Squads of sheriff’s deputies in military fatigues and riot gear arrived just before dawn Tuesday outside the old three-bedroom house on Magnolia Street in West Oakland, Calif. A BearCat armored vehicle rolled down the still-sleepy residential street. Officers broke through the reinforced front door with a battering ram and sent a small, camera-equipped robot into the home to check for any potential threatsFSB,.The "knock on the door on the middle of the night" is the hallmark of a police state. Against four families that evinced no intent to resist by force, the cops rolled up in the dark with all of their paramilitary toys on full display.
When the deputies finally entered the home, they called out for the occupants to surrender. They did, saying they wanted the standoff to end peacefully.
But the tense, militarized raid didn’t target anti-government zealots or drug traffickers. Instead, deputies aimed to arrest a small coalition of homeless parents who were trying to live inside the long-uninhabited home without paying rent.
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Days after the judge’s ruling, sheriff’s deputies in military gear arrived at 5:15 a.m. Tuesday to pull the families out of the home.
Gregory Ahern, the sheriff is of Alameda County, needs to hire on with a law enforcement agency that is in tune with his ideas of policing. My respectful suggestion is that he submit an application to the FSB (or the ATF).
I cannot think of an eviction that I have either done or heard of where the sheriff's department rolled out a bunch of paramilitary goons with drawn firearms and an armored vehicle. It's unheard of when the eviction is being carried out on single-parent families headed by women.
My suspicion is that this one was driven by the vulture capitalists who bought the house. They now are saying that they'll do something minor to help the local community, which no doubt will be just eyewash.
8 comments:
If it been your house, you’d have been screaming for the cops to evict the squatters in 24 hours.
Women and children.
The women are grown-ass adults who know what they’re doing. The kids, of course, are subjected to their parents whims unless they’re taken away by CPS.
DA, you are quite wrong. But it's no matter, I'm not a vulture capitalist who preys on the poor.
The organization the women belong to was offering to buy the property for what the absentee landlords paid for it, as they are with many other unoccupied properties in the East Bay, where there are brand new condo farms and tent cities as far as you can see.
This is all about wealthy gentrifiers getting wealthier at the expense of the residents of the neighborhoods they are trying to gentrify.
The peninsula tech boom has driven rents higher than normal working families can afford. Median rent in Oakland for a one bedroom is $2,500.
Oakland, and in particular West Oakland where Magnolia Street is located, used to be a working class place, which is one reason why I moved there and stayed for 35 years. I lived on Magnolia, between 24th and 26th streets in the late eighties in a long gone artist's collective, and on Peralta a few blocks west of there in a large warehouse space, also recently "redeveloped", from 2007 to 2011.
None of the neighborhoods in that area are even recognizable as what they were a decade ago.
Some will argue that the crime rates have gone down in the gentrified neighborhoods, but will ignore the fact that they have similarly gone down in the remaining non-gentrified areas as well.
The Oakland cops have a long history of malfeasance and corruption, and while in my experience the OPD is a cut above the smaller surrounding muni forces because they have actual crime to deal with and are less likely to jack you up out of boredom than, say, the Emeryville police, my experience dealing with the ACSD is limited to interacting with the deputies assigned to Highland Hospital, who I have never had a problem with.
Still, I am not surprised at the tactics reported, having lived through the over-reaction of other law enforcement agencies in the East Bay on more that one terrifying occasion.
-Doug in Oakland
So while the cops may have overreacted, I fail to see why the eviction is so wrong.
These folks were occupying a home that was not theirs. Being asked (or ordered) to leave is neither immoral nor wrong.
The cops choice of method may be in question, the eviction, however, is not. The squatters had no right to the home.
Doug, thanks for some reality framing...as opposed to True Belief huffing and puffing on the Right (or Left).
B: "The squatters had no right to the home." Just as human beings have no right to much any existence...unless they have a way to earn a living (blue collar jobs are over) or a substantial wad of capital, lucky them. Otherwise they're weeds in the garden of affluent, to be extirpated and thrown in the garbage. And we need to get rid of things like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid: it just encourages the Used Up and worthless, who should go off and die someplace out of sight, hearing and mind.
Sorry for this reductio ad absurdem....but like global warming, it's where were *are*, not even where we're going. Cue the Stones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOiLH-2hTPQ
Gentrification in the Bay Area is due to high paying jobs and a lack of new housing.
But hey, One Rincon has a 2BR 2 bath for $2.5M.
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