Protesters to Ring In the New Year by Linking Cops to Evictions

Despite its faults, I think we all agree that tech bus shutdowns are a pretty effective way to protest gentrification.  No matter.  Some off-message neighborhood activists are gathering at 24th and Mission at 3pm New Year's Day to “Evict The Cops,” as posters plastered up-and-down Mission Street say.

Here's the spice:

Mission residents and agitators want to ring in the New Year with a big “fuck you!” to the San Francisco Police Department. The elevated pig presence in the neighborhood is unavoidable and many have already felt its effects. In November, four Valencia Gardens residents were attacked and then arrested by SFPD officers. And the expansion of police surveillance at the 16th street BART plaza has lead to increased harassment of young people of color, homeless folks, and sex workers.

These efforts only aid in the gentrification of the Mission District as policing and surveillance are integral to the process of sterilizing a neighborhood for new, well-to-do, bougie assholes. Time and again the police have proven their loyalties to new developers and shitty landlords.

It's the cops who are there to make sure we leave on the day of our evictions, who throw us out of our squats when we have no place to go, and who continually harass us because we're not white yuppies. We're fucking sick of it and so our resolution for 2014 is to make the SFPD's life hell at any opportunity that presents itself.

I like a good pre-Law & Order Ice-T track as much as the next guy, and certainly SFPD has done some objectionable things this year.  But considering teachers and other city employees are already being pushed out of the city, I'm sure police officers will soon too be finding themselves outside city limits.

Whatever.  Happy New Year!

Comments (44)

I’m sure that a bunch of white trustafarian anarchists picking a fight with the SFPD will work out extremely well for the Mission’s remaining working class residents. Fight the power, dudes!

I welcome the increased police presence at the 16th Bart station. Feels safer!

+1

+2

I don’t agree.

It’s why I luv the mish so much; endless free entertainment!

You are a bad person who is bad and also dumb and you should feel bad and dumb.

You’re a presumptions and pretentious advocate of failed social policies that have made SF what it is today. You reap what you sow, but blaming others obviously feels much better to you.

And BTW, your feeble minded and circular logic diatribe above looks like it was written by a 12 year old, “doktor.”

Failed social policies….yeah, capitalism is really working out great for everyone, except the tens of millions in poverty/homeless/without healthcare. Capitalism totally rawks!

What’s that? I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite make it out over the sound of you being dumb.

And bad.

read some mike davis books c.f. City Of Quartz and subsequent volumes………..employees like cops and firefighters and yes, teachers have long been priced out of cities like SF…..it is highly likely many of these SFPD members are already residents of far-flung locales. perhaps there is a strategy that could win them over as allies in the fight against homogenization and gentrification?

have fun y’all

Many police don’t want to live in the areas they patrol so they don’t come across those they arrest when off duty.

SFPD Salaries start at 116K a year. That’s a far cry from teacher’s salaries.

I thought it was ~$80K, but, yeah, still far above most teachers.

They also work more months out of the year and the work is not really comparable in regard to stress and safety risk. I think teachers are underpaid but comparing their salaries to those of cops doesn’t make much sense. It would be nice if our society put an equal premium on education and the perceived sense of security but society, for the most part, does not. Putting the blame on the people doing the work seems like cognitive dissonance.

Neither of us (or Kevin for that matter) said anything about who should or shouldn’t get paid more or less. I DEFINITELY think that SFPD deserves a higher pay for what they have to deal with on a daily basis, no doubt. I also benefit from their work far more often than a Teacher. But that’s neither here nor there. I was just stating the fact that Cops will be able to afford life in the city for a while especially if they’ve already got their housing situation worked out.

I was a bit on the high end when I said $116k though.

http://www.sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1655

Wait. Did you just say that you benefit more from the work of police officers than teachers? You don’t actually believe that, do you? Cuz that would be some pretty high-octane crazyjuice.

That’s exactly what I said. No I’m not going to be in SF for the rest of my life so seeing the blossoming crop of Noe valley kids fulfill their life’s purpose isn’t really a reality for me. The cops who show up to deal with a drunk who’s found his way into my house or a rabid Gnargle terrorizing my street is far more useful to me, now, than a teacher. All of *my* interactions with SFPD has been wonderful and I absolutely appreciate the *good* work that they do. When it’s good it’s great. When it’s bad it’s fucking awful. Get over your “fuck the police” bullshit though.

The event description sounds like a lot of anti-police buzzwords carelessly tossed into a blender without thought about how one topic leads to the next. Pretty ironic that the people behind this protest wouldn’t pass a Turing Test.

