Open
World Conference of Workers
In Defense of Trade Union Independence & Democratic Rights
Charges, Lawsuits and Investigations:
April 7 Reverberates Through Oakland
By STEVE STALLONE
(reprinted from the July 2003 issue of the ILWU Dispatcher, the
official monthly newspaper of the International Longshore and Warehouse
Union)
Fallout from the unprovoked police attack on anti-war demonstrators and
longshore workers at the Port of Oakland April 7 keeps piling up. The
injured are seeking redress. Law enforcement officials are seeking to
blame the victims. Politicians, protesters, workers and the media are
seeking answers. They want to know how a simple, non-violent picket became
a bloody battleground.
The flurry of activity comes more than two months after several hundred
anti-war protesters set up picket lines in front of the APL and SSA
terminal gates early that Monday morning. They acted to highlight what
they claimed was "war profiteering" by the companiesAPL has a
contract with the U.S. government to ship war materiel to Iraq and SSA was
recently awarded a $4.8 million contract to operate the Iraqi port of Umm
Qasr. As ILWU longshore workers stood by awaiting an arbitrator's decision
on the validity of the picket, police moved preemptively to disperse the
crowd. They began indiscriminately shooting so-called "less than
lethal" munitionswooden bullets, stinger grenades spewing rubber
bullets and lead-shot filled bean bagsinjuring dozens of protesters and
nine workers, some seriously enough to require hospitalization and
surgery.
Three days before the press conference where civil rights attorneys
representing the protesters and workers planned to unveil their lawsuit
accusing the police of violating their constitutional rights, the Alameda
County District Attorney's office launched a first strike. On June 23
prosecutors filed charges against 24 demonstrators and ILWU Local 10
Business Agent Jack Heyman. Although police have tried to justify their
use of force by accusing protesters of throwing rocks and bottles at them,
none were charged with that. Instead they face misdemeanor charges of
failure to disperse and interfering with a business. Heyman is charged
with failure to comply with a police officer's order and resisting an
officer when he did not immediately move his car as told. The defendants
are scheduled to be arraigned in Oakland Municipal Court July 21.
ILWU Local 10, all nine Local 10 members injured in the melee, and 31
demonstrators who were hurt filed a civil rights class action lawsuit
against the Oakland Police Dept. and the City of Oakland June 26. In their
filing they allege police use of dangerous munitions against the
protesters was specifically "motivated by the political content,
message and viewpoint of the demonstrators." The attack on the
longshore workers, they say, stemmed from police "hostility, animus
and discrimination against the ILWU as an organization." They further
allege the police acted "for the purpose of interfering with [the
demonstrators'] First Amendment rights" of free speech and assembly.
By those actions, the lawsuit claims, the police also violated their
Fourth Amendment rights to be "free from unreasonable seizures and
excessive and/or arbitrary force" and their Fourteenth Amendment
rights to "not be deprived of liberty without due process of
law" and "to equal protection under the law." The suit also
alleges violations of similar protections under the California state
Constitution and the state civil code.
The lawsuit seeks an injunction against the OPD to restrain it from using
"excessive, indiscriminate and/or arbitrary force" at future
demonstrations in Oakland. It also seeks monetary damages for medical
expenses, wage loss, etc., as well as punitive damages and costs of the
suit.
At the press conference announcing the lawsuit, Rachel Lederman, attorney
with the National Lawyers Guild, said that in her organization's 20 years
of providing legal support to demonstrations in the Bay Area, they had
never experienced the level of unprovoked violence they saw that day. This
included violence specifically directed at legal observers taking notes
and videotaping the events.
"For the first time legal observers had lethal force used against
them for observing police action," Lederman said.
Six of the 10 NLG legal observers were shot by police or run into by cops
on motorcycles and three were arrested. Lederman held up the notebook one
of the observers was using which, she said, was splattered with blood from
a shot he took in the head.
Willow Rosenthal, a protester with West Oakland Residents Against the War,
said she was trying to leave the demonstration and go home when police
charge the retreating crowd and started firing. She was hit in the back of
the calf at close range with a wooden bullet. She had massive internal
bleeding and a 4"x5' piece of skin had to be surgically removed. She
was hospitalized for 10 days and laid up and out of work for weeks in the
most severe pain she has ever known, she said.
"I have permanent nerve damage to a large part of my leg and
permanent disfigurement," Rosenthal said. "These police actions
are calculated to frighten people from expressing their views."
Local 10 longshore worker Billy Kepoo said he was standing by the SSA
terminal gates on his way to work when he was shot.
"What I witnessed was horror. What I felt was pain," Kepoo said.
