“This is football, not Hollywood,” lamented right-wing reactionary Rudy Giuliani following Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, California. The former New York City Mayor was up in arms over the half-time show performance of Beyoncé Knowles’ new song “Formation.” The music video for the song draws attention to the devastation of post-Katrina New Orleans as well as systemic racist police terror.
Giuliani stated later on a Fox News broadcast, “I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers, who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive.”
Understanding the origins of the police in the United States as vigilante slave patrols dispels Giuliani’s mythical hero-cop narrative, while videos of the San Francisco Police Department’s firing-squad execution of Mario Woods in December of 2015 show how the police regularly take the lives of Black people instead of protect them.
Efforts towards the struggle for justice following Woods’ murder took the national stage at the Super Bowl and went viral with the courageous actions of the Last 3% Coalition activists Ronnisha Johnson and Rheema Calloway. The two flagged down Beyoncé ’s back-up dancers and had them take a picture with their fists in the air while holding a sign reading, “Justice 4 Mario Woods.” Johnson said of the action, “We know San Francisco is capitalizing off the momentum of the Super Bowl at the expense of the poor Black communities that reside here.” The Last 3% Coalition represents the barely three percent Black population left in San Francisco after many years of intense gentrification.
San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee shelled out $5 million to host the Super Bowl despite the game actually taking place forty miles outside of the City at the new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. San Francisco did however host the majority of festivities with ritzy celebrity dinners, concerts, and a giant corporate encampment that took over a section of downtown, hailed as “Super Bowl City.” Months prior to its construction, Mayor Lee promised to remove the homeless in the area, a plan he then moved forward with using hundreds of police officers to issue citations and guard his multi-milllion dollar investment.
The media attention given to the grand opening of “Super Bowl City” was overshadowed by the protest march onto its front gates led by the Justice 4 Mario Woods Coalition. Beginning at Union Square, six hundred people in solidarity with the Coalition took over both lanes of Market Street where they were menaced by cops in riot gear, some of whom were armed with assault weapons. Loudspeaker announcements from police vehicles declared the march to be unlawful but were drowned out by chants from protesters.
Later in the week the Coalition on Homelessness, in conjunction with one of San Francisco’s 2015 mayoral candidates known as “Broke-Ass Stuart,” organized a “Tackle Homelessness” rally and march that drew over a thousand people and was faced with a major militarized police presence. The demands of the protest were for Mayor Lee to immediately invest the $5 million he spent on the Super Bowl to house homeless residents, to use “publicly-owned assets” such as empty buildings or unused land to “create monitored programs that support secure sleep, hygienic toileting, and access to transition/healing services,” and to direct all funds used for law enforcement and anti-homeless laws into housing and support services.
The plan of action was to set up a tent-camp next to “Super Bowl City” to expose the criminalization of the City’s poor, but it was SFPD thugs themselves that provided insight into their role as shock troops of gentrification as they announced, “The minute you put the tents on the ground, you’re in violation of ‘illegal encampment.’ We will confiscate your tents.” Imagine the vulnerable position the homeless on the streets are in when approached by police that are not held accountable by anyone watching or filming them.
Statistics on homelessness provided by organizers revealed that there is one shelter bed for every six homeless people in the City, while 8,000 homeless households are on the waiting list for public housing, 3,300 children in the City are homeless, 61 percent of the homeless have disabilities, and in the last year 11,000 citations have been issued for resting.
While people were in the streets demanding the shifting of City resources to be budgeted towards the poor, a gold carpet was being installed inside
City Hall. Mayor Lee was scheduled the next night to host the billionaire owners of the various NFL franchises and besides the gold carpet that was
literally rolled out for them on the steps, thousands of dollars were spent on security alone. The Justice 4 Mario Woods Coalition learned of the dinner as their weekly meeting was set to begin, and swiftly moved the meeting into a full-on protest at the steps of City Hall.
Representing the Justice 4 Mario Woods Coalition, Minister Christopher Muhammad of the Nation of Islam proclaimed, “How dare the NFL owners go and have dinner at City Hall when there’s blood on the hands of those in City Hall…San Francisco is a dangerous place for people of color. We know Black lives matter in San Francisco, they matter on the football field…they don’t matter outside of sport and play.”
Hundreds of people throughout the Bay Area carried on protests throughout the weekend leading up to the Super Bowl. Ranging from a march through the San Francisco airport led by the Anti-Police Terror Project to dozens of youth rallying at Cesar Chavez Plaza Park in San Jose, the messages were the same. People are sick and tired of fighting to merely survive while the rich celebrate luxury lifestyles reaped at their expense.
As long as City, State, and Federal budgets continue to pour money into police departments, luxury development, privatization schemes, and corporate subsidies, there will be no justice for poor, working, and oppressed people in San Francisco or anywhere else in the country. The masses of people struggling to live under capitalism must take bold unified action against the obstacles of racist police terror, austerity, and the dictatorship of the rich to uproot this criminal system and its stranglehold on the rest of the world.
