A COMMUNITY FORUM ON POLICE VIOLENCE
The next Monday, April 28th, there was a community forum on "Ending Police Violence at the Port and in our Communities," which was held at the First Congregational Church of Oakland. It was a full house, some 200 people.
Many of the speakers were becoming familiar to me. Some, like Sri Louise and June Brashears, were individuals who had taken part in the April 7th demonstration and were here to share their experiences of that morning. Judy Goff represented the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, Clarence Thomas and Jack Heyman represented ILWU Local 10. Joel Tena, aide to Nancy Nadel, was also there.
In addition, there were speakers from the National Lawyers Guild and the American Civil Liberties Union, as well as the Green Party, and Direct Action.
The introduction was by Rebecca Kaplan. June Brashears repeated her account of being inside the police command post, and a letter from Congresswoman Barbara Lee was read. Jack Heyman ended his talk saying that one of the demands was that the police drop charges against all who were arrested that day, wryly adding, "Including myself."
There was also a group I hadn't heard from before, the principal community group which was hosting his forum, called PUEBLO - People United for a Better Oakland. It was composed mostly of Latinos and Blacks. Many of their speakers were African American women, some of them grandmothers. Several members of this group brought up the issue of citizen abuse by Oakland police officers, abuse that continued after Mayor Jerry Brown took office.
A woman named Jill told of a time, some years ago, when she'd brought Police Chief Richard Word to their office and shown him a database on police brutality. "The names that came up," she said, "were over and over, the police officers who had continuously beat and abused people."
The chief had listened to the problem, but had apparently done nothing about it. The problem continued.
Hearing of that, I wondered how many of policemen whose names had come up over and over on that data base had also been at the docks on April 7th. Could Officer M. Powell be on that database? And what about the officers who did the actual shooting?
Gwen Hardy summarized PUEBLO's position by saying, "We have been trying to get what we would call a professional Citizens Police Review Board. We have worked diligently, and we have made some improvements," she said. "But…"
Creation of the Citizens Police Review Board had been a step in the right direction, but it wasn't being kept up. In fact, it was being incapacitated.
The meeting concluded with the showing of a half-hour documentary of that violent morning, Shots on the Docks, by Kazumi Torii and Steve Zeltzer of the Labor Video Project. It was a poignant film which put the April 7th event in perspective, with scenes of the shooting interspersed with flashes of footage from the war in Iraq.
So diverse groups, who perhaps had been hardly aware of each other's existence, were now speaking together at forums and comparing notes.