Scene 1: Oakland, CA, January 2012.
Occupy Oakland protesters gather with the stated intent to commandeer an abandoned building, so that the building could be used as a meeting space. En route, protesters clash with police, who fire on unarmed citizens.
Eventually, police dedicate a truly impressive amount of time and energy to arresting 400 people outside of the Oakland YMCA, while violent crimes and emergency calls go unattended.
In the aftermath, City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente states that it’s “terrible” that protesters are consuming police resources, but “when you have hundreds if not thousands of people, and you never know if they are going to break windows or vandalize businesses, you have to respond.”
Scene 2: Truckee, CA, also all across the country, 2010.
Bank of America wrongfully forecloses on the house of one woman, disposing of her belongings without alerting her. She tells the NYT “This is in essence a burglary, but when a burglar goes in, they don’t take your photos and your husband’s ashes.” Yes, dead husband’s ashes.
Today, the federal government reached a settlement with 5 of the largest banks over the offenses related to “robosigning” foreclosures, the practice of rapidly processing millions of foreclosures without proper documentation, which resulted in scenes like the woman in Truckee’s all over the country. The settlement means that the number of people arrested for these crimes will remain at 0.
Says Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, one of the best out there, “Robosigning is not a small offense. It's not a "clerical" issue. It's a mass-perjury issue, a tax evasion issue, a contractual fraud issue, and it's a criminal conspiracy issue (the banks' highest executives were engaged in planning it) and it resulted in millions of errors that resulted in untold numbers of premature foreclosures.”
-----Personally, I think it’s ridiculous that a city leader would state that the possibility of windows being broken totally forces the hand of an entire police force. It’s a fucking window my man, and last I checked we’d figured out how to replace windows. To me, property crime should always take a back seat to people crime, especially violent-emergency-type people crime. Isn’t it just absurd to think of dozens of police in armor guarding an abandoned building while 911 rings off the hook?
But it’s not just that they have a dumbass policy of protecting things before people, because when it’s people’s things that need protecting from businesses, rather than the other way around, no one goes to jail. The banks are allowed to “settle” for less money than they made doing the robosigning in the first place, and as part of it, they get immunity. Them and all the contractor thugs who actually do the burglarizing.
This is what the Occupy movement is really about. It’s about how we’re playing a rigged game, how powerful businesses get a pass on things like “laws,” while normal people who point that fact out get arrested.
I don’t want the movement to get unduly wrapped up with police confrontation; I’d rather concentrate on the real 1%. But the police ARE a symptom of the larger problem. It is impossible for me to consider the two scenes above and not conclude that, when push comes to shove, the police are equivalent to a taxpayer-funded private security force for business interests. As we push for real reforms to the system, how the police approach people’s interests and business interests has to be on the table.
