through their march with total disregard for safety. These tactics were repeated in the hopes of intimidating the protesters as they extended their march.
“When they saw they weren’t going to stop us from marching down the street, they decided to sprint far ahead of us, even out of sight, and that is when we got the report that they had moved ahead to defend Disneyland by blocking a small bridge that leads to the theme park,” said Mitch Strand, an activist with the ANSWER Coalition (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism).
Toward the end of the march the group was divided by cops on horseback charging and forcing the front end in one direction as others were forced to take a different route. Nine people were arrested after the crowd was fired on with beanbag rounds and pepper balls.
A demonstration that gathered at Disneyland the following day was met with a massive police presence. Cops adorned with military fatigues carried an array of military-grade weapons.
The message to demonstrators was clear: Threatening Disney profits would not be tolerated in the city of Anaheim, where over 40,000 people visit Disneyland and California Adventure theme parks daily. In one year, at least 17 million people from around the world visit the parks, with admissions revenue alone in the billions. Disney is attentive to the situation in Anaheim. A repeat of the 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion—sparked by the acquittal of four police officers involved in the brutal beating of Black motorist Rodney King—could spell economic catastrophe for the corporation raking in $40 billion a year.
Fear of the people
But what this leaked document and the actions of the Anaheim police and other agencies reveal more than the potential repressive power of the state is the potential revolutionary power of the people.
In times of economic crisis, the naked class war inherent in capitalist society is revealed to the workers as education, health care, housing, pensions and wages are lowered across the board. The repressive forces of the state expand to protect ruling-class power by intimidating and harassing the most oppressed sectors of the population. The poorest communities are occupied by police who kill with impunity as we have seen in the epidemic of police brutality that brought the Anaheim community into the streets.
No one, not even the intelligence agencies of the ruling class, can predict what conditions will create a revolutionary situation or what incident can spark a revolutionary upsurge. The ruling class of Tunisia learned this lesson when a street vendor’s self-immolation roused the working masses. The swiftness with which political power can be challenged and even overturned in times of economic crisis makes the U.S. ruling class ready and willing to militarize civil society.
Far from discouraging the movement, the advancing militarization of the police and civil society should be taken as a sign of the coming intensification of class war. In this war, the power lies with the organized working-class, which can bring society to a complete halt by refusing to further enrich the ruling class through its labor. One of the scariest parts of the Occupy Wall Street movement to the capitalist class was the fact that it showed the masses the very simple ratio of an overwhelming 99 to 1. That is, 99 workers to every 1 capitalist, a ratio that spells certain victory to the masses in the event of a revolutionary crisis, if the workers are properly organized and led.
Historical development of police militarization
It would be a mistake to believe that the militarization of the police began with the current economic crisis or even the opportunity presented to the government by the Sept. 11 attacks. On the contrary, the stepped-up militarization of police began at least 20 years prior to Sept. 11 in the late 1970s.
A new technological revolution started at that time that led to the mass replacement of human labor with machines in manufacturing industries. The 1980s and 1990s was also a period when production was shifted to oppressed nations where the basis had been laid for large-scale industrial development and the capitalists could reap super profits by paying wages that were far less than those paid to workers in the United States.
Many decent-paying manufacturing jobs in the United States had been won by Black and Latino workers after decades of successful struggle within the labor movement and broader society against institutional racism. Now, entire sectors of the working class were economically devastated.
Gang activity, and especially for-profit gang activity such as drug sales, grew exponentially within Black and Latino communities in parallel with the long-term decline of U.S. industry. Unable and unwilling to reverse this trend, the capitalist class found ways to profit from a deepening of racist oppression by launching the “war on drugs.”
This came about in the form of expanded police departments and swelling local government budgets to “stop gangs and drug sales,” along with the explosive growth of the “prison-industrial complex.” Housing small-time drug offenders, whether selling or using, soon became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The “war on drugs” is a farce as proven by recent revelations that Wachovia and Bank of America knowingly laundered billions of dollars from the drug trade just in the last few years and not a single banker has been imprisoned for it.
Large-scale military tactics and occupations, such as “Operation Hammer,” were carried out within Black and Latino communities in Los Angeles from 1987 to 1990. Operation Hammer involved the wholesale rounding up of young Black and Latino people within a given neighborhood, usually about 150-400 people at a time, to be searched, harassed, humiliated, beaten and arrested.
Weekly headlines in the Los Angeles Times reported hundreds of youth “nailed.” After several years of these tactics and arrests numbering in the tens of thousands, only a handful of convictions resulted, proving the aim of Operation Hammer was not to eradicate gangs but to terrorize entire communities.
