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On March 30, Mumia Abu-Jamal collapsed in the prison infirmary at SCI Mahanoy from diabetic shock before being hospitalized in the ICU at Schuylkill Medical Center. Despite his serious condition, he was transferred back to the prison just two days later. The National Lawyers Guild is calling for immediate and independent medical attention for him, and on Friday, April 10, community members in Oakland will participate in a National Day to "Stand Up for Mumia" at the Federal Building.
As community members mark the one-year anniversary of the police killing of Alex Nieto, none of the four San Francisco police officers involved in Alex’s death face any charges. In response, Stop Police Impunity held a peoples’ court in front of the SFPD's Mission District station on March 23. This trial complete with a peoples’ judge, jury, and prosecutor found all four officers guilty. Demonstrators locked themselves together, and the entire block of Valencia in front of the police station was blocked for four hours.
On March 28 in Monterey, about 75 people joined a broad coalition of activists in a rally and march starting at the Monterey Wharf to protest white supremacist police brutality in Salinas and nationwide. Thirty protesters marched to Highway One, blocked all four southbound lanes, and closed the highway for 45 minutes. Eight people in total were arrested. The action was organized in the context of the killing of five unarmed Latino men since March 2014 by white Salinas police officers: Angel Ruiz; Osman Hernandez; Carlos Mejia; Frank Alvarado, Jr.; and Jaime Garcia.
Autonomous Students UCSC write: Before dawn on March 3, a group of six students at the University of California Santa Cruz went to the fishhook connecting Highways 1 to 17. Evoking the practice of highway blockades popularized during the Black Lives Matter movement, they chained themselves to aluminum trashcans filled with cement and blocked traffic for nearly five hours. The traffic jam this caused stretched over the hill to snarl Silicon Valley commutes, an act of peaceful civil disobedience that has since become the most controversial of the “96 Hours of Action” declared across the UC system for the first week of March, in protest against tuition hikes and police violence.
On March 23, coordinated actions were held statewide in California to oppose the use of solitary confinement in prisons and jails. Protests were planned for Eureka, Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, and San Jose. In Santa Cruz, community members gathered on West Cliff Drive for a rally and candlelight vigil. Organizers say future actions will continue to be held statewide on the 23rd of each month to symbolize the 23 hours per day prisoners in solitary are held in the "complete isolation" of their cells.
On March 12, the Pit River Tribe and their Native American and environmental allies optimistically left the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco following oral arguments in their long legal battle to protect the Medicine Lake Highlands from geothermal destruction and desecration. The Pit River people, the lead defendants in the case, are fighting in court to defend the Highlands, known to them as “Saht Tit Lah," an area that has been used for healing, religious ceremonies and tribal gatherings for thousands of years.
Students at UC Santa Cruz concluded four days of protests against tuition and fee increases with a campus-wide strike and shut down on March 5. Dubbed "96 Hours of Action," demonstrations were held March 2 to 5 at schools across California to highlight the relationship of racist mass incarceration to the privatization of education. Thousands of people in Santa Cruz were affected on March 3 when six students locked themselves together to block highway traffic.
Amilcar Perez-Lopez was a 21-year-old man from Guatemala, living and working in the Mission District. Amilcar and his household were facing eviction at the end of March. On February 26, plain clothes SFPD officers Craig Tiffe and Eric Reboli shot and killed Amilcar between two parked cars. In their public campaign to justify the death of Amilcar, the police have stated he was in the process of stealing a bicycle. This claim is called into question by a number of witnesses, some who say the cyclist had stolen Amilcar's phone. Witnesses have reported being intimidated and bullied by SFPD since Amilcar's murder.
Friends, neighbors, and community members held a vigil for Amilcar on March 1. Side by side with praise of Amilcar from his friends and neighbors were calls for justice in his death. Speaker after speaker connected the dots between anti-immigrant racism and the killing of Amilcar. Community members spoke of the inability of San Francisco police to work with Spanish speakers. Amilcar was not an English speaker. A number of the witnesses are also facing eviction.
Neighbors for Justice for Amilcar Perez-Lopez issue a press release on March 2 to denounce a SFPD townhall meeting and demand justice for Amilcar. The night of the killing neighbors were not allowed to leave their homes and witness the aftermath. They were told things like "lock your doors" and "get away from the windows" by the plainclothes officers. Amilcar bled to death in the street, rather than being raced to SF General's Trauma Unit just blocks away.
On March 7, people gathered at 16th and Mission and marched throughout the Mission District to protest the police killing. A banner in front of the march read, “It’s Always Justice When Police Kill.” A chant went out: "¿Qué queremos? ¡Justicia! ¿Cuando? ¡Ahora! What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”
Mission Protest of Cop Killing in SF |
 Fight For Amilcar Perez-Lopez |
Neighbors For Justice 4 Amilcar Perez-lopez |
 Sunset Vigil Held for Amilcar Perez-Lopez in The Mission |
March Against Police Violence! No One Should Die Over a Bike!
See Also:
Broken System: A response to non-indictment of Alex Nieto’s killers
A group of sixty graduate students led a teach-in and mediation at UC Berkeley’s School of Welfare on February 24 in response to racist comments made by tenured professor Steven Segal. The action was organized in support of twenty-five graduate students enrolled in Segal’s Mental Health Policy course. During class on February 10, Segal shared statistics citing Black-on-Black crime as the real cause of harm to the Black community. He then encouraged the class to join him in a rap, with lyrics that stated the movement “needed to stop scapegoating the cops.”
