Black Lives Matter,gentrification and the security state in the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

In the Fall of 2014, Black Lives Matter protests erupted across the United States and the San Francisco Bay Area became the site of nightly demonstrations that deployed a range of disruptive practices and direct actions. The content and style of these protests reflected both the national political issues raised by the Black Lives Matter movement, and highly local and regional struggles over gentrification and displacement. In this article, I analyze these protests in relation to the regional political economy of the tech-industry, the real estate booms, and the attendant ‘eviction epidemic’ in the region. In doing so, I lay out an analysis of the relationship between policing and gentrification in the Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area. In the first section, I analyze the regional political economy as the context in which these protests must be understood. In a second section, I argue that the protests created a regional protest geography that, in turn, was met by a regionalized repressive security state. Finally, I read the disruptive practices deployed by these protests as a series of complex and sophisticated contestations which embodied connections among policing, gentrification, and the regional political economy. As such, the Black Lives Matter protests produced an intersectional analysis and can be read as a regional uprising aimed to disrupt the security state.

Keywords

gentrification policing protest race security

Introduction

Do we have the same level of outrage when a young black person gets killed as we do when a window gets broken? And if not, then why is that?

Alicia Garza, co-founder of #blacklivesmatter

On a warm night in November 2014, while attending a Black Lives Matter protest that had wound its way to West Oakland, I struck up a conversation with another protestor. At that point, the protest had been going on for two hours, following an erratic path through the streets of Oakland. Momentarily stopped, the crowd of protestors waited underneath a highway onramp for those who had climbed up to block Interstate-80. It was there that the young Black teenager standing next to me, Josiah,¹ who I soon learned was from East Oakland, asked me to hold onto the boom box that he had balanced on the handlebars of the small fold-up scooter he was riding. As was common with many of the interactions I had at these protests, our conversation soon shifted from the mundane (the technicalities of attaching a boom box to the top of a scooter) to the personal and political dynamics of the protests. As we talked, I learned that these protests were his first experience with protesting and that he had been ‘out’ every night attending them. When I asked why he kept attending, he answered solemnly: ‘How do I say this … because they don’t care about us. The police, the politicians, the city, they just want to kill us like we don’t matter.’ For Josiah, every part of what he described as ‘the whole damn system’ was equally culpable in systematic violence and racism.

The account of ‘the system’ that Josiah gave me fit Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as ‘the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Gilmore, 2007: 247). Indeed, it was the premature death of two young Black men at the hands of police that had prompted the protests I was attending, one in a series that started roughly around 24 November 2014,² after the announcement that a Grand jury in Missouri would not indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed the unarmed Black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson. These protests then grew larger after the announcement on 3 December that New York Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo, who killed the unarmed Black man, Eric Garner, had also not been indicted by a Staten Island grand jury. Starting in the Fall of 2014 and continuing in spates over the next years, these loosely organized protests occurred throughout the San Francisco Bay Area under the banner of ‘Black Lives Matter’.³ Similar protests were documented in almost every major city in the United States as well as in the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Canada. At the time of writing this in March 2017, there are Black Lives Matters chapters operating throughout the United States as well as internationally.

In this article, my focus remains on the loosely organized⁴ protests in the San Francisco Bay Area which started in November 2014 and continued for the next few months across the region. Employing a range of disruptive protest practices, from taking over streets, to shutting down major highways and breaking store and bank windows, the daily protests often continued for hours into the night. As part of a national protest movement occurring around the country, Bay Area’s protests shared a general critique of the racialized violence of policing, and the systematic targeting and killing of Black people by the US security regime. As a rebellion against this security regime, they were simultaneously raw expressions of collective outrage, anger, and grief, as well as material forms of resistance that operated across a number of spatial scales: from the personal and bodily, to the home, to the neighborhood, city and region. Across the United States, the protests forced a political conversation about race, racism, and the value of Black life and, as I will argue, the political content of the protests was often intimately connected to the local histories and contexts that shaped them.

While Black Lives Matter protests around the country had many commonalities, I argue that the Bay Area protests must be understood within the specificity of the economic and political forces shaping the region as well as the particularities of how security is produced in the region (Glück, 2015; Glück and Low, 2017). That is, they must be understood in the context of the Bay Area’s political economy: a political economy defined by gentrification, a speculative real estate boom, a housing affordability crisis, and the consequent ‘eviction epidemic’ precipitated by the massive impacts of the region’s tech industry. Framing the article in this way, I analyze Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area as protests against a racialized security regime designed to protect capitalist urban redevelopment, tech-led property speculation, gentrification and the regional restructuring of the Bay Area’s economy. I understand racialized police violence as a means of creating ‘safe’ spaces for capital investment and gentrification in the region (since at least the mid-1990s). Or as activists from the Anti-Police Terror Project bluntly say: ‘police are the shock troops of gentrification.’⁵

In this analysis, I have drawn upon participant observation at the protests themselves in Oakland, Berkeley, Emoryville, San Francisco, and on the major highways and bridges that inter-connect the Bay Area and link the region to the rest of California. My participant observation in the protests is also framed by long-term ethnographic fieldwork within the housing-rights movement in the Bay Area. I also draw upon understandings of the protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, that have analyzed them in the context of the racialized suburbanization of poverty⁶ (Kneebone, 2014; Parlette and Cowen, 2011) as well as broader understandings of the United States’ regime of racialized criminalization and incarceration as productive of carceral landscapes (Gilmore, 2007). These are landscapes in which the neoliberal security state manages racial capitalism and its crises (including protests against it) through the production of more securitized spaces (Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Gilmore, 2012).