Police shot Kepoo in the hand with a wooden bullet, breaking his thumb so
badly the bone was sticking through the skin. He had surgery that evening
and was fitted with a cast. He was out of work for two months and his
employer, SSA, denied his workers' comp claim, leaving he, his wife and
four children without a paycheck all that time.
"We're more than protesters and workers," he said. "We're
people with families."
Given the OPD's long history of excessive force lawsuits and costly
settlements, city officials could not ignore the call from community
groups, the ILWU and the Alameda County Central Labor Council for an
independent investigation into the events of April 7 and the alleged
police use of excessive force. So at its June 17 meeting the Oakland City
Council voted to establish an independent five-person panel to carry on
such a probe. The panelists, selected by Oakland City Attorney John Russo,
include three former judges, a civil rights attorney and a former
assistant police chief from Washington, D.C.
The panel is charged with interviewing participants in the April 7 protest
and police who were there. The panel is scheduled to complete its work
over the summer and present a final report on its findings in September.
The panel will take testimony behind closed doors, but a verbatim
transcript will be available to the public, City Attorney Russo told The
Dispatcher. The panel will not have subpoena power or the power to compel
witnesses to testify under oath, Russo added.
"We didn't want to get bogged down in legal battles over
subpoenas," he said. "We need to get through this in a timely
fashion."
But that process may not provide all the answers the ILWU wants. While the
city has instructed the police to cooperate fully with the investigation,
it has no such clout over APL and SSA managers. The ILWU knows those
employers and Port of Oakland officials met secretly with police several
days before the demonstration to plot out how to handle it. After last
year's bitter contract battle many in the union can't help but be
suspicious of what kind of collusion may have gone on between the
employers and the police. A few facts feed that suspicion. The police were
made aware of the arbitration process, but they attacked protesters and
workers alike before it could workand an SSA official was spotted at the
police command center set up at the nearby intermodal yard during the
action.
Oakland's only daily newspaper, The Oakland Tribune, did not wait for the
city bureaucracy to ask why the police came to the protest armed and
firing. In an investigative story published May 18, the Tribune portrays a
police department in lockstep with Attorney General John Ashcroft-Patriot
Act paranoia, purposefully blurring the distinction between legitimate
dissent and terrorism.
According to the Tribune, the OPD received an "intelligence"
report from the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center (CATIC) April
2, five days before the demonstration. The report from CATIC, a state
agency staffed with personnel from the FBI, the Defense Intelligence
Agency and other federal, state and local agencies, warned the police that
the protesters might turn violent. The Tribune's analysis of documents
obtained through open government laws led the paper to conclude that CATIC
"blended solid facts, innuendo and inaccurate information about
anti-war protesters expected at the port." CATIC selectively gleaned
information from activist web sites, list serves and intercepted email
correspondence of ILWU members to support its pre-conceived notions of the
protest and protesters.
The Tribune quotes CATIC spokesman Mike Van Winkle justifying his agency's
COINTELPRO-style tactics.
"[I]f you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause
that's being fought against is international terrorism, you might have
terrorism at that (protest)," said Van Winkle, of the state Justice
Department. "You can almost argue that a protest against that is a
terrorist act."
Later in the story Van Winkle says, "I've heard terrorism described
as anything that is violent or has an economic impact, and shutting down a
port certainly would have some economic impact. Terrorism isn't just bombs
going off and killing people."
As an example of the kind of "intelligence" CATIC provided the
OPD, the Tribune reported that CATIC noted that the activist group the
Ruckus Society planned on joining the protest. The report failed to
mention that the Ruckus Society "specifically shuns violence and
states its mission as `nonviolent direct action' repeatedly on its Web
site," the Tribune said. Instead CATIC concluded that because Ruckus
Society members were involved in the WTO Seattle demonstrations (along
with 50,000 other people) and there was violence in Seattle, there was a
serious enough threat of violence at the port to raise red flags with the
OPD.
As the lead plaintiff in the class action lawsuit, Local 10 is most
concerned that there be changes in OPD procedures on handling
demonstrations, said the local's president, Henry Graham.
"We come from the community and next time it could be us being
attacked on a picket line by police using the guise of port
security," Graham said. "Last time they made allegations that
they didn't know if there was a terrorist there or not. They could us any
excuse to shoot at us."
Anti-war protesters and ILWU members returned to the APL and SSA terminals
at the Port of Oakland May 12 to reassert their right to demonstrate. All
but one terminal at the port closed for the second shift that day and
after all the bad press the police received for their previous
overreaction, they kept their distance from the demonstration. The
protesters held a spirited and peaceful march and rally, and went home
satisfied they made their point and stopped business as usual just by
their presence.