Cop Watch Conference (Oakland, July 13-15)
by Ben Saari and Mary Moore, July 2007

(What follows are a couple of impressions from Ben Saari and Mary Moore, and why people should learn more about this approach.)

Friday was cool, the opening plenary was a good mix of directed comments from the stage and back and forth with the conference attendees, it was where I saw the most ideological and methodological diversity.

Friday night felt like Xmas eve, I could hardly sleep and suffered for it the next day (which was a 14 hour thing start to finish).

Saturday AM there was a brief huddle of folks from the North Bay and we sort of divvied up workshops so someone from SR or 'Luma would be at almost every one.

For the first session I went to Using Media to Shape Message; it wasn't what I was hoping for but it was still good. Basically Miguel Molina (who has/has had various public affairs and cultural shows on KBBF and KPFA for the past 30 years) talked about his experience and where he thinks media is going. He is advocating for activist journalism, he thinks waiting for the mainstream to give us fair coverage is a waste of time, and that we need to become the media we want. He broadcasts on the 3rd Friday of every month from the New College campus in Santa Rosa, he invited us specifically to come see how it's done and get on the air.

2nd session Bursts and Nathan (Petaluma) and I, went to Alternatives to Calling the Cops: the panel was large, and most of the time was taken up with intros and then a long discussion about defining community. This workshop would have been better if it was twice as long with fewer presenters. The conversation about community and privilege was a crucial component of the subject, but it took up so much time that practical alternatives to cop calling hardly got discussed. The panel all approached the problem from a police/prison abolition perspective which was awesome. Still I left without any concrete ideas about how to put cop free zones into practice. I think this real gets at the work in our movement that still needs to be done around the privileges and divisions that keep us from being able to have difficult discussions about privilege and division. I also think that white people and men have left this work up to women and people of color. Now, I'm riffing.... I guess what I have to say about it is that it was an awesome idea, the execution got bogged down in setting up a needed foundation.

3rd session I went to Sustaining a Copwatch: hands down the best workshop I went to all weekend. Specific recommendations from this workshop: Communities United Against Police Brutality in Minneapolis has a database template that they will share with us for free (check http://www.cuapb.org/HomePage.asp) also they run a 24 hour hotline that is where they generate most of their incident reports and volunteers from. To manage the hotline the have one land line that forwards to 3 cell phones so hopefully someone is always able to answer. Volunteers are recruited from callers "we will help you with your problem, if you will help the next person." Berkeley said an office changed the quality of the work they were able to do. Instead of living out of a box they were able to generate records, newsletters, come and go as they pleased, etc. Also Berkeley has regular income from sponsoring the Ashby Flea Market, it brings in $6-7K per year which pays for the office and printing expenses. Finally Berkeley is able to offer course credit for Copwatch at UC Berkeley, the course reader is available for $20, we might want to think about trying to get this into SSU.

4th session I went to a Case Study work shop, which was for a new method of offering critique on the organizational level without creating resentment, or exploiting privilege. Phoenix Copwatch were the guinea pigs. I liked the effort, the method is clunky, but promising, hopefully I'll get some info from the facilitator so I can share the actual methodology.

Somewhere in there I had lunch with Vincente, Aiza, Bursts and Karin, and started to realize how over stuffed my head was and that that didn't compliment my sleep deprivation.

At dinner I talked a lot with Rose City Copwatch, they are looking for a next step beyond patrols, some way to more directly challenge the legitimacy of police.

By the time the film fest rolled around I was utterly useless, but too stubborn to sleep, eventually I went back to Ryan's and crashed.

Sunday AM, Gerald Sanders gave a presentation on how to build a defense movement, with the SF8 as an example.

After Gerald there was a long sum-up of the whole conference. In brief it was decided to: start a national copwatch listserve invitations will go out to every e-mail address on a registration form; there will be a national copwatch website (prolly copwatchunited.org) that will basically be a directory of copwatches, Denver Copwatch will organize a conference for next year (prolly around the time of the Democratic National Convention). During this session I made a good connection with Jared from New Orleans, he's gonna send me some of the anti-racist work he's been doing; and I volunteered to work on a national newsletter proposal with some folks from Denver. What was most obvious in this session was that we are really lacking creative ways to communicate with the people we are trying to serve.

And just when the oversight issue seems hopeless because the State Legislature was unwilling to undue the damage done in 2006 by the State Supreme Court with the Copely decision rendering Civilian Review Boards more impotent than they were before and all seems even more hopeless than before, along comes a gathering organized mostly by the young people to give us hope.

How fitting then that it was my two oldest grandchildren who drove me down to Oakland last Saturday to spend my 72nd birthday with this inspiring group of mostly young folks from across the land and Canada. In Canada there is still the ongoing issue of repression of the native people so activists from there were able to connect with activists from Mendocino County who are experiencing the same thing on their reservations. That is the kind of connections that were being made the entire weekend -- both in the many workshops inside as well as the ongoing networking at the tables outside. I spotted about ten people I knew from Sonoma county and there were probably more. Our own Elbert “Big Man” Howard was one of the keynote speakers to a full house on Friday. Elders inspiring the youth and visa versa!!

Besides the networking which is so valuable in itself (this email list has now gone statewide) the workshops offered every tool we could want and explored the more subtle and lesser known angles in this struggle against “police abuse.” That term is so inadequate to describe how deep this issue goes. I now prefer the term “Militarization of the Police” and the presence of so many people from so many different places who are experiencing the same thing in their communities shows us that this goes way beyond abuse or accountability. In the name of “gangs,” “war on drugs,” “mental illness or distress,” immigration enforcement, and a myriad of other excuses that don’t involve actual crimes, we are fast becoming a police state and people better wake up to that fact. The recent defeat of SB1019 due to the power of the state police union over our representatives should be a clue for those still trusting in law enforcement and the politicos who cover for them.

The main thing I took away from this valuable coming together of concerned and aware people was that lobbying our “leaders” for them to give us even a watered down Civilian Review Board (not even on the table) or any kind of meaningful oversight is keeping all the power in their hands. We, the People, need to do an end run around that idea and start watching and witnessing and documenting OURSELVES. One approach is top down and the other approach is bottom up and effective. It involves actual citizen involvement using modern technology and the concept is NOT NEW!!

In the past few months in Sonoma County all the local “leaders” have done is to hold closed meetings with hand picked representatives of the “community” as they know it, in an unsuccessful attempt to co-opt us. Not only are they against ANY kind of citizen oversight they are not even willing to sponsor a forum to hear from the entire community. So we will also have to do that. Next meeting to begin planning for this forum in early October will be at the Labor Center on July 28 at 1PM. The forum will help to build for the local march to coincide with marches around the country around October 22.

Please come and be part of the solution as it sure isn’t coming from those “Leaders”!! Thanks, Cop Watch -- you helped me remember an important lesson.

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