In the first section, I analyze the current regional political economy of the Bay Area in relation to the policing and security regimes that often accompany gentrification and urban restructuring. In the second section, I analyze Black Lives Matters protests in the Bay Area as a response to this regional political economy which, in turn, was met with a security force also organized at a regional scale. In making these arguments, I contend that the Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area must be understood not only as a national uprising against racist police violence, but also as a series of local and regional uprisings which were grounded in the political struggles of particular places. Through this analysis of spaces of accumulation, resistance and repression, I show how the Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area drew clear political connections between policing, security, dispossession and gentrification at a regional scale.

A regional political economy and its security regime

In the San Francisco Bay Area, practices of policing the poor have proceeded hand in hand with gentrification and the restructuring of the regional economy. Certainly, San Francisco has undergone several waves of gentrification, each of which transformed specific neighborhoods in the city. However, the current wave of gentrification precipitated by the so-called ‘tech boom 2.0’ is distinguished in its total saturation of the city’s rental and real estate markets. This in turn, has put intense pressure on the city’s long-term residents and precipitated what activists have called an ‘eviction epidemic.’ The city currently has the highest levels of income inequality in the country (Knight, 2014) and property values and housing costs have risen apace. Put simply, as tech-wealth floods into urban real estate markets in the region, it has also precipitated a social and political crisis.

The crisis of poverty, homelessness, and evictions that has swept across the region from San Francisco to San Jose, is directly linked to the massive regional impact of the tech economy. Valuations of private tech companies have reached unprecedented heights in recent years (Dee, 2015) as investors and hedge funds pump money into new startups. This has occurred alongside the astronomical valuations of the area’s more established companies, such as Facebook, Apple and Google who have a collective net worth of approximate $1.6 trillion dollars (La Monica, 2015; Schaefer, 2015). At the same time, companies based on a ‘sharing economy’ model, such as Uber and Airbnb, continue to grow rapidly and were valued at $62.5 billion and $24 billion, respectively, in their last funding cycles (Newcomer, 2015, Winkler and Macmillan, 2015).

In this context of tech-led speculative capitalism (Harvey, 1989), the industry has become the region’s newest gold rush. The ‘rent gap’ (Smith, 1996) in San Francisco – that is, the differential between the ‘market rate’ and what long term tenants pay in rent – is growing under pressure of two major tech-related forces. Firstly, on the consumer side, thousands of high-income tech employees, who in 2014 made an average starting salary of anywhere from $121,611–$195,120 (Hoge, 2014) have moved into the region, pushing up actual and projected ‘market rates.’ Secondly, a significant amount of affordable housing has been taken ‘off the market’ and inserted into the short-term rental market, through Airbnb and other ‘sharing economy’ companies. Airbnb alone has taken as much as 40% of ‘potential’ rental units off the market in certain neighborhoods (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2015a). As the income from short-term rentals is higher than normal rents, the cumulative effect is increased ‘market’ pressure to either raise rents or convert apartments into such short-term rentals. San Francisco is thus in the midst of a prolonged affordability crisis: in 2015, the city had the most expensive rental market in the country, with the median two-bedroom apartment renting for $5,000 a month (Elsen, 2015).

As urban real estate markets across the United States have increasingly taken-up the function of absorbing or ‘mopping up’ international capital and surplus value in the wake of the financial crisis in 2007–2008 (Harvey, 2012), San Francisco stands out as a city where such ‘absorption’ has precipitated a social and political crisis. This crisis has meant that large numbers of long-term rent stabilized tenants have been evicted at an accelerated rate – indeed, over the past 5 years, there has been a 54.7% increase in evictions in the city (San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition, 2015).⁷ At a highly local level, there is a direct co-relation between neighborhoods with the highest number of evictions (such as the Inner Mission) and large numbers of units listed on Airbnb (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, 2017; Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2015a). But just as importantly, these evictions and displacements from San Francisco have led to the redrawing of urban space throughout the entire Bay Area region.

This political economy of gentrification and displacement has complex racial dynamics that are articulated in urban space. The general trend however is that the suburbanization of poverty in the Bay Area has gone hand in hand with the whitening of the cities of San Francisco and Oakland and relegation of the racialized poor to suburbia. Some of these trends are a long time in the making. For instance, the displacement of San Francisco’s Black population, which started with urban renewal policies in the 1970s that literally razed the historic Fillmore District (known as the ‘Harlem of the West’) has continued at an alarming rate (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, n.d.; Brahinsky, 2011; Hudson, 2014). Yet, even though the Black population makes up only 6% of the city, its criminalization and mass incarceration have not abated and currently accounts for 56% of the city’s jail population (Hudson, 2014). San Francisco’s Latino community has also been greatly impacted, as the Mission district (historically Latino) experienced an astounding 27% decrease in its Latino population from 2009–2013 (Budget and Legislative Analyst’s Office, 2015b). Thus, the forms of violence enacted against communities of color through such processes of urban transformation are many: as they are displaced from the cities of the inner Bay Area, Black and Latino residents are also subject to criminalization, incarceration and lethal forms of police violence at the hands of the security state.

