Anarchists torpedo Greg Suhr's career

It was Suhr's bright idea to encircle and mass arrest demonstrations on Market Street (a costly practice he promoted at a April 2004 city hall hearing on police tactics during protests). Somehow though, I have a feeling the next deputy chief will bring even more Stormtrooper riot cops than Suhr to the next demo....

so long greg. we'll miss ya!

Suhr has been deputy chief since 2002, when he presided over the Fajita-gate incident....

Yeah - I don't know where the class action lawsuit went regarding the 1200 arrests during one evening at the Not in Our Name march on March 20, 2003, in which participants were quite mainstream and were behaving themselves well, staying on the sidewalk and waiting for the lights to change. One observation at that scene was that an fbi agent was traveling around in the command vehicle, a Chevy Tahoe with dark windows, with Suhr and other leadership, so they may have influenced decisions. It is Richard Bruce who was probably making higher level decisions during the IRaq escalation stuff where everyone was taken to the big limousine warehouse on the pier. http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/03/1583174_comment.php (this is probably Greg Suhr in the second picture here). The person making the specific decision for the smaller arrest of ~325 at hayes as opposed to Franklin has left the force and that is why the office of citizen's complaints didn't sustain charges regarding this illegal mass arrest of everyone, protester or non, standing within the encirclement.
Here is an account of that night:
http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/06/290999.shtml

That is an interesting payscale. My housemate is a security guard at Safeway and also dispatching, and he regularly has to fight odd kleptomaniac people he scouts out at Marina Safeway or in the Fillmore, who often aren't who you'd first suspect such as senior citizens, and his pay isn't that high - he can only afford a room.

How much does a teacher his age make in this city? An EMT? A fireman? A rookie beat cop?

In New York, the police don't make very much - like starting $35,000. I noticed that the officers have regional borough accents, and visiting briefly, once a police van pulled up and all young black men wearing normal clothes got out to get pizza - meaning they were police - which you don't necessarily see in California. Also, my friend got ticketed by more young nonwhite plainclothes police enforcing the civility codes who he hadn't guessed at all could be police. There are also a lot of people who still retain their irish or italian ethnicity, whereas those people often become white elsewhere. They have a ticket quota and have all sorts of things that are eligible. Did anyone who was in New York for the rnc or who is from there notice this demographic effect among the police, and see how this affects how they go about their business.

see comparative list here.
http://www.policepay.net/zmainlinks/1st%20Year%20Base%20Pay.htm

oh also, my friend attends the teaching program at San Jose state. After paying the cost of a bachelor's degree, teachers must go through a credential program that lasts two years. This would occur when normal adults in their 20s are earning money and even having children. So typically they might own a car or live in housing other than shared rooms. My friend is 29 and decided to go through the program, and while she's doing the student teaching at an elementary school, she is making $1300/month. I felt really bad because we had delayed them from catching the last bus so they had to take the train for 15 miles which would cost $5 - which is nothing to any yuppie but is a heck of a lot to anyone on a teenager or working-through-school or service industry budget. She found a room in an apartment for $400, but still has to pay for the master's degree, and health insurance including one prescription medication. This sacrifice being asked of people entering the teaching profession makes me angry about Schwarzenegger's ballot initiative. Other people in career oriented masters programs such as public planning or engineering tend to earn a little more. Some teaching positions do have a fairly high pay scale with experience. I think it is pre-school and day care where wages are really abysmal. She was describing full teaching days with problem kids in 3rd grade, where one kid would always be pulling her clothes off and hitting other kids, and others would be putting their heads down on their desk, and it would take 40 minutes to get them all focused on filling out a form.

D.C. Shur got the boot because Chief Fong got tired of pretending that she was in charge when everybody in S.F.P.D. knew who was really calling the shots. Too bad for him but thems the breaks when your a profile boss in S.F... as far as u anarchists go, payback is a bitch so update your mommy and daddys health insurance. YOUR GOING TO NEED IT NEXT TIME.

"got tired of pretending that she was in charge when"

You wouldnt happen to be a cop posting from home would you. Sounds like you have a few problem with having woman boss that could hurt your carrer if you talked like that with your real name.

So is getting caught breaking the law on camera.

god knows the truth hurts even on this p.c. facist website

u mean like the video showing u cowards attacking the cop? the video and witnesses that this website begs not to post because the truth won't set them free? . u pretentious assholes really make me sick with your double standards and your politically correct facism. Most of of u who write and post on this site have become the monsters in your dreams u think your fighting.

Cowards don't attack cops. It's too dangerous. Cowards attack unarmed civilians.

The lawyers and a legal collective asked, see: http://indybay.org/news/2005/07/1753148.php

Suhr was paid $195K, his retirement is to be 90% of that.

Fewer than 20% of all SFPD recruits in the current academy class are from SF, the rest from the outer boroughs.

Starting pay is somewhere north of the high 40K, low 50K range.

I'd thought Suhr was commander during fajitagate in Feb 2003, but he might well have been deputy chief. Such rapid sharp ascents up the chain of command are rarely so asypmtotic, nosebleed.

