Here on Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, I'm Amy Goodman
with Nermeen Shaikh.
Before dawn on Monday morning, hundreds of police and riot gear raided the Occupy Oakland
encampment in order to evict peaceful protesters.
It was the second time the police had evicted protesters.
A similar raid was conducted on October 25th.
On Monday, more than 30 people who chose to remain as an act of civil disobedience were
arrested.
Later in the day, Mayor Jean Kwan's chief legal adviser resigned over what he called
the quote, tragically unnecessary police raid.
I visited the campment on Sunday prior to the raid.
It was a peaceful Sunday morning.
One of the people who happened to be right in front of Oakland City Hall at the Occupy
Oakland encampment talked about why he was there.
Hi, my name is Ali.
How y'all doing?
Hi.
Have you been here from the beginning?
Pretty much.
Pretty much.
And what do you want to see happen here?
There's a lot of things.
I'm from Oakland.
You know what I'm saying?
So for me to see these changes, it's not a Wall Street thing.
It's not a bank thing.
But it's a social thing.
You know what I'm saying?
Everything that's been going on in Oakland, the homicides, schools being closed down,
libraries being shut down, teachers being cut off, public workers getting laid off, work
for loans, everything that the city is supposed to be taking care of its own is not being
done.
That's what I'm here for.
It's trying to get them to start taking care of us as the people in Oakland, California.
This is my nuke.
This is a small thing right now, if we look at it from Oakland's perspective.
But this is not small.
We are a role model for the whole world, and that's what's going on.
And how are the police dealing with us at this point?
Can I be frank?
I don't care.
I want to say it in different words, but I just, I don't care.
What the police think.
I don't care what Mayor Kwan think.
I don't think what any politician think about what we're doing here.
Because what we're doing here is starting something new, saying I don't deal with
any type of politics situations or none of that.
What I'm dealing with is this encampment of Oscar, Oscar, Oscar Grand Plaza.
Okay.
That's the only thing, that's the only my concern.
And why is it called Oscar Grand Plaza?
I mean, you know, it's a representation of what's been going on in Oakland, California
for a long time with the oppression of, of, of poverty here, of the people of, of the
community of Oakland.
Okay.
Oscar Grand was a young male who was pretty much handcuffed on a bar train with a 250
pound officer on his back, six four, okay, while he had another officer on his neck and
the officer pretty much put the gun and shot him in the back while he was standing handcuffed
laying down on the platform on his stomach.
So how do I understand the, the threat in that?
Okay.
And that's the threat of, of these corporations on our society and our community that represents
that.
We are all on handcuffs.
We are all on our back.
We have no way of getting out of it.
And they pretty much have got these guns on our back and they're shooting us.
This representation of a whole.
And what do you think this encampment has accomplished?
How long has it been out here?
I mean, you know, this encampment has accomplished a lot.
Okay.
For myself, I, I, I, I, you know, we have discussions all the time, you know what I'm
saying?
And it comes to what society labels us as, you know, and this, this, this, this, this,
this right here, this encampment has given the people a chance to change what those
labels are, you know what I'm saying, whether you've been called a black man who's a criminal
or Hispanic, who's a car thief or individual who's a racist, this, this is a place where
none of that exists.
Okay.
Because if you come with those that you're going to have some type of change.
Okay.
And we're pretty much what I've seen happen here because of this is our own world, our
own community, our own society that's by the people, we feed people.
Okay.
We house people.
Okay.
And not just people, but families as well, you know what I'm saying?
These people, if you go around West Oakland, the homeless encampments all across West
Oakland are pretty much here.
They are a part of the society and they have to be recognized that they are here, you know
what I'm saying?
But everybody here is not a homeless individual.
Some of us are hardworking class.
You got these homeless people, crack addicts, heroin addicts, disabled people, right along
with the same people that are doctors, lawyers, practitioners, power of practice, teachers.
We're all here together.
Okay.
We are parents, we are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters.
Everything here is together.
No matter what level you put on us, you know, I'm a criminal.
I'm a thug.
I'm a convict.
I'm a gangster.
I'm a womanizer.
But you know what, that's what society labeled me as, this society, I'm not none at all.
I just met these people right here, you know?
I just met you guys.
Do you guys consider me as a felical criminal or anything?
No.
There we go.
You know what I'm saying?
And that's what's been going on in society is that we have these labels upon ourselves
and living in these low-income areas and pretty much, like I was saying, is that we need
to start showing the people.
That was Ali at Occupy Oakland on Sunday morning.
Within 24 hours, the encampment was raided, scores of people arrested.
Oakland Mayor Jean Kwan admitted in an interview with the BBC that she and leaders across various
cities around the country experiencing Occupy protests, well, participated in a conference
call.
I was recently on a conference call of 18 cities across the country who had the same
situation where we had started as a political movement and a political encampment, ended
up being an encampment that was no longer in control of the people who started them.
And what I think you're starting to see is that the Occupy movement is looking for more
stability.
I spent a lot of last week talking to peaceful demonstrators, wanted to separate themselves
from my city away from the anarchist groups who have been looking for confrontation with
the police.
Well, as police forces violently crack down on protesters across the United States and
Europe, we turn now to an author who looks at the increasing influence of military technology
on domestic police forces.
