The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

Can’t believe this occurred? This story actually happened, witnessed by me and other Critical Resistance Oakland members while copwatching (or observing and documenting police actions and procedures in the community). In Oakland, the scene above recurs every weekend night. We have documented hundreds in incidents in which people’s cars are taken from them, literally stranding them in the cold for nothing more than small vehicle infractions. The Oakland police and the California Highway Patrol perpetrate these actions using a program called “Operation Impact.”

Operation Impact Profiles, Intimidates
The Oakland Police Department bills Operation Impact as “supplemental law enforcement assistance to combat violent crime through minimum tolerance, proactive traffic law enforcement and arrest warrant operations directed in violent crime areas identified by OPD crime trend analysis.” The police claim that they are pre-empting crime by addressing what they refer to as “precursors to violent crime and gang-related activity, namely reckless driving, DUI, weapons possession, narcotics, vandalism, and loitering.”

To translate in plain English: the police department is using these so-called precursors to harass and criminalize entire neighborhoods and communities while circumventing racial profiling laws. Since the Operation Impact checkpoints and blockades are set up only in primarily black and brown neighborhoods, the only people the police can pull over are black and brown people.

The police target people based on their skin color, on the music they listen to, and on their zip code. They use a variety of petty vehicle infractions (broken taillights or loud music seem to be the most common) to stop people –– and they use those infractions as a pretext to do further searches. On weekends, police use minor vehicle infractions to tow people’s cars, resulting in a nice wad of cash for the city and creating a hefty “poor tax” for the residents of East Oakland, who often pay upwards of $500 to get their cars back. Proponents of Operation Impact tell the public that these tactics—essentially pulling random people over, interrogating them and towing their cars—prevent violent crime.

Operation Impact is being used in cities around the country, and reflects the national trend of curtailing civil liberties and freedoms. We are increasingly seeing paramilitary models of policing in the many neighborhoods and cities where Critical Resistance operates, resulting in quasi-martial law for certain zip codes and ethnicities. The public is told that these actions are justified by ‘criminal activity’ in the neighborhood. The amount of public outrage determines when and where our constitutional rights apply.

Police brutality and misconduct in poor communities and communities of color has been well documented. According to a 1998 report from Human Rights Watch, “Abuse by law enforcement officers in the United States is one of the most serious and divisive human rights violations in the country. Police have engaged in unjustified shootings, severe beatings, fatal chokings and unnecessarily rough treatment.” An internal review by the Oakland Police Department itself found that African Americans were 3.3 times as likely as whites to be searched during a traffic stop.

Independent monitors of the Oakland Police Department last year found that Oakland police frequently conduct public strip searches of suspects that result in the exposure of their genitalia. Findings from the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch also show that police oversight in Oakland and across the country often is either nonexistent or is poorly managed, under-funded and politically weak. Policies such as Oakland’s recently adopted 10 p.m. curfew for parolees and probationers also contribute to increased racial profiling and civil liberties violations.

Critical Resistance Challenges Policies
Critical Resistance is a national, grassroots organization in 10 cities across the country that challenges the belief that prisons and policing keep our communities safe, and organizes for alternatives. Our members in Oakland chose to organize against Operation Impact because we know that these types of policing programs directly funnel low-income people and people of color into the prison and jail system. As part of our organizing around policing and prisons, members have been copwatching for a year, particularly observing police checkpoints in East Oakland.

Through campaigns opposing Operation Impact and Oakland’s 10 p.m. curfew, Critical Resistance organizes to increase support for community-based alternatives to policing and prisons. We know that neither policing programs like Operation Impact nor prisons themselves keep our communities safe. In fact, the devastating effects of imprisonment and policing make the lives of people targeted by the prison industrial complex more disordered and less safe. Widespread evidence, along with common sense and experience, shows that when people have what they need in terms of education, job opportunities, healthcare and hope, long-term personal and community safety follow.

The “tough on crime” initiatives—fueled by police associations and opportunistic politicians—have led all levels of government agencies across the country to call for more police and prisons to “solve” their cities’ social, economic and political problems. Those calls are often accompanied by the further expansion of the prison industrial complex that already numbers over two million people locked in cages. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly 7 million people were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole at yearend 2004—3.2% of all US adult residents, or one in every 31 adults.

Through grassroots organizing, movement building, policy work, and aggressive media campaigns, Critical Resistance challenges the use of prisons and policing tactics like Operation Impact that funnel people into our growing prison system. Our members across the country work to shift society’s investment from prisons and policing to lasting forms of safety through grassroots organizing, movement building, coalition building, public education, media work, and developing leadership among communities most impacted.

Policing and prisons, used as answers to social, political, and economic problems, result in the marginalization and disenfranchisement of people of color, both producing and anchoring structural and institutional racism. We do not believe you can make the prison industrial complex “less racist,” but rather that we need new, explicitly anti-racist, public safety mechanisms. We also believe that such policy changes are only as secure as the movement of people behind them.

Sitara Nieves is an Oakland-based national organizer with Critical Resistance, which received a grant from Resist last year. For more information, contact Critical Resistance, 1904 Franklin St Suite 504, Oakland, CA 94612; www.criticalresistance.org.

Copyright © Resist, Inc., 2006