While there have been many scholarly accounts of tech-led gentrification in San Francisco (Brahinsky, 2014; Maharawal, 2017; McElroy, 2016a; Mirabal, 2009; Opillard, 2015; Solnit, 2013: Maharawal and McElroy 2017a), less attention has been paid to the cities across the Bay, particularly Oakland.⁸ However, rather than focusing solely on Oakland or San Francisco as ‘discrete’ entities, I contend that a regional analysis that understands the inter-connections between racialized dispossession in Oakland (and the greater East Bay area) and the tech-economy in San Francisco is urgent (McElroy, 2016b; Schafran, 2013). For instance, in the traditionally working-class city of Oakland, rents in 2015 were the fourth highest in the country (Erwert, 2015), pushed-up in part by displaced middle-class San Franciscans who are moving to the city, and in part due to the tech-boom, as tech-capital investment spreads across the Bay. Also emblematic of the regional spread of the tech boom was the 2015 announcement by Uber that they would be re-locating their headquarters from San Francisco to the Sears building which they had bought in downtown Oakland (Bethencourt, 2015; Wood, 2016).⁹ Following the spread of tech wealth (and tech workers) in 2014 and 2015, real estate developers and investors also increasingly looked to Oakland as the ‘next frontier’ for regional property speculation, evidenced by a spike in construction of new large-scale market-rate buildings and the buying-up of houses to flip by large investment companies (BondGraham, 2016; Tepperman, 2013). Numerous articles have lauded Oakland’s ‘renaissance,’ most notably a New York Times piece dubbing the city ‘Brooklyn by the Bay’ (Haber, 2014), and by 2015, Oakland had the fastest rising rents of any city in the country – by some accounts it was the nation’s ‘hottest’ rental market (Erwert, 2015). Of course, in conjunction with this sharp upward swing in its housing costs, Oakland, too started to witness a rapid increase in evictions (Cherney, 2014; Graziani et al., 2016; Tavares, 2015). The domino effect created by a chain of displacement has ultimately led to the suburbanization of poverty in the outer Bay Area: as San Francisco’s displaced middle class, tech company offices and property speculators move to Oakland (as well as Berkeley, Emoryville, and Alameda), low-income residents who can no longer afford to live anywhere in the inner-Bay are forced to move farther afield to suburbs such as Vallejo, Antioch, Fairfield, and Stockton (Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, 2016; Hudson, 2014; Sankin, 2012). This spatial reorganization of the Bay Area has also gone hand in hand with security and policing practices used to enforce and protect capital investment and gentrification across the Bay Area.

Policing, gentrification and racial capitalism

In his seminal work on gentrification, Neil Smith poignantly connects police violence and gentrification through the 1988 police riot in Tompkins Square Park, writing that ‘the city was seeking to tame and domesticate the park to facilitate the already rampant gentrification’ (Smith, 1996: 3). He goes on to describe the new social and political geography that was emerging at that time in New York, one in which the space for new investments and speculation was paved not only by displacement and dispossession, but also by police violence. The snug relationship between police regimes and urban redevelopment have been described in other cities throughout the country where similar processes of ‘military urbanism’ (Graham, 2011) and securing urban space for capital re-investment seem to perennially proceed through evictions, ‘homeless removal,’ the privatizing of public spaces and the growth of security and policing practices that criminalize the poor (Camp, 2012; Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Davis, 2006; Low, 2006; Mitchell and Staeheli, 2006; Sorkin, 1992). In Los Angeles, Jordan T Camp refers to this process as a ‘security turn’ in the urban social order for which ‘revanchism provides the ideological underpinning’. (2012: 668). The revanchist project, which saw major capital reinvestment into previously disinvested urban cores, has been accompanied by an urban security regime of so-called ‘law and order’ or ‘zero-tolerance’ policing. In New York City and Los Angeles (among other cities) this occurred under the rubric of what has become known as ‘broken windows’ policing (Harcourt, 2005; Vitale, 2008). As critics have pointed out, this form of policing, ‘often presented as a more community-minded alternative to more aggressive forms of policing’ is underpinned by a racial logic that ‘conflates the racialized poor with spatialized disorder,’ (Camp and Heatherton, 2016: 3–6). As such, it is part of a historical tradition in the United States in which ‘law and order has “become [so] conflated with racial order’ (Murakawa, 2008, 235).

So-called ‘broken windows’ policing developed out of neo-conservative thinking in the 1960s and focuses on ‘quality of life’ infractions in order to maintain urban order. First articulated by criminologists James Q Wilson and George Kelling in the early 1980s, the theory¹⁰ argues that poverty and social disorganization result from crime and not the other way around (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). Connected to racist ‘culture of poverty’ arguments that pathologize and blame poor people for their own poverty, broken windows policing targets the urban poor in general, and racialized urban communities in particular, arguing that these communities exhibit ‘moral failings’ that cause them to commit crimes and live in poverty. Emerging from the neo-conservative backlash to the civil rights movement, particularly to its more radical elements, this ‘tough on crime’ political rhetoric became hegemonic in American politics in the 1970s and 1980s,¹¹ alongside euphemistic and racially coded language of ‘inner-city crime,’ ‘welfare queens,’ and ‘crack fiends’ that was used to legitimate new policing initiatives (such as the war on drugs and zero-tolerance policing) alongside the dramatic expansion of the carceral state (Camp and Heatherton, 2016; Gilmore, 2007; Vitale, 2014). This marked a new era in urban policing, as ‘broken windows’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies became a highly effective mechanism for criminalizing Black, Brown and poor communities which led to the legitimization of new forms of the micro-regulation of urban life.¹² Increasingly, the use of military style command-and-control systems, high-tech urban surveillance and the use of technology and big data sets for predictive policing have been deployed in tandem with broken windows (Graham, 2011; Scannell, 2016). However, as a pillar of neoliberal urban strategy in the United States, broken windows is about more than just policing – it also embodies the state’s shift away from the maintenance of social welfare and towards the function of security provision alone and as such it is a shift that enlarges the role of the police over all aspects of social life (Camp and Heatherton, 2016).