Stephen Graham is professor of cities and society at Newcastle University in the UK.
His book, Cities Under Siege, the New Military Urbanism, looks at the links between military
counter-insurgency tactics deployed in war zones abroad and the methods of surveillance
and control increasingly used in urban areas around the world.
Stephen Graham, welcome to Democracy Now!
Could you say a little bit about what the significance of your findings in the book
were regarding the Occupy movements in the U.S. particularly?
Yes, well, the book really tries to look at the ways in which police forces are increasingly
using military ideas and military tactics at the domestic scale to confront particularly
mobilizations in cities such as the Occupy movements that we're talking about here and
how those tactics and ideas and increasingly technologies have really close links through
big security industrial complexes to the moves in the military towards a really intense focus
on cities and on counter-insurgency tactics in sort of war zone cities such as Baghdad
and Kabul.
Right.
In a CNN article that appeared yesterday, the author talks to a police officer who reports
that now the kind of equipment that's accessible to the police includes machine guns, tasers
and also that larger and mid-sized police departments in the U.S. now have access to
tanks.
Can you say something about how this happened?
Well, there's been a long-standing shift in North America and Europe towards paramilitarized
policing using helicopter-style systems, using infrared sensing, using really, really heavy
militarized weaponry.
That's been long-standing fueled by the war on drugs and other sort of explicit campaigns.
But more recently, there's been a big push since the end of the Cold War by the big
defense and security and IT companies to sell things like video surveillance systems, things
like geographic mapping systems, and even more recently, drone systems that have been
used in the assassination raids in Afghanistan and in Pakistan and elsewhere as a sort of
domestic policing technology.
It's basically a really big booming market, particularly in a world where surveillance
and security is being integrated into buildings, into cities, into transport systems on the
back of the war on terror.
And then talk about the issue of surveillance.
Either we're talking about how the Occupy movements are being watched, surveilled, monitors.
Very interesting to hear Oakland Mayor Gene Kwan say on the BBC that they're coordinating.
And they are coordinating with the FBI, they're coordinating with Homeland Security and dealing
with these movements.
So talk about the surveillance apparatus, something you know very well from Britain.
And name names, what are the corporations involved?
Well, there's a whole variety of corporations linked to university research departments,
linked to large-scale data mining companies, linked to companies like Raytheon, who most
people know of as making missile systems.
Increasingly, they run border surveillance systems for things like the airline security
and so on, which is a big thing in Europe and North America.
But the key point really here is that surveillance is being used to try and track activist groups,
permanently sort of monitoring them using video systems, using database systems, and
to allow infiltration.
These are very much seen as movements that need to be infiltrated.
In the UK, there's been a big scandal because of undercover police going into activist movements
across Europe, green movements, social movements, and so on, with a view to sort of basically
being informers and spies, to allow police to sort of crack down on what is effectively
completely legitimate democratic activity.
What do you think the significance, Stephen Graham, of the fact that protesters across
the U.S.—and it's been true in Europe as well—are increasingly characterized as
somehow criminal drug addicts or sexual predators, or somehow a sanitation or health hazard to
the communities in which they're protesting?
Can you say a little bit about how this works?
Well, in the book and elsewhere, other authors are writing these things, too.
I think it's important to put this debate in a bigger context of how cities have changed.
And cities in the last 20 or 30 years, particularly in North America, have become much more sanitized,
much more controlled by questions of zero tolerance, by questions of really aggressive
policing, to clear out those that are deemed to be sort of not fitting a model of urban
life, which is centers on consumption, which centers on business.
So there's been a really powerful shift in cities to sort of criminalize homelessness,
to criminalize panhandlers, to criminalize those not seen to belong in what Neil Smith
in New York has called the revanchist city, the city taking back spaces for the wealthy,
effectively.
That was very much Mayor Gugliani's strategy.
So in a way, I think, what the Occupy Movement is so powerful at is demonstrating that by
occupying public spaces around the world, and particularly these extremely symbolic
public spaces, it's reasserting that the city is the foundation space for democracy.
And we have to reassert that symbolically, and with the actual groupings of the activists
in space.
So the internet is not enough.
It's very much necessary to reassert that cities are political spaces, which need to
be used to mobilize social and political change.
And you talk about how the population centers have so dramatically shifted not only in the
United States, but around the world to the cities, and it's that question we'll end
with, Stephen Graham.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, last year we moved past the moment where 50 percent of the world was living
in cities.
By 2050, 75 percent of the world's population will be living in cities.
But too often, political and military power is controlled by people who see cities purely
as threats, purely as sites of unrest, sites that need strong military and security control.
And what's so wonderful about the Occupy protests is that there's a different and much more
hopeful idea of cities being pushed there.
In a world where we have a really radical crisis and a radical sense of illegitimacy
for the social model that we're all still having to live under.
Stephen Graham, I want to thank you for being with us.
His book is called Cities Under Siege, The New Military Urbanism.
And that does it for our broadcast.
Democracy Now is produced by Mike Burke, Rene Felzer, and Martina Minchake, Steve Martinez,
and Al Capone, Masugra, Bikaran, Ryan Devereaux, Dina Guzman, Al Khanna, Mimi Goodman.
