‘Where Are We Supposed to Go?’

Gavin Ames said he broke his leg on Oakland’s pothole filled Jackson Street. The health problem cost him his job, leading to homelessness. The city forced him to leave his camp site next to the Kaiser Auditorium today and trashed some of his belongings.

The city of Oakland ordered several dozen homeless residents to vacate their camp sites around the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Center today. A large crew of public works employees were ordered to dispose of tents, blankets, luggage, and other possessions. At least ten Oakland police officers were on scene also.

Pastor Preston Walker has lived in a tent under a buckeye tree near the Kaiser building for several months. He shared the spot with several other men. Their campsite is decorated with a flag of the United States, the words “no justice, no peace” written on it. An Oakland Athletics Baseball Club pennant hangs next to a sign reading “Occupy the Hood.”

Scrawled on the sign is a date; “January 28, 2012,” the day hundreds of Oaklanders attempted to take over the Kaiser building as a “community center.” Oakland’s mayor and city council authorized the police to use all means necessary to repel the march. Oakland police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and threw stun grenades at the protesters. The building has sit empty since then.

“People are just gonna come right back here cause where are they going to go?,” said Walker. “Otherwise they’ll just squat somewhere else.”

Seven Oakland police officers chatted among themselves nearby, watching ducks and geese and a stray rooster pecking at the grass. The officers looked bored.

“I don’t think they want to be doing this, out here when there’s better things they should be doing,” said Walker.

On the other side of the building Gavin Ames is trying to figure out how to move his belongings before the city’s workers throw them away.

“I used to be a cashier at a Chevron station. I was living paycheck to paycheck,” said Ames. “Then this happened,” he said, pointing to the cast on his leg and foot.

“I fell in a hole in the street on Jackson, right here, downtown Oakland, broke my leg.”

Ames said he finds it ironic the city of Oakland’s public works employees are being told to remove him and other homeless residents. “They should be fixing the streets.”

City of Oakland staff, non-profit outreach workers, and Oakland police at the “clean up” of Kaiser Auditorium.

Joe Devries, a neighborhood services supervisor with the city of Oakland, said the city had reached out to those camped around the Kaiser building offering services since September. “This has been a long slow process, but we made it abundantly clear that people could not be camping here.”

Devries mentioned also that last week the building was broken into and copper was stolen. It’s not clear how that related to the homeless persons camped out nearby. Several of the homeless men called it just another excuse to remove them.

“People want to use this space as a park. The city has invested millions around the Lake here,” said Devries. “This is an area want to keep making beautiful.”

A large number of Oakland police officers watched over a public works crew as they removed a homeless encampment around the Kaiser Auditorium.

Surveillance

Five stationary cameras and a point, tilt, zoom (“PTZ”) bubble camera in an East Oakland neighborhood with a population that is 50% Black, 23% Latino, 16% white and 6% Asian.

Race is a surveillance technology. Race can be theorized as an embodied, primarily visual means of perception used by the viewer to identify and track human bodies.

In the era of early mercantile capitalism race was deduced by skin color, hair, and facial features. Race was used to categorize humanity into castes of slaves and masters, free and bonded.

The anthropology and biology of the colonial era developed the idea of race as a “nature” in the blood, and as a fact measurable in the body’s proportions, the texture of hair, the size of the brain. All of this was scientific nonsense, of course, but the point wasn’t to grapple with empirical reality; the point was to justify slavery and imperialism based on what is otherwise an arbitrary and politically determined difference. In the plantation societies of the Americas every white eye was a camera, every Black body the object of surveillance.

A street sign in deep east Oakland circa 90th and International Boulevard, a mostly Black and Latino area of the city, warns pedestrians and vehicles that “all activities” are under surveillance.

Surveillance has always been about controlling the mobility of the poor and property-less, be they slaves or prisoners, wards of reservations, immigrants, or welfare recipients.

The poverty and violence of inequality constantly threatens to spill over into the privileged zones of wealth and tranquility.

Surveillance tends to be most concentrated on border zones between the enfranchised citizens and the marginalized denizens, or in ghetto and prison architectures designed to contain the boiling masses of the darker nations.

A PTZ camera along Broadway in Oakland’s downtown commercial corridor, location for the offices of fortune 500 companies, law firms, and valuable real estate.

Today the state and the military-industrial contractors that build and operate the contemporary surveillance systems adamantly deny the raciality of surveillance. Like those who deployed surveillance systems of prior centuries, the empirical evidence contradicts them. We know that NYPD stop and frisk tactics disproportionately target Blacks and Latinos.

We know that border reconnaissance drones fly mostly over the US-Mexico border, watching down upon non-white immigrants.

Biometric databases are used to capture the identities of “foreign” combatants, prisoners, border crossers.

These surveillance systems, vast projects that have consumed billions of dollars and countless labor hours, reveal obvious obsessions with the movements of racialized bodies.

The sign for a youth center in east Oakland tells Black, Latino, and other immigrant youngsters to “achieve success.” A PTZ surveillance camera watches over them.

In Oakland, California, local police and security agencies are in the early phases of building out a city-wide surveillance system called the Domain Awareness Center (DAC). The DAC will pull video camera feeds, gunshot detection alerts, and even information gleaned from social media, into one central hub. It will allow the Oakland Police Department to use the surveillance intelligence to deploy officers in real time, and also as evidence in later criminal prosecutions.

As with all surveillance it’s important to understand who will be watched, and who will be watching. Oakland is one of the Blackest cities in California with roughly 100,000 African American residents. 73,000 of Oakland’s African American residents live at or below the federally defined poverty level of income. 27 percent of Oakland’s population is Latino, and 16 percent is Asian. Poverty is high among these groups also.

Surveillance cameras peer around the corner of the building in which the Oakland Tribune, the city’s major daily newspaper, is located. The street poles in the background are decorated with banners of the Downtown Oakland Association, a business improvement district that is applying for grant funding to build out a private surveillance camera network that may eventually be linked into the city’s DAC system.

The eyes of authority watch over Black, Latino, and Asian youngsters at Fremont High School in east Oakland.