But Greg can spend his time now being paid $195,000 guarding the PUC infrastructure, Hetch Hetchy and aquaducts from anarchist terror. Perhaps he will get to bust a medical cannabis grow operation on SF land in Yosemite or the Tuolomne watershed somewhere.

Fong is a cop, and a cop is a cop, but she is not of the vice or narco unit. That is where the corrosive rot which has infected the SFPD for 30 years originated. If you were in with that crowd, you were infected, and there was resentment amongst the rest of the department to the neandertal nature of that good ole boy's clique.

Hettrich, Corrales and one other cop who busts whores and pot ops are all who remain in power from that bloc. Also, with Gary Delagnes, uber bigot as the head of the POA, Fong gets to sit back and look good just by standing still..

The SFPD has been corrupt from it's very inception. In most cities, the Mob owns the cops. In SF, the Mob *is* the cops.

Fajita-gate happened in Nov. 2002 after Suhr was promoted to deputy chief.

The Bay View Hunters Point area is occupied territory. In Oakland the psychopaths kill with impunity. 70 pct of them live in fascist - white trash suburbs in Contra Costa. None of their money flows back into the black community.

Oakland and Hunters Point should be policed only by blacks. Not a single white racist cop should be allowed in those communities.

let me see if i got this right. The deputy chief stepped on his dick too many times and got the boot, but still gets the golden parachute award.
some of you hate all cops
some of you feel that you need a bigger cross section of cops that represent the city better.

The big surprise is, most cities have recruitment drives to get more cops of different ethicities and genders. That has been the case for most of my life.

if this Suhr guy did what you said, surprised he kept his job as long as he did.

Pay wise, are you saying to pay them less?

I'm part of the group that hates all cops. Their job is primarily to protect the rich and powerful no matter what color they are. Secondarily, it is to preserve themselves in order to do #1. Thirdly, it is protect citizens (alleged good people, beginning with white rich people and working their way down) and their property from those who would act anti-socially. This is in the interest of the rich and powerful because chaos often turns into something that might overthrow their social order or at least prevent from going shopping in their stores.

This is baove all the reason Greg Suhr was moved up and out. He was not protectign the rich and powerful as well as he should have, by allowing a cop to get hurt without asy backup around, or without enough cops to lie for that cop.
Protection of what needs to be prtrected (very little) can be done by each of us. And besides when equality and fredom occur robberies and burglaries and the like and crimes from the stress of this fucked up society and the lack of self-esteem in it will go away. Other crimes will either just happen (no one can prevent everything) or people who will have more time on their hands to do so, will figure out non-coercive ways to stop it.

Ok man. Let's go to Rio.No crome there. I hear that South Africa is a paradise after Mandela became prez. no crime there either.
Call it what you will, there will always be rich and always be poor. Somebody always wants whaty you have, be it property or relationship.
I don't know you. Know nothing about you. But if your actions were to threaten my family in your hopes of bringing the system down..I don't need to say more.

There has always been a form of community watch. It's only in the last 2 centuries have we had a truly organized way of doing it. What you have now is a rsult of people half assing the job or not wanting to do their part. Your predecessors abdicated their guard duties to a paid force. Find a way to train your community and get everyone to share in the duties and responsibilties and you could disband the police. I think your chances of success are the same as me getting my youth back, but good luck buddy.

>In New York, the police don't make very much - like starting $35,000

for high school drop outs that dam good money.

Only as long as we permit it.

That's quite true. I make almost exactly that amount with a biology phd.

That's what they make on the books. Add in what they make off the books, and it's quite a tidy sum.

To Joel:1. No one here knows my ancestors. They didn't havce anything to abdicate. They were poor Jews living in the Shtetl in Moldova and Romania. 2. Now, more importantly, i didn't single out U.S. cops, i'm against cops in South Africa, and in Brazil, and i'm against capitalism in South Africa and Brazil. Becuase as long as you have captialsim you will have property crimes. That's not ssying that's all you have to get rid of to get of m ost crime, but that's a good start.
3. I never threatened you or your family, unless you are an exploiter or a represser, or get in the way of those trying to rid the world of repression and exploitation. In fact, i even welcome you and your family to join that fight.
4. I believe a New York City cop has to be a high school graduate. i know that in New York they have a special branch of the City Univeristy of New York for cops: It's called the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But in rerality it doesn't matter how educated they are, or how much money they make or don 't make, a cop is a repressor whose main job it is to preserve the system. (I was going to use the word "pig" rather repressor, but i felt that would be an insult to our animal friends.)