Broken windows policing can be understood as just one part of the security regime that undergirds American racial capitalism. Through the policing of urban centers that are being remade by gentrification, the United States’ security regime buttresses the displacement and criminalization of the urban poor through police violence. Following Cederic Robinson, I use the term ‘racial capitalism’ to describe how, since its inception, ‘the development, organization and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions’ (Robinson, 1983: 2). These ‘racial directions’ remain fundamental to the character of capitalist development. Further, the current urban security regime in the United States is dependent upon ‘enactments of surveillance … along racial lines’ (Browne, 2012: 72) that are both unique to the present era and deeply historical. Indeed, the ‘zoning of Black mobilities in city spaces’ (Browne, 2012: 72) can be traced to practices developed by slave owners (Parenti, 2000), as well as to the use of ‘lantern laws’ in 18th-century New York City (Browne, 2015) and every era of American history has seen its own innovation of racial practices of socio-spatial control (Browne, 2015; Da Silva, 2007; Gilmore, 2007; Hall, 2013; McKittrick, 2011; Melamed, 2011; Murakawa, 2008; Wacquant, 2002). In the Bay Area, the current manifestation of this socio-spatial control is intertwined with the transformation of the regional political economy. As tech-led gentrification reshapes the cities of the Bay Area, it is in turn producing both security spaces and spaces of contention across geographical scales throughout the region.

Policing for urban redevelopment in Oakland

Oakland’s urban transformations have followed a classic historical trajectory, like that of many post-WWII cities across the United States: African American migration during the war transformed the city, followed by deindustrialization, suburban growth, urban decline and the rise of politics focused on private property (Self, 2003). However, Oakland’s history is distinct in that it is where the Black Panther Party (BPP) was founded and, as such, it is a place with a rich history of protest and organizing against police brutality. As Robyn Spencer writes, ‘police brutality was a persistent problem in Oakland’s history … [it] was not a matter of isolated instances … [but] a reflection of how racial inequalities permeated the maintenance of law and order’ (2016: 12). This history continues today in the racialized violence of contemporary policing practices which protect urban redevelopment projects, and the protests that have emerged to contest them.

Two recent moments in Oakland’s history illustrate the role of the police in the redevelopment of the city. The first of these was in 1999 when (governor at the time of this writing) Jerry Brown was the mayor of Oakland. As mayor, Brown pushed for a downtown development plan aiming to build 10,000 units of market-rate housing to lure higher income residents to the area (Elinson, 2010). To enact this plan, he courted developers with significant tax breaks to build the units. This downtown development plan went along with his backing of new police measures modeled on the zero-tolerance policies of (then mayor) Rudolph Giuliani in New York City (Slater, 1999). The Oakland Police Department, already notorious for violence, then gained further notoriety for a series of beatings and false arrests in the early 2000s that ultimately led to Federal Oversight (Harris, 2011). One Oakland resident described the police department during this time to me as: ‘determined to crack people’s heads … for no reason’ (Author’s personal fieldnotes, 2015). At that time, the explicit shift to ‘zero-tolerance’ policing accompanied the emergence of the gentrification and redevelopment of downtown Oakland.

The second moment occurred in early 2013 when the Oakland City Council voted to hire William Bratton – the notorious police chief-cum-global-security-consultant who pioneered Broken Window policing in New York City and Los Angeles – as a consultant to advise the department¹³ (Kuruvila, 2013). In its role as advisor, Bratton LLC penned an influential report recommending the increased use of CompStat, as the primary mode of policing (Bratton Group, 2013). CompStat, which is short for ‘Computer Statistics’ is part of a trend towards predictive big data-driven policing, and was introduced by Bill Bratton when he was commissioner of the New York City Police Department in the mid-1990s. As Joshua Scannell writes, the CompStat

approach provides easy transparency, in that anybody can look at a map and see if there are more or fewer dots than before. More dots mean the cops are failing. Fewer dots mean they’re doing their job. (2016)

This approach is rooted in the fantasy that statistics are neutral and can provide a window into the reality on the ground in urban spaces. However, as various critiques have pointed out, big data is, of course, not neutral but embedded within social conditions (cf. Amoore and Piouck, 2015). In the case of CompStat and other predictive policing algorithms, this is a ‘law-enforcement strategy that was racist all along’ (Scannell, 2016).

While the Oakland Police Department has never ‘officially’ said that they engage in broken-windows policing, their policing practices, which have historically been brutal and targeted at the city’s Black population, have more recently been shaped in the image of this dominant policing ideology. Policing in Oakland, like in many US cities, has been shaped through urban policy consultants as knowledge, expertise, and techniques move from one city to another through networks of experts (Peck and Theordore, 2010). Through such processes, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) all but formally signed on to the Bratton doctrine, and have deployed broken windows-style policing, particularly in spaces of urban redevelopment and reinvestment.

