Police terrorize Oakland

Popular Resistance - Inside the air-conditioned Emergency Operations Center of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO) outside Oakland, California, dozens of law enforcement officers spent the weekend coordinating more than a thousand terrorist attacks. Each attack was scheduled down to the minute. Each attack occurred 35 times.

Masked terrorists stormed the visiting locker room at Candlestick Park during a soccer tournament and took five members of the Filipino National Team hostage in a luxury suite. In nearby South San Francisco, “homegrown jihadists” engaged in an indoor shootout with officers attempting to deliver a search warrant. Elsewhere in the Bay Area, a “militant atheist extremist group” took hostages at a suburban Presbyterian church, “foreign terrorists” hijacked a public bus, and the Golden Gate Bridge was threatened by a terrorist with an IED.

On Saturday afternoon, a giant screen in the middle of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) displayed four livestreams of attacks in progress, including an assault by “a violent homegrown extremist group” in the theater of a local community college. Other areas of the screen displayed a live traffic map of the San Francisco Bay Area, the interface of the ACSO’s command and control software, an NFL game, and the semifinals of the US Open.

Paul Hess, the ACSO’s Emergency Services Supervisor, apologized for the sports. “It is the weekend,” he said.

The EOC was the nerve center of Urban Shield, a 48-hour training exercise for law enforcement agencies that’s been held in and around Oakland for the last eight years. Founded by James Baker, a former assistant sheriff in the ACSO, Urban Shield began in 2007 as a series of training scenarios for SWAT teams. Since then, it has grown into what organizers describe as “a comprehensive, full-scale regional preparedness exercise” that aims to “test regional integrated systems for prevention, protection, response, and recovery in our high-threat, high-density urban area.” The event takes place under the auspices of the Bay Area Urban Areas Security Initiative and is largely funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Because of the DHS money, Urban Shield’s training scenarios must include “a nexus to terrorism.”

This year’s Urban Shield, held September from 4 to 8, took place amid increased scrutiny of police militarization in the wake of the overwhelming response to protests against the killing of Michael Brown by local cops in Ferguson, Missouri. On the second day of the conference, Dan Siegel, a former legal adviser to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan who is now running to replace her, publicly criticized the convention, telling local news station KPIX: “Urban Shield is an effort to further militarize police departments in Alameda County, and it is certainly something that we don’t need.” Later that day, while hundreds of protesters rallied against the event, Mayor Quan, who is herself running for re-election, issued a statement announcing that the event “will not be held in Oakland next year.”

The public side of Urban Shield is a two-day trade show at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Oakland—an event filled with the corporations that cater to “anyone who has a gun,” as a salesperson for Safariland described it to me. But away from the convention center, 35 teams of six to eight police officers—mostly from local police departments, but also including some from South Korea, Singapore, Philadelphia, and Texas—compete to see who can best respond to to 31 different terrorist or emergency scenarios at locations around the Bay Area. The teams rotate through the scenarios for 48 hours with just one scheduled 30-minute nap (on bunk beds in cells at the San Francisco County Jail).