ACTIONS AGAINST OTHER WAR PROFITEERS
By the evening of the first day the world was looking askance at the Oakland Police Department, and by the end of the second day, the City Council had heard our story. Four of the eight council members were calling for an investigation, soon to be joined by a fifth. Congresswoman Barbara Lee had written a letter to Mayor Jerry Brown in which she requested a report on the actions of the police. How this might end was not at all certain, but it was immediately clear that April 7th would not be forgotten soon.
Meanwhile, Direct Action continued with plans to hold the next action the following Monday; this would be at the Chevron Texaco in San Ramon. I wondered if police there would follow the lead of the Oakland Police Department and use Tango Teams with "less-lethal" weaponry.
I didn't attend. That's because I'd been summoned for jury duty. That morning I anxiously watched the TV news as televised reports came in, showing scenes from San Ramon. Several hundred protesters showed up for the event and things appeared to be going well as I went to the courtroom.
The next morning's Chronicle reported that the protest at Chevron Texaco "was generally peaceful with protesters and police praising each other for restraint." It was a relief to hear that the San Ramon police had chosen not to follow the lead of the Oakland Police Department. It's also possible that Chevron Texaco had some input on the matter and decided that they'd prefer to be shut down for a day than get involved in a Port of Oakland type of event.
The week after that a protest action at Lockheed Martin in Sunnyvale was also achieved without violence. There were no reports from anywhere else in the country of police using Tango Teams against protesters - at least not for the moment.
Nevertheless, the events of April 7th had made us acutely aware that our First Amendment rights were in danger. Oakland was where those rights had been violated most egregiously, and so Oakland was where we had to defend them. We had to show that we would not be silenced.
I waited to hear what our next move would be.