Such policing practices generally lead to more frequent and violent encounters between police and residents, as the enforcement of quality of life infractions (such as walking in the middle of the street or selling loose cigarettes) become sites of confrontation. This type of policing is decidedly racialized and often any look at the numbers will explicitly show it to be so. For example, the data on the number of stops the OPD carried out between April 2013 and October 2014 show ‘unambiguously, that the majority of stops, searches and arrests conducted by OPD were of African Americans’ while Blacks account for 28 percent of the population they represented 59 percent of the stops (BondGraham and Winston, 2015).

Gentrification and police violence in San Francisco

In both Oakland and San Francisco, racialized policing has served to buttress gentrification, a process that inevitably leads to increased violence for many people of color at the hands of the police. Of the many names associated with such violence in recent years, the killing of Alejandro ‘Alex’ Nieto by the San Francisco Police Department in 2014 was most explicitly connected to processes of gentrification in the region. His death became a symbol for many residents of the lethal violence of gentrification in the Bay Area. As such, a brief discussion of his death and the political analysis that emerged in its aftermath is useful here for understanding the context in which racialized security space and gentrification was being discussed by activists and others around the time that the Black Lives Matter protests erupted in the region.

Alex Nieto was shot and killed by the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) as he ate a burrito on a park bench in Bernal Heights Park on 21 March 2014 at around 7 pm. His friends told the media that he often went up to Bernal Hill, with its wind-swept views of the city, when he needed some space to think. The 28-year-old City College graduate who had grown up in the Mission and Bernal Heights neighborhoods was on his way to his job as a security guard, and so was armed with a Taser. It was there that Nieto had three encounters with white men walking their dogs that led to a 911 call and his subsequent death by the police.¹⁴ The first of these was with Evan Snow, a 30-something white man who had moved to the neighborhood six months earlier and who worked as a ‘user design professional’. Snow’s dog went after Nieto’s food, the two men yelled at each other, and Snow apparently used a racial slur (though in the court testimony he declined to say what). Soon thereafter, the couple Tim Isgitt and Justin Fritz, who had been living in the city for about a year, passed Nieto, and Isgitt testified that he saw Nieto moving ‘nervously’ and putting his hand on his Taser. Isgitt then urged Fritz to call 911 to report Nieto. Fritz did, telling the 911 dispatcher that a Hispanic man in the park was pacing with a black handgun. Five minutes later, four police officers appeared on the scene and shot 59 times at Nieto, killing him on the spot.

Soon after Nieto was killed, I attended a march with hundreds of others that took place in his honor (see Figure 1 for a memorial made after his death). Starting at the Mission Cultural Center and lead by dancers from the group Mixcoatl Anahuac it slowly wound its way through the Mission and Bernal Heights to the park and the site of Nieto’s death, where the dancers led an Aztec ceremony, and Nieto’s father stood in the rain hugging everyone who attended. I saw signs littered through the crowd that read: ‘Gentrification = Police Brutality’. The conversations people had during the march were quiet, solemn and sad ranging from recollections of Alex Nieto (‘my older brother knew him and I used to always see him around …’) to anger and dismay. As one young Latino man I knew from housing activism said to me, gesturing to a café we passed with mostly white patrons huddled under an awning: ‘you know it’s sad really … they are scared of us, they live among us but are scared of us’.

Figure 1.

Memorial to Alex Nieto outside Red Poppy Art House, The Mission, San Francisco, CA.

Indeed, the person who called 911 feared Nieto because of the way he looked (a young Latino man in a rapidly whitening neighborhood), and Nieto in turn died because of their fear, his appearance triggering the lethal response of gentrification’s security regime. Here, the power of fear, as an embodied and affective state, reminds us that security is also a ‘state of being’ often produced at the scale of the body, and sometimes with deadly consequences (cf. Bestman, 2017; Glück and Low, 2017). Since the killing of Nieto, there have been at least two more police killings of young men of color in San Francisco: that of Almicar Perez Lopez in the Mission, and Mario Woods in the Bayview.¹⁵ Frequent as they are, however, such individual instances of racialized police violence are ‘only the tip of the iceberg’ in a larger system that includes the War on Drugs, mass incarceration and the construction of the carceral state (Gilmore, 1999, 2007; Gottschalk, 2008; Taylor, 2016). These police killings remind us that states of security operate at both micro and macro levels of social power – they create affective environments of fear and racialized fantasies of crime through which the security projects are consolidated (Glück, 2017). In the Bay Area, the current racialized ‘state of security’ (Glück and Low, 2017) is produced in tandem with urban redevelopment and gentrification, and is in turn producing its own affective environments of fear and lethality, leaving a string of deaths in its wake.

As such, gentrification signifies not just the reinvestment of capital into urban spaces, but also the concomitant security forces which exert violence and spatial control upon poor racialized urban populations. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes, ‘The social consequences of austerity budgets have effectively made the police storm troopers for gentrification, as cities compete to attract businesses and young white professionals with disposable incomes’ (2016: 124). It is in this context that the death of Alex Nieto has become a potent symbol of the link between police violence and intensifying gentrification across the region.

The Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area were grounded in these processes. Ultimately, I contend that while the protests were part of a national a response to the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, in the Bay Area they were also about the tech-led regional transformation of cities across the region and the particular kind of security state being produced to protect this political economy. In Oakland and San Francisco, the lived experiences of police violence in the shadow of tech-led gentrification formed the basis of the local grievances out of which Black Lives Matter protests erupted. As such, these protests must be analyzed as closely connected to the violence of displacement, eviction, gentrification and police brutality that accompanied them.¹⁶

Spaces of protests: Rebellion and repression at a regional scale

I still hear my brother crying, I can’t breathe—now I’m in the struggle, I can’t leave.

Lyrics from protest song, I Can’t Breathe¹⁷

On 24 November 2014, after the announcement that Darren Wilson would not be indicted for killing Michael Brown, a few hundred people gathered at 7 pm in downtown Oakland at ‘Oscar Grant Plaza’¹⁸ in front of City Hall and participated in a mass ‘die-in’. As the crowd swelled to a few thousand, an informal march, diverse in age, race, gender, and mobility, began to weave its way through the city, shutting down streets. We were followed by a low-flying police helicopter beaming its spotlight down on the crowd, as protestors marched through the streets, some chanting loudly while others remaining solemnly silent. At the intersection of Grand Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard, directly beneath the Highway-580 overpass, a line of police blocked the march’s progress. After briefly pausing, protestors found a way around the police line and stormed up the highway ramp; there they blocked East-bound traffic on the highway, shutting down a major regional artery at the height of rush hour traffic. While some of the drivers rolled up their windows and looked away, others chanted along with protestors in support, waved and raised their fists out of their car windows; one car blasted N.W.A’s classic ‘Fuck Tha Police’.

The police eventually forced the protestors off the highway, ending the hour-long traffic blockade. The crowd then marched back the way it had come, towards downtown Oakland, and was finally stopped by another police line at the intersection of Broadway and 7th street, one block away from the Oakland Police Department Headquarters and two blocks from another highway on-ramp. Although police prevented protestors from ‘taking’ another highway, there was little they could do to prevent other disruptive protest tactics, such as lighting dumpsters on fire, building barricades in the street, and breaking bank and store windows. The windows of a Starbucks were broken and food was distributed through the crowd while in front a Black man in his mid-20s in a wheelchair was using a megaphone to publicly recount his experiences of being brutalized by the police. It was past midnight when the last few hundred protestors were finally dispersed by the police who shot beanbag pellets and ‘less than lethal’ munitions into the thinning crowd.

The nightly Black Lives Matter protests in the Bay Area, which continued through January 2015, were unique for their intensity and consistency: for two months, a kind of regional uprising unfolded nightly, as tear gas and broken glass littered the streets. While people traversed the Bay Area to attend the protests, the marches themselves often crossed municipal lines from Oakland to Emeryville into Berkeley, blurring any sense of discrete city boundaries and forging a regional protest geography. These protests took many different forms, ranging from the street protests I have describe above, in which highways, intersections and streets were blocked and the windows of corporate chain stores, gentrifying businesses and banks were broken and spray painted with phrases such as ‘ACAB’¹⁹ or ‘Justice for Mike Brown’, to highly organized direct actions such as the lockdown of the Oakland Police Department Headquarters and the blockade of the Oakland Federal Building.

The tenor of these protests was defiant, jubilant, desperate, and heartbreakingly sad all at once (See Figure 2 for a scene from one of these protests). There was the sense that people were in solidarity with each other and learning nightly how to enact such solidarity.²⁰ Spontaneous dance parties occurred in blocked intersections. People sang old civil rights hymns and new songs like I Can’t Breathe whose lyrics echo Eric Garner’s last words: ‘I still hear my brother crying, I can’t breathe – now I’m in the struggle, I can’t leave.’ High-school students staged walk-outs, Public Defenders held a ‘die-in’ on the steps of the Oakland courthouse and others organized vigils and healing spaces. One night a pickup truck was used to block an Amtrak train halting regional circulation on that East Bay rail line for hours – meanwhile, a group of approximately 200 people climbed over a highway barrier next to the rail line and blocked Interstate 80 for hours. Various groups and collectives sprung up and organized protests. For example, The Black Out Collective shut down the Bart Area Rapid Transit (BART) system one morning by chaining themselves to West Oakland BART station, and Black Brunch (another collective) conducted direct actions in restaurants interrupting Sunday brunch goers in gentrifying neighborhoods (such as Temescal) with performative readings of the names of those who had been killed by the police.

Figure 2.

Black Lives Matter Protest, 4 December 2014, West Oakland, CA.

As these protests produced their own alternative spaces within the Bay Area, the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville were remade in the political imaginations of participants. Night marches, confrontations, and smashed bank windows re-mapped people’s knowledge and experience of these cities. The spaces that protests produced were grounded in collectively learned tactical (and tactile) knowledge of urban space. This included knowledge of which highway ramps could easily be taken over, which streets the police could use to hem-in a march, the risks of getting trapped in the maze-like parking lots in Emeryville, the most common intersections for police blockades and which neighborhoods could be counted-on for solidarity – where people would come out of their homes and join in (I saw this happen in the primarily African American and rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of West Oakland) – or, on the other hand, which neighborhoods contained residents who would close their doors, turn off their lights and pretend they were not home (for example in the upscale Piedmont neighborhood).

