Collisions with Reality

Here’s a quick list of the reasons I’m pissed about the Anonymous protest at the BART stations yesterday:

• There have been no clear demands (such as, say, disarming the BART police and firing the higher-ups). As far as I can tell, the strategy of Anonymous (and other protest groups) is to goad the BART police into doing something yet more reactionary, and then protesting that. This is a tiresome chain of events.
• Shutting down BART is not a mere “inconvenience” for passengers. It is a serious disruption in the lives of people, many of whom do not have alternate transit options.
• Shutting down BART is not about to win you any supporters. When transit workers strike, they are making a point that BART does not run without the workers (and in any event, strikes are an increasingly unpopular tactic). When protestors shut down BART, they are making a point that they can. Which, bully for them, but they haven’t yet made me care.
• Let’s not forget that Anonymous released the personal data of over 2,000 users of myBART.org. Why should I be on their side again?
• I’m sure that many of the Anonymous hackers live and work in the Bay Area, but I don’t like an outside group coming in and treating my home like their playground.

I am not at all an expert on protests, rallies, or successful movements protesting police brutality. I will grant you that. But I have not yet seen any clear demands from Anonymous or from No Justice No Bart. I have not seen any protests at BART headquarters. I have not seen either protest group reach out to other social justice organizations in the Bay Area. All I’ve seen are groups of people trying to shut down BART, without any reason for me to join them.

Finally, I resent that attitude that if I’m against police and BART brutality I should be supporting the series of protests at the BART stations. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend.

On Thursday, BART turned off the cell phone service inside the stations in anticipation of a protest by No Justice No BART. The main source for the timing of the protest was a deleted blog post viewable via Google cache. (Alas, the cache has now expired, and I never took a screenshot.) There were a couple of details on the post that made me a bit suspicious, though. Protestors were urged to take precautions to keep the protest plans under wraps, including not linking to or emailing the web page, and one suggestion was “text the URL to trusted friends”. That last part made me laugh, but that’s when I realized there were two options:

1. The people behind No Justice No BART are idiots who have no idea how the internet works. (Given their reaction to passengers’ anger at them for disrupting rush-hour trains, this is plausible.)
2. The people behind No Justice No BART are punking us. There was never going to be a protest.

I realize that option 2 is perhaps giving them too much credit. But one blog post, and BART turns off the cell service for three hours? That is power, and that goes down in the books as a successful attempt at targeting some aspect of BART’s service. And despite the disruptive nature of the last protest, I am a hell of a lot more scared of the phone service being turned off than I am of some people chanting on a train platform.

(Meanwhile, with Anonymous maybe throwing their hats into the ring, I have never been so glad to commute by bus.)

In early June, when it was announced that Johannes Mehserle would be released from prison sometime this month, various groups planned a protest on the day of his release. Although he was released at 12:05 a.m. this morning, the protests occurred yesterday in Oakland. A few hundred people gathered at the Fruitvale BART station, listened to a few speeches, and continued on to downtown Oakland. From our home, we could track the progression of the protest by watching the police (and news?) helicopters from afar. How was this protest going to go?

One protester was arrested for graffiti. And that was it! No other vandalism, no violence, no sirens. Just a couple hundred people walking along International Blvd. But there were protests after the verdict, and after the sentencing, so why yet another one? From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Ron Cottingham, president of the Peace Officers Research Association of California, whose legal fund paid for Mehserle’s defense, said Sunday that Mehserle never received special treatment and his sentence was fair. More than two years after the shooting, he said, the protests are “accomplishing nothing.”

“Accomplishing nothing”? Not quite. The relationship between the African-American community here and the Oakland police (and perhaps the city government in general) is not great. Previous protests in this series have ended with smashed windows and hundreds arrested. But yesterday, one person was arrested for graffiti, and the city provided buses for free shuttles back to Fruitvale BART. If that’s not progress, I don’t know what is.