The 1992 Los Angeles Rebellion was deeply rooted within the experiences of Operation Hammer as much as it was about the acquittal of the cops charged with brutalizing Rodney King.
The reaction within the ruling class and the state to the widespread rebellion in 1992 was not to address the problems of poor communities but instead to further clamp down and build up the police as a military force. The Pentagon’s “1033 Program” was established in 1994 to oversee the distribution of excess military weapons and vehicles to local police departments. In the past 17 years of the program’s existence, millions of pieces of military equipment have been given to local police departments, including M-16 rifles, MP5 machine guns, bazookas, grenade launchers, planes, Black Hawk helicopters, Huey helicopters, armored personnel carriers, body armor, night vision goggles, sound cannons and even several fully armored tanks with turrets utilizing .50 caliber machine guns.
Every year since 1994, hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons and equipment have been handed to local police departments. The “1033 Program” was temporarily suspended in June due to an investigative report in Arizona that revealed some weapons and equipment had been given to third parties after being received by local departments. The ongoing audit has revealed that many departments around the country have kept no records of the massive amounts of military weaponry received.
‘Operation Halo’ is a war crime
The heightened militarization of police and decades of racist oppression, far from defeating the community of Anaheim, has sparked an ongoing militant movement for justice. Members of the community and organizations around Southern California have shut down police stations, taken over streets and City Council meetings and at times clashed with police.
The response of the Anaheim police to the Latino community for their dissent came in the form of collective punishment and indiscriminate mass arrests—defined by the Geneva Convention as war crimes.
On the same day that Anaheim police killed Manuel Diaz, the first of three victims that week in Anaheim, the community came out to protest and demand answers. It was met with severe repression caught on camera and played around the country. An attack dog was unleashed on the peaceful demonstration made up almost entirely of women and small children. Pepper balls, bean bags and rubber bullets were fired at the protesters, injuring a dozen small children. This part of the story is largely ignored in the corporate media today, but this violence served as collective punishment aimed at the community for defying police repression.
Community activists refused to back down, and the punishment intensified on Aug. 10 when “Operation Halo” was carried out throughout Latino communities, including the street where Manuel Diaz was murdered. The raids were labeled “gang busts,” but according to residents, many of the 44 individuals rounded up and arrested on various felony charges were not gang members.
Residents were further angered by a flyer handed out during the raid that claimed the police were helping the community by arresting and brutalizing their fathers, brothers, neighbors and friends. The show of force was identical in nature to the “mutual aid plan” leaked in connection with the protests weeks before.
Operation Halo consisted of cops kicking down doors with guns drawn. It was intended to terrorize a sector of the working class and disrupt ongoing organizing activity by warning the community that worse repression would come with their continued efforts. In weeks of sustained protest, nearly 100 arrests were made.
Police brutality is the tip of the iceberg
Demands from the movement include the arrest of killer cops and the establishment of some form of community control over the police. In addition, the local community has moved beyond these concerns to address other issues of systemic racism, especially disenfranchisement, by demanding districting for local elections to ensure the Latino population is represented. Currently over half of the 336,000 residents of Anaheim are Latino, but there is seldom any elected official from the community. The City Council rejected by one vote the recent bid for districting despite widespread support.
The current structure of at-large elections in Anaheim ensures that the wealthy Anaheim Hills area dominates local politics. Anaheim Hills is predominantly white with a median income of about $120,000, according to U.S. census data.
Canyon High, an Anaheim Hills high school, recently came under fire for promoting an event called “Seniores and Senioritas” for the past three years where white students come dressed in sombreros, or worse, when last year they came dressed as pregnant teens and gang members. These events were promoted by a school administration that is now being forced into “sensitivity training” by the school district. This kind of racism is normal in the community from which most of the Anaheim political establishment comes.
Toward victory
The local community, police brutality activists and bereaved family members in Anaheim have developed a united front as well as ties to movements in Fullerton and Downey. This front continues to struggle against police brutality in Anaheim with weekly demonstrations and packed attendance at City Council meetings.
The militarized response to dissent with raids and heightened patrols has turned the city into a battleground of the class war. History has shown time and time again that movements for social justice and revolutionary movements can grow even when the repressive state is used against the people. The true class character of our government is exposed every time the police shoot children with rubber bullets while crooked bankers walk.
The ongoing movement against police brutality in Anaheim and around the country is one part of a growing working-class fight-back. Each day that the ruling class shows increasing fear by preparing state forces is another day closer to working-class victory.