As these spaces were taken over and infrastructures were interrupted, the protests communicated a political message that was both general (i.e., as part of a national movement critiquing police violence and systemic racism) and simultaneously specific to the violent nexus of policing and gentrification in the Bay Area. They articulated a complex politics: encompassing multiple cities, neighborhoods and regional transportation infrastructures, they came to embody and spatialize a critique not only of the security state but also of the regional political economy that it was imbricated in. In doing so, the protests resisted the spatial re-ordering of the region by the tech economy and the its militarized policing apparatus, linking macro and micro articulations of the security state in the cities and everyday lives of residents. Put another way, the protests fluidly linked general political (and policy) issues, to deeply personal and local places and events.

Repression at a regional scale

The Black Lives Matter rebellion in the Bay Area was met with a security force that also operated at a regional scale. Analyzing the constitution of this security force allows us to understand how spaces of security are produced at specific spatial scales. Particularly, the production of a regionalized security response to Black Lives Matter shows how the repression of these protests operated across scales, in which local and municipal security functions were embedded within ad-hoc regional arrangements. This regionalized police response can be analyzed at two different levels.

The first level is that of the actual composition of the police forces who responded to the protests. Through the use of so-called ‘mutual aid agreements,’ local police departments called upon the assistance of other departments across the state in repressing Black Lives Matter protests in their cities. These agreements acted as force multipliers, increasing police numbers in a short amount of time and were frequently used to repress protests. In the case of the nightly Black Lives Matter protests, according to criminal justice and surveillance expert and journalist, Ali Winston, the agencies involved in the nightly repression of protests included Oakland Police Department, Fremont Police Department, Hayward, East Bay Parks, Alameda County Sherriff, Albany Police Department, the University of California Security Forces, and the California Highway Patrol (which itself called officers from as far away as the town of Truckee on the Nevada border). The composition of this piecemeal police force meant that protestors often did not know by whom they were being policed, nor how officers would treat them, as different agencies have different use-of-force policies. Moreover, in such hybrid-regional forces it becomes almost impossible to hold particular police accountable for brutality towards protestors or other transgressions as agencies are inclined to ‘pass the buck around’ to avoid responsibility (Winston, 2016, interview). According to Winston, when operating as a composite police force, operations are coordinated through local fusion centers and the incidents that ‘mobilize’ such a regional force are treated as ‘Homeland Security events.’ Indeed, a 2005 US Department of Justice report that outlines the protocol for ‘mutual aid’ agreements prominently talks about 11 September 2001 as an example of the necessity and utility of such agreements (U.S. Department of Justice, 2005).

The second level in which protest-policing operated at a regional scale during the Black Lives Matter protests was through the surveillance deployed against protestors.²¹ Namely, those who participated in the protests were being surveilled on social media by a regional network of ‘Terrorism Liaison Officers’ (TLOs) of which, according to unofficial counts there are 14,527 in California alone (BondGraham, 2016). This network of TLOs located throughout the state was created after 9/11 and is coordinated by fusion centers such as the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. Additionally, other agencies involved in surveillance of the Black Lives Matters protests in the Bay Area included senior intelligence advisors with the California State Threat Assessment Center who coordinated with the Oakland Police Department, Alameda County Sherriff as well as other agencies involved in the protest-policing (BondGraham, 2016; Brown, 2014).

The use of these statewide and regional surveillance infrastructures also conflated protestors with terrorists, leaving many legal questions unanswered – questions such as: how is this information used and tracked? Are protestors tracked indefinitely? Who has access to this information and for what purposes? As Nadia Kayyali, an activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation said: ‘We don’t know what their standards are, [nor] their policies with respects to limits and privacy’ (BondGraham, 2016). The use of a regional counter-terrorism and security infrastructures to police and surveil Black Lives Matters protests thus mirrored both the regional nature of the protests as well as the regional political economy of the Bay Area. This regionalized security force and its surveillance of protesters through counterterrorist infrastructures also represents the latest incarnation of post-civil rights security regimes, stretching from Reagan’s War on Drugs and Clinton’s security policies to the present-day conflation of civil disobedience with terrorism (Taylor, 2016).

Disruptive practices and social order

We have to disrupt the white supremacist status quo.

protestor, Oakland, CA, 2014

Throughout the Bay Area, the connections between gentrification and racialized police violence were made continuously by protestors. The connection was drawn clearly on 21 March 2015, on the one-year anniversary of the death of Alex Nieto. At this protest, people chained themselves to the SFPD’s Mission station, held a mock trial of the four officers involved in Nieto’s death and blocked a tech bus carrying eBay workers from the city to Silicon Valley to highlight the connection between tech-led gentrification and police violence. Disruptive²² practices such as these were common throughout the Black Lives Matter protests and laid bare the connections between racism, urban space, and police violence.

The most immediately legible form taken by such disruptive practices were perhaps the windows of businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods that were often broken during nightly marches – such as coffee shops, bike stores, and upscale restaurants. In San Francisco, the Acting Director of the San Francisco Tenant Union, Andrew Szeto, when asked about his involvement and what he thought about such property destruction, replied:

I was part of the protest because as someone who works in the Mission and does anti-displacement work, [I see that] the violence against black people is directly related to the eviction problem. […] A lot of these small businesses play a real part in gentrification. They serve food or have these products that are catered to wealthy customers, and people in the neighborhood feel alienated by all this stuff. (quoted in Cernavskis, 2014)

For Szeto, these businesses were symbols of gentrification and the beneficiaries of the racialized policing that protected them. They were sources of alienation and tangible symptoms of the broader economic forces oppressing residents. Seen through this lens, the property destruction at work in the BLM protests was not random, but symbolically and politically loaded and can be read as the material repudiation of both gentrification and police violence.²³

Similarly, to ‘take to the streets’ is to create a public for what might otherwise be individual expressions of anger, outrage, or desire for change. Black Lives Matter protests created precisely such a public through disruptive practices, forcing the issue into public conversation by interrupting everyday life. Shutting down highways and interrupting weekend brunch-goers was aimed at disrupting people’s everyday lives in order to draw public attention to the complex violence of racialized policing. In the context of displacement and rampant evictions, these disruptions sought to expose the violence that underpinned the regional real estate and tech-boom. Disruptive protests thus revealed the intimate connections between policing, gentrification, and the eviction of Black and brown people from urban centers – and often, protests against one legitimately spilled over into protests against the other.

