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Enough already with tasers for San Francisco police!
April 13, 2013
San Franciscans working from 2004 to 2013 to keep tasers out of SFPD officers’ hands as they “talk down” people in public crisis are today celebrating SFPD Chief Greg Suhr’s Wednesday, April 10, decision to drop his “less lethal” taser proposal for San Francisco cops. Idriss Stelley Foundation Program Director Jeremy Miller affirmed: “The Police Commission should be commended for engaging this issue seriously in a manner that befits their political responsibility. Tasers torture and kill. They are unaccountable weapons for unaccountable officers. But it was the people of San Francisco who forced Suhr’s hand.”
ACLU opposes SFPD taser deployment
January 5, 2013
A Dec. 4, 2012, ACLU letter to SF Mayor Ed Lee urged rejecting any SFPD proposal “to deploy tasers or other conductive energy devices”. The letter emphasizes that costly tasers would generate heavy legal fees from officer overuse and abuse, posing serious injury and death risks, especially to SFPD’s targeted populations: people in public mental health crisis and people of color.
SFPD chief invites the community into the taser debate, shuts down people of color!
October 31, 2012
Police Chief Greg Suhr scheduled six community forums in September and October to discuss tasers replacing guns in mental health crisis situations. When a citizen group kept showing up at hearings asking questions about hundreds of taser deaths and maimings and supporting SFPD Crisis Intervention Team training in verbal de-escalation, Chief Suhr cancelled the community forums.
My mind is pre-occupied with racism in ‘Occupy’
November 4, 2011
Mrs. Bowie said she had been attacked by a white supremacist faction of Occupiers and then subsequently attacked by the police. I asked if there had been white power issues at the camp and was met by a reluctance to broach the topic that was echoed by the next half dozen people I would speak to. A few made silent or cryptic affirmations that this phenomenon was occurring.
Inside a housing takeover
July 29, 2011
For 17 hours – 4:45 p.m. Monday, July 4, until 9:45 a.m. Tuesday, July 5 – San Francisco Homes Not Jails took direct action conducting a second open housing occupation at the long-empty Mission District Sierra Hotel.
San Francisco police claim Black youth shot himself … say what!
July 26, 2011
Kenneth Harding Jr., 19, was shot and killed on July 16 as he ran away from two police officers interrogating him for his alleged failure to pay a $2 fare for a ride on the city’s light-rail train. Incredibly, after originally admitting that two officers shot and killed Harding, the new story from the police some days later is that the young man must have killed himself.
Hunters Point is home!
June 8, 2011
Standing Up for Ours Tours will launch Sunday, June 26, 1-5 p.m., at Middlepoint and West Point in Hunters Point to listen to and support young people of color – plus poetry, food, entertainment and fun. “Hunters Point is home. It’s what’s made me and what nourished me,” says Jamal Modica of Tough House Project.
Partisan resistance: Anatomy of a takeover at a health care corporation
May 23, 2011
On Monday, April 11, in San Francisco, I felt it was not a romantic notion that my videographer Scott and I were embedded among partisan guerrillas deep in enemy territory. We were all joined together in a viciously difficult corporate class war.
50,000 volts a zap
April 3, 2011
“If, at 50,000 volts a zap, five officers shoot their tasers at the same time, the subject gets a 250,000-volt output – equal to the electrical charge inside the death penalty chamber,” Mesha Monge-Irizarry, a leading advocate for police accountability, explained.
Why did SFPD shoot Randal Dunklin in his wheelchair?
January 29, 2011
As the police continue to shoot unarmed and mentally disabled people, including a man in a wheelchair, the community is speaking out against these incidents of excessive force. On Martin Luther King Day, Monday, Jan. 17, about 150 San Franciscans and Bay Area activists expressed their outrage with a march and rally in San Francisco.
Black Friday 2010 ‘Housing Harvest’ occupation
December 6, 2010
On Black Friday 2010, at 16th and Mission in San Francisco, Creative Housing Liberation held a “Housing Harvest” rally with songs and speeches followed by a tour of four vacant neighborhood properties. Creative Housing Liberation would like to invite “all kinds of folks, including families,” to be involved in future housing occupations and demonstrations.