Exactly. It’s like an Occupy Bot.

The police at 16th and Mission are long overdue, but probably better late then never. Judging from its the same photo, and the location, I’d say the people behind this idiocy are
https://station40events.wordpress.com/

I hope the anti police people never have to need the police for anything.

No one above this comment has ever been stopped, searched, and/or questioned simply because they ‘look suspicious’ (are a brown person). I have. The increased police presence sure feels like the State has decided that making one class of people feel comfortable at the expense of others is good policy. It is not. This rally is stupid though.

When I was younger I got stopped, searched, ID run through the system and even arrested for many reasons. The way I looked, the people I was with and the locations I was at. You have no fucking idea who I am, how or where I was raised. It must be nice to throw around cute little buzz words and labels for people you don’t know. Enjoy your paranoid and lonely little life my friend.

I’ve been surrounded by federal agents, with assault rifles, had a very sketchy search of my person performed, found out I had an alias when they called in my ID (wouldn’t tell me what it was), and had them attempt an illegal search of my vehicle. All because of how I looked at the time.

I hope you never feel the need to use your 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech.

Oh, you actually did express an opinion, so you _did_ exercise the 1st Amendment, so YOU are the hypocrite here.

Tu quoque right back atcha, big guy.

I have lived in SF for many more years than all of you. Therefore, I am more entitled to my opinion than any of you. That is all.

OK, now that your opinion has been officially verified by some text on the internet, what say you, wise brown resident?

Check Your Priveledge: I guarantee my skin color is ten times browner than yours. You have no idea what you are talking about.

S.F. resident since 1972, that is all.

I’m stupefied how people don’t want a cleaned up and safe 16th/Mission, or Capp, or projects. The reason the cops target those areas is because us TAXPAYER residents complain to the cops. If I saw whores selling themselves on my front door steps, or open air drug deals at bus stops, or watched the people who just stole my shit run back to the VGs, I’d complain to the cops too. And as a TAXPAYER, the police work for me and I expect their response. And lets be frank, in the Mission, you get a response. As a non-yuppie white person, a 30 year native of San Francisco (20 in the Mission), I take a little more pride in my neighborhood than some who feel entitled to treat it like a toilet. And since I can’t play Dirty Harry, I employ the SFPD to do whatever is necessary to do their work.

I find it funny that the very people who hate the police the most, contribute the least to society.

Thank you.

The only reason the po-po are there is because of the local big-bux condo-lofts in development. Let’s see a list of the founding members of the “Clean Up the Plaza” astroturf campaign. It’s likely the nearby developers, landlords, and house salesmen who stand to benefit most from increased property values resulting from the banishment of the SRO folks whom the po-po are chasing away.

Hey dude, you know that the people being arrested are, to use your odd capitalization scheme, TAXPAYERS also, right?

Your idea that only people who pay taxes are worthy of police protection is completely awful.

OMG I just walked by these protester-losers! It’s a small spectacle of 10-20 angry white peeps, who look like they moved to the mish 10+ yrs ago. Whoopee! And now they are mad at the tech people who are more recent then them. See the problem here? It’s like these clueless idiots can’t figure out that THEY HELPED gentrify the mission, only now to complain about it. Oh well, maybe they can pick up a fig leaf/cause célèbre (like the tamale lady supervisor Crapos recently adopted) so they can appear to appeal to the ‘real, and brown’ people they are so anxious to help out. Such total self absorbed fraudsters, it’s comical!

+1, couldn’t agree more.

Silly PAM, you’re being bad and dumb again.

As these protesters neared some condos on mission street they chanted to residents looking out from their balconies:

“We hate you and the Mission hates you!” the crowd chanted in unison. “We know where you live and we will burn this place to the ground!”

There is definitely something wrong with you by your continuance to defend these miscreants. But go on, blame me. Silly girl.

Sorry, I still can’t make out what you’re trying to say over the bad and dumb-ness of it.

Herr Doktor Cockture. Ha ha ha.

Nope, still too dumb/bad, keep trying.

1. Not all of us agree that the bus protests are effective in getting the public to sympathize with the economically displaced.
2. A lot of cops already live outside of SF, and have sued for the right to do so.
3. This shift in attention is a natural progression. Cops are even less sympathetic than “techies”, and these folks have always been more excited by “hating the other” than with real economic justice.
4. Again, the eviction issue is related more to general affordability issues. While Ellis and other no-fault evictions spike when housing prices go up, an overwhelming majority of evictions are still “for cause”; that is to say, because folks can’t make rent in the first place. That points to other rising costs which impact their ability to pay rent.