According to one protestor I spoke with, the point of these practices was to ‘disrupt the white supremacist status quo.’ Commenting on the Black Lives Matter movement, Fred Moten argues that there is deep connection between state violence, Black sociality and so-called order:

when we say that Black lives matter, I think what we do sometimes is obscure the fact that it’s in fact Black life that matters – that insurgent black social life still constitutes a profound threat to the already existing order of things. (Moten, 2014, emphasis added)

Such statements are suggestive for understanding the widespread use of disruptive practices at these protests. If the aim of broken windows policing is to create ‘urban order’ (and in doing so to reform and recapture ‘disorderly’ and racialized urban places as safe and secure for capital), then the political content of breaking windows can be read as a spatial and symbolic act that defies and contests this ‘order.’ It is a political disruption that recaptures the very symbol of the broken window and uses it to reveal state violence. Read this way, such acts produce a legible message, written into the very fabric of the city (Lefebvre, 1996).

As protests wound their way through the cities of the Bay Area, they created their own protest geographies and spaces of contention, challenging the systemic racism of policing and gentrification through their embodied practices. In turn, they were policed by a security state also constituted at a regional scale and built in equal measure by post-9/11 counter-terrorism infrastructures and the broken window-style policing practices that have accompanied economic urban redevelopment projects in the region. These loosely organized and often messy protests have been criticized for their lack of coherence and the ‘violence’ of property destruction that they enacted. However, as I have shown, we may also read in their disruptive practices and targets an important and nuanced political message: one that connects the racial violence of policing at a national scale to the particular injustices and violence of gentrification and spatial transformation in the region.

Conclusion: Beyond gentrification, beyond policing

We demand … the immediate divestment of city funds for policing and investment in sustainable, affordable housing so Black, Brown and Indigenous people can remain in their hometowns of Oakland and San Francisco.

Black.Seed Collective²⁴

On Martin Luther King Day, 18 January 2016, a caravan of activists from the Black Seed collective stopped all Westbound traffic on the Bay Bridge – the main artery connecting the cities of San Francisco and Oakland – by chaining themselves together across the five lanes of the bridge (Hinckley, 2016; Wong, 2016). Unfurling a banner that read ‘Black Health Matters,’ the protestors stopped all traffic on the bridge for over an hour before having their chains cut apart and getting arrested by the California Highway Patrol. The bridge shutdown was one of many actions that took place during four days of protest surrounding Martin Luther King Day and which were aimed at ‘reclaim[ing] MLKs radical legacy’ (Wong, 2016). At the bridge shutdown, protestors demanded the resignation of the mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf, as well as the resignation of the San Francisco and Oakland police chiefs in the wake of the killing of several young men of color in both cities. They also demanded the repurposing of city funds earmarked for policing to be used instead to build affordable housing for ‘Black, Brown and Indigenous people’ (Anti-Police Terror Project, 2016).

It is significant that the protest took place neither in San Francisco nor in Oakland, but on the bridge that links the two. Through this action, protestors brought together a seemingly incongruous set of demands – demands concerning health, policing, housing and the culpability of city officials on both sides of the Bay. And the location and demands of the protest indicated that these issues extended beyond the purview of any one municipality, but were rather part of a crisis at a regional scale. According to these protestors, the police killing of Mario Woods on 2 December 2015 in San Francisco was about the interconnected issues of affordable housing, mental health and racialized criminalization throughout the region.²⁵ This intersectional analysis went beyond demanding police accountability or reform, rather, it drew attention to the various scales at which racialized violence is enacted and produced.

By disrupting urban spaces and infrastructures, the protests I discuss here have contested not only the structural racism of the security state, but also processes of displacement, gentrification, and dispossession which are protected by this state. They drew connections between the political economy of tech, mass incarceration, the lack of healthcare, and the security practices at the heart of contemporary racial capitalism. In paying close attention to the messaging, practices, and tactics enacted by these protests, there is much to learn about both the nature of the contemporary capitalist security state as well as how it might be possible to contest it.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Thank you to editors Setha Low and Zoltán Glück for comments on this article and for organizing this special issue. Thanks also to Ruth W. Gilmore and the 2015–2016 cohort of the Center for Place, Culture and Politics seminar at The Graduate Center, CUNY for their exceedingly helpful comments on an earlier version of this piece. Two anonymous reviewers and Sam Stein provided important suggestions for revisions. My biggest thank you is to the many activists and protesters in the San Francisco Bay Area to whom I am deeply indebted.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Major funding for research and writing was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Notes

Manissa M Maharawal is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at American University in Washington DC. Her research examines urban space and social movements.

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