Alicia Schwartz of POWER

"We are not afraid of these politicians who are trying to criminalize our youth," said Renee Saucedo to a crowd gathered in front of San Francisco City Hall to protest San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera's recent gang injunctions. In November, a San Francisco judge upheld the City Attorney's application for the latest injunction, which prohibits certain individuals' presence within the injunction zones.

We were there to speak out against these racist, criminalizing polices. "These injunctions only cause more racial profiling and police harassment against Latino and African-American communities," Luis Aroche, a youth advocate with the Mission Community Response Network, said to the crowd filled with youths, teachers and scholars from neighborhoods across the Bay Area.

To clearly illustrate our demands, we had decided to confront City Attorney Dennis Herrera in his office in City Hall and serve him with a symbolic injunction notice ordering him to stay out of our neighborhoods - the neighborhoods he has slapped with gang injunctions - the Mission, Bayview Hunters Point and the Fillmore.

Also included on our injunction notice were six demands from the community: 1) clear and fair criteria to get off the injunction list, 2) guaranteed support services for those on the injunction list, 3) a clear process to get off the injunction list that does not involve people having to serve as informants, 4) an official investigation of police misconduct and racial profiling during the enforcement of the injunction, 5) a public commitment from city officials to implement a long-term violence prevention plan that addresses the root causes of violence and 6) an outlawing of future gang injunctions in San Francisco.

According to Sandy Banks, Los Angeles Times staff writer: "The LAPD has intensified its war on gangs with stepped up patrols and tough enforcement of a year-old court injunction that allows the arrest of Grape Street Cripps if they congregate in the project or on surrounding streets. Councilwoman Janice Hahn, who represents the area, said her office has been deluged with complaints from residents who say officers' heavy handed tactics are saddling young men with arrest records and increasing hostility towards the police. At her prodding, LAPD Chief of Police William J. Bratton and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo have pledged to review the injunction process."

We were calling for not just a review, but an end to the gang injunctions in our neighborhoods, streets, parks and communities. As we walked through City Hall to meet Mr. Herrera, I noticed how much the building resembles a mausoleum with its cold marble interior and how the presence of tortured spirits being held against their will permeated the environment. In contrast, the heat that emanated from the young people seeking an end to this injunction added life to the desolate, soul-less environment.

One after another, we piled into the City Attorney's office to show our unity. The receptionist looked extremely concerned by the presence of all these Bay Area citizens exercising their rights.
After leading a chant, Renee Saucedo announced the purpose of our visit and requested that Mr. Herrera accept our papers. After a few seconds of awkward silence, the spokesperson for Mr. Herrera said he was busy in a meeting and couldn't come out to receive his papers.

I could tell by how tight the spokeswoman had her arms clenched that they weren't used to having to deal with that many citizens. The law enforcement officer who stood next to Herrera's spokesperson told us, "He won't be coming out because no one made an appointment."

Renee Saucedo swiftly responded, "Dennis Herrera didn't make an appointment with us when he started the gang injunction." Her response was met with applause and cheers. Because Mr. Herrera refused to meet with our group, an earful of scholarship was given to the nervous spokeswoman, as many people spoke to how this injunction is a policy aimed only at criminalizing young people.

Although we weren't allowed to see Mr. Herrera, we decided to continue on in the belly of the beast and meet with our elected officials. After all, they do work for us. We went into the offices of Supervisors Peskin, Chu, Sandoval, Ammiano, Dufty, Maxwell, Alioto-Pier and Daly. A copy of the injunction was given to each staff person along with the reasons we wanted the gang injunction to be stopped.

A Southern California newspaper reported that its review of the impact of a local gang injunction showed that nearly 80 percent of the gang members named in that injunction had been convicted of at least one crime since the injunctions were imposed. More than half of those convicted committed crimes in the injunctions' target neighborhoods, indicating that gang members neither ended their criminal acts nor moved away after being served with court orders to do so and that these gang injunctions do little to decrease gang violence.

As Nancy Hernandez of Homies Organized in the Mission to Empower Youth said: "This gang injunction is attacking a symptom of the problem, not the root cause. The problems are poverty, gentrification, lack of programs, lack of jobs and after school programs."

As we walked down the spotless halls of power I was reminded of the words uttered by Minister Christopher Muhammad when he spoke at a rally about San Francisco politics. He said, "They use the word gentrification, but the real word is ethnic cleansing, to remove poor people of color in every neighborhood."

Sam Drew is a staff writer with Poor News Network. Read more about issues of poverty and race written by the people who face them daily at www.poormagazine.org.

SFPD gone wild in Bayview Hunters Point!

by Alicia Schwartz, POWER

Join us at these two meetings:

• San Francisco Police Commission meeting Wednesday, Dec. 5, 5:30 p.m., City Hall Room 400
• Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing on gang injunctions Monday, Dec. 10, 10 a.m., City Hall, Second Floor

On Thanksgiving Day, one of POWER's leaders and her family were terrorized by several San Francisco police officers. At the time, the woman was taking a shower, while her children were downstairs.
The police entered her home, terrorized her children, assaulted and arrested one of her family members, and removed her from the shower and held her, in front of her children, with no clothes on.

This woman is not alone. Dozens of families in Bayview Hunters Point, the Mission District and the Fillmore are being terrorized by the SFPD and gang injunctions that protect developers, not families. These racist gang injunctions need to be stopped, and the SFPD needs to be held accountable.

We deserve:

• Community policing, not policing for Lennar and other developers
• The removal of these officers from the community
• Community education and control over the terms and enforcement of the gang injunctions
• Police accountability - including contact information and badge numbers of all officers in the community, and an anonymous complaint line

SFPD should not be allowed to run wild in Bayview Hunters Point or any other community! For more information, call Alicia or Jaron at POWER, (415) 864-8372, ext. 302 or 303.

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