1. I'm visiting a buddy who's going home to Romania on Friday. They're a good bunch of guys.
The threatening action is when people want to burn shit down,tear shit up. If you want to go head to head with the cops, that's fine by me. You get other people caught up in your games, zero tolerance for that.
As for myself, part of my family has been here for several hundred years and other parts just got here. You could call me a tool of the system. Have been a soldier, postal worker and cop. Not any of the above at the moment.
I wish you well on your quest. I do think you are beating your head against the wall. no matter what name you call it, the way of the world is to always have a ruleing class and an underclass for them to shit on. Pick a time and a place. The smart ones don't fuck over the little people as much and get to keep their position. The dumb ones suffer through bloody revolutions that usually create another ruling class to shit on everyone else. having lived in several 3rd world shitholes I can testify to that.
Again, hope you find what you are looking for, unless you have the same vision as PolPot,or Stalin

Lets set aside the diverse economies and political systems, some of them the model of anarchism, that existed for thousands of years in other world regions such as micronesia/ North and South America, SE Asia, and the whole planet before agriculture 10,000 yrs ago. Well, if we consider only agricultural economies in Europe/Asia/central mexico, there was a long period of time during which there had been no example of a western democracy to point to except for a brief period in Greece. People could have said 'there will always be a king. Why bother not turning in the required fraction of the farming produce on the land we rent from him as rent?".
It was always very quickly that things changed, although there often was a rebound effect for everyone to catch up. For instance, France and the U.S. (despite its own elimination of the previous indian nations) had their revolutions in short sequence around 1776 and the public hd just been waiting for an opportunity and some direction.
In 1848, there were revolutions all over Europe that had been building up, after various rulers had been tightening the screws.
Read Orwell's book about his horrible elementary boarding school experience - there were a lot of super-rich in the world after the industrial period with sweatshops and so forth in the 1910s. After the world wide depression and WWII, a lot of colonial countries, and the agricultural/industrial countries really had to institute some modern reforms which permitted people to switch from farmers to middle class suburbanites, and those big fortunes of the european rich were just leveled by WWI and II.
If you look at the charts, the amount of wealth and income going to a top 3% is becoming like the 1910s and 20s again. It can't last like that forever. I think at some point, the U.S. will be pinched enough by crazy housing prices that there will be a recession, and maybe people will follow the model of many south american countries where there are inspiring examples right now in Argentina etc.

>no example of a western democracy to point to except for a brief period in Greece.

Ancient Greece was no democracy. It was a slavocracy.

well duh, so was the United States. The U.S. only gave dark skinned people the right to vote in 1964, and the 2000 and 2004 elections were quite questionable as to whether people in whole states had their votes counted with disenfranchisement, suspicious Diebold machines and irregular county voting patterns, and the supreme court decision overriding the clear fact that Palm Beach County's ballots weren't read right.
Democracy comes in degrees. Googling this Mission incident, I am reading a lot of comments on conservative blogs about "bluh, organized anarchist march, isn't that a contradiction in terms". Or referring to them as pol pot supporting communists. They don't understand that what anarchism is really is just a more advanced state of democracy where instead of electing one Senator to represent 15 million Californians, and make decisions for them, these 'hierarchical' power-holding positions will be eliminated. Due to logistical difficulties with a high population, *delegates* can be sent to government bodies that organize things for larger geographic areas, but the *delegate* is not given special power that people such as Feinstein are given to override the democratic position of their constituents, and can be quickly removed if they cast a vote against the intent of their people. Inevitably, society will go this way, if there is no nuclear situation first.

Don't tell 'em. They only see hierarchal organizations as threats. As long as they think were not a threat, we have a tremendous advantage over them.

Alas, the government is smarter than these guys, and *does* recognize the threat:

http://www.indybay.org/news/2005/07/1753016.php

look, people are active in ways they feel comfortable being active. many anarchists need to kill the cop in them by validating people's activism that is not as "radical" in the direct action sense.

by every means necessary all at once in cacophonous harmony.

cops are people, people are varied, cops play a role and sometimes as working people they sabotage their orders and do what's right. if there are going to be cops, then we should increase civilian oversight and controls while encouraging cops to take their cues from the neighborhood rather than imposing their views on us.

should we not have cops? of course. but we have them, they have guns and we have some political influence. let's use it to bring the cops as much under civilian control as we can.

kill the cop in you
wank the priest in you
evict the landlord in you
fire the boss in you

As some guy once said somewhere:

(snip)

Capitalists and authority figures have no place in the the new world. Police and military are a more complex issue. All anarchists agree the police and military should go. We disagree on what should take their place. The head-in-the-clouds, new-age types believe we should trust in the essential goodness of human nature to make them unnecessary. Pragmatic realists, on the other hand, believe their functions should be subsumed by a citizen's militia.

If you can scare up a copy, check out Towards a Citizen's Militia: Anarchist Alternatives to NATO and the Warsaw Pact by Scottish anarchist Stuart Christie. It came out over two decades ago, but is still relevant today. Christie draws on such diverse sources as Swiss civil defense manuals and the experience of Northern Ireland.

Occasionally, someone reissues it as a Xerox. Keep your eyes peeled. It's a fascinating read.

(snip)

* * * * *

At the moment, a few copies are still available at Bound Together Books, 1369 Haight St., which is open from 11:30 AM till 7:20 PM, seven days a week.

Check it out. It's a fascinating read.