On February 7 an Oakland Police Department officer shot at — but missed — a man who was reportedly having a mental health crisis. Later that day, Oakland city officials bragged in a press release that OPD had not shot anybody for twenty months. However, in the last thirteen months five people have been shot and killed by law enforcement in Oakland, it just happens that they were not killed by members of the Oakland Police Department. Jacorey Calhoun was shot and killed by an Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy in August of last year.
Since January 2014, people in Oakland have been shot and killed by the CHP, Alameda County Sheriff, private security, San Leandro Police Department and most recently by the Emeryville Police Department. It would seem that nearly every local law enforcement agency — if private security can even be placed under that label — that operates in Oakland have killed somebody since last January.
In August of last year, an unarmed African-American man was shot several times and killed by a white law enforcement officer who later claimed the man was reaching into his waistband. His lifeless body was left for hours in a puddle of his own blood and the police would later claim that the man was suspected of a robbery. This incident describes the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, but it also describes the killing of Jacorey Calhoun who was shot and killed by an Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy in Oakland six days earlier.
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FireWorks writes: In September of 2014, the City of Oakland began to make attempts to displace and remove people in public plazas in the wake of the WOSP (West Oakland Specific Plan) being passed. Then, in December, as the Ferguson inspired Bay Area uprising was raging, people armed with bolt-cutters took down the fences encircling the park to the cheers of those on the streets. Wanting to know more about the anti-gentrification struggle and how it connects to the battle against police and white supremacy, we caught up with long-time Oakland organizer and militant, Linda Grant.
Yuvette Henderson was gunned down by Emeryville police officers Michelle Shepard and Warren Williams on February 3 within minutes of an incident at the Emeryville Home Depot about a block away. Concerned that Yuvette was killed because she was a Black woman, and that police agencies are involved in a massive cover-up, the Anti Police-Terror Project held a rally at Emeryville PD headquarters on February 21 before marching to the Home Depot, where activists used chains and lockboxes to shut the store down for most of the day.
Family, friends, and community supporters came together on February 14 for a candlelight vigil to honor 23-year-old Phillip Watkins, who was shot and killed by two officers with the San Jose Police Department on February 11. About one hundred people attended the vigil, and many spoke about what a positive person Phillip was, and how he changed their lives.
According to the Transgender Law Center, five transgender women of color have been violently killed within the first two months of 2015 in the United States. One murder locally has rattled the nerves of the local transgender community. On February 1, Taja Gabrielle de Jesus was stabbed repeatedly by an unknown assailant while walking down a street in the Bayview district in San Francisco. The stabbing death has mobilized the local transgender community to address their concerns with the San Francisco city government.
Approximately 200 people rallied on the steps of city hall for Transgender Tuesday on February 10. A permit was requested for the event but was denied by the SF sheriff’s department purportedly because the Board of Supervisors were meeting that day. The rally was held anyway without a permit.
 Murders Motivate Transgender Community |
Taja Gabrielle de Jesus Memorial Fund |
TransgenderLawCenter.org
In the early afternoon of February 3, Yuvette Henderson, a 38-year-old African American mother of two was shot and killed by Emeryville police on Hollis Street just inside of Oakland city limits. An employee of Home Depot in Emeryville called police reporting a shoplifter who was armed with a gun. Initially, police did not claim Yuvette had brandished a weapon when they approached her, but later said she did. Emeryville police officers Michelle Shepherd and Warren Williams both fired multiple times at Yuvette, killing her instantly. As activists who inspected the scene of the shooting suspected, a high-powered AR-15 rifle was used to kill Yuvette.
Nearly a hundred people turned out for a vigil for Yuvette Henderson that evening, marching to Home Depot where a window was broken, then chanting inside of Safeway and blocking the intersection of 40th Street and San Pablo Avenue before returning to the site of a memorial for Yuvette.
On the morning of February 10, activists gathered at the site of the memorial for Yuvette and proceeded to deliver printed questions for ExtraSpace Storage, where Yuvette was gunned down, and Home Depot, where Yuvette was accused of shoplifting and apparently some sort of altercation took place. A demand was issued for both the Emeryville and Oakland police departments to release surveillance video.
Vigil for Yuvette Henderson, Gunned Down by Emeryville Police in Oakland |
 Statement on the Emeryville Police Department's Killing of Yuvette Henderson |
Questions and Demands Surrounding the Police Killing of Yuvette Henderson |
Support Yuvette Henderson's Family
Members of Youth Alliance for Justice rallied in front of Mountain View City Hall on June 28th with the faces of victims on placards, asking that they not be forgotten. All the images were of people who were killed, seriously injured, or "disappeared" due to racism or human rights violations.
Student speakers asked, "Why should the US government be above the law?" They said the US government should join 122 other countries and belong to the UN's International Criminal Court. In addition they called for an end to police violence against people of color.
Akubundu Lott, an organizer for the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party, addressed the crowd. He said the US displays its imperialist role when it sends aid in the form of troops to countries requesting humanitarian aid. In addition, Lott said, the US has helped Israel set up an apartheid state in the Middle East.
Read More with Photos: 1 | 2
In Oakland, hundreds of people from more than two dozen groupings organized in response to the Anti Police-Terror Project’s call to come together for ninety-six hours of direct action over the Martin Luther King Day weekend. The first action announced was a protest inside Montgomery BART station in San Francisco at 7am on Friday. The weekend’s events culminated in a Jobs and Economy March for the People on Monday, January 19. Other groups organized more MLK-related events in Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, Santa Cruz, and throughout Northern California.
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