Standoff at La Vie Restaurant

Know Your Rights & Resist the Police State Workshop (1/24)
http://indybay.org/newsitems/2007/01/22/18350686.php

Wednesday January 24th

4:30 to 6:30pm

Lincoln and Cedar
Across the Street from the Farmer's Market


“I’m going to remain silent. I would like to see a lawyer.”

Is this the guy who has curly brown hair and waves his arms above his head to panhandle on the mall? Messed up the Metro area because the buses could not use the Greyhound parking area and could not use Cathcart Street nor Front Street.

that is a neat truck. It wasn't clear at all that he was armed and apparently he only had a pair of scissors. The Sentinel has some video of him (they will cover stuff that occurs within a few blocks of their offices I guess), and they showed him cutting out little pink hearts and taping them to the window, and scrunching up his face like someone having a mental episode.

I'm relieved that no one was hurt. Even though we don't know the full circumstances, I'm pleased that the cops didn't try to play commando, smash in the glass and rush the place. If this guy came out unscathed, I'd say he should be thankful for fair treatment. I think it speaks well of the cops that everyone was unharmed at the end of the day.

As for La Vie, the owners are good people and they lost a day's revenue yesterday. I hope the community rallies around them and helps them make up for the loss.

To me, this underlies the need for more (humane) facilities and housing for mental ill people. Let's increase our efforts on that front.

Jesus fucking christ. That's some serious equipment the cops have.

Is this representative of every law enforcement agency in America in a post 9-11 police state, or is Santa Cruz specially equipped to repress the revolution?

Given that on a daily basis, the most gnarly piece of specialized equipment the PO uses are handcuffs, they must get damn excited when they can tote out their assault rifles, high-powered binoculars, sniper rifles, SWAT gear, kevlar vests and helmets, and battering rams.

When there's no exciting hostage crisis, where do they keep that specialized police monster truck anyway?

According to the Sentinel, "Taser blast ends standoff at downtown Santa Cruz restaurant"

So, I guess someone was hurt...

"Is this representative of every law enforcement agency in America in a post 9-11 police state, or is Santa Cruz specially equipped to repress the revolution?"

I think it is pretty typical, actually. Basically any city, especially where there is a lot of Capital (money). Plus, with UCSC on the hill, the cops are quite ready to repress even the slightest hint of an uprising... hell, even a little demonstration can be met with Riot Cops these days.

"When there's no exciting hostage crisis, where do they keep that specialized police monster truck anyway?"

I guess they keep the gear in the huge Cop Shop on Laurel St. They have an underground shooting range there, too. When they are not in the streets with the gear, they are most likely practicing with it.

Can you relate? We living in a Police State.

oh come on, guys.. someone holds scissors to his throat and you want to talk about this being related to a protest situation? I'm all for police accountability, but possible hostage situations (which I don't think this was.. although the police may have prepared for) generally receive such treatment from the cops. This wasn't a demonstration, and this wasn't an example of 'keeping down the (non-existant) revolution.'

The movie 'The Miami Model' talks about the extreme use of police gear against protests, but again, a much different situation.

Maybe someone should go to the jail and interview this guy if you're so interested in understanding what happened... but I doubt you'll find your cause célèbre.

No it was not a protest. But, the cops do use a lot of the same weapons.

Why are the Police Violent?

Wednesday the 31st of Jan
at UCSC's Women's Center
showing of Miami Model
* not sure of time, but about 7pm, most likely.

The Miami model is a term used by political activists to describe the tactics employed by law enforcement agencies during demonstrations relating to the negotiations for the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade agreement. The meeting related protests took place in Miami, Florida in November 2003.

This term reportedly refers to the distinctive features of crowd control technique used in Miami, which included large scale pre-emptive arrests, heavily armed sometimes unidentifiable law enforcement, the collection of intelligence from protesters, and the "embedding" of corporate media with the police.

Miami Activist Defense and National Lawyers Guild filed a federal lawsuit against the City, the Mayor, Police Chief Timoney, Homeland Defense Secretary Ridge, and Attorney General Ashcroft for rampant abuse of the constitution.

Among the groups which organized against the FTAA were Root Cause, several AFL-CIO affiliated unions, Midwest Unrest, The Pittsburgh Organizing Group, Food Not Bombs and many others.

THE MIAMI MODEL
Paramilitaries, Embedded Journalists and Illegal Protests.
Think This is Iraq? It's Your Country
http://www.democracynow.org/static/miamimodel.shtml

The Miami Model : an indymedia production

In November, 2003, trade ministers from 34 countries met in Miami, Florida, to negotiate the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). The FTAA threatens to devastate workers, the environment, and public services like health care, education, and water, and to destroy indigenous rights and cultural diversity across North, Central, and South America.

Thousands of union members, environmentalists, feminists, anarchists, students, farm workers, media activists, and human rights activists who gathered in Miami to struggle against the FTAA were brutally attacked with rubber bullets, pepper spray, electric guns and shock batons, embedded reporters and information warfare, all coordinated by the new United States Department of Homeland Security.

Against Capital's model of paramilitary oppression, information warfare, and corporate rule, we offered models of grassroots resistance, creative action and solidarity.

Breaking the Media Blackout

Collectively, Indymedia activists shot hundreds of hours of video footage documenting the FTAA protests in Miami. This footage has been edited by the FTAA Miami Video Working Group into a documentary that cuts through the mass media blackout to reveal the brutal repression and assault on civil liberties that took place, as well as the life-affirming and inspiring alternatives to capitalist globalization that were also in full effect in Miami.
The ftaaaimc.org video working group is proud to present The Miami Model .
http://ftaaimc.org/miamimodel

I find an 8-hour massive police siege of one guy with scissors to be not just outrageous but an ominous sign of the times. It's not just $8.5 billion a month in Iraq (and how much more in to bomb Iran, who knows?), not just a huge misguided local drug war, but this extreme, extended, and disproportionate use of police. I guess it sells newspapers and police budgets.

It would be interesting to get an itemization of all the military equipment our police force has.
We're still waiting for the Rotkin-Porter "Police Oversight" Public Safety Committee to release documentation of how many people were tasered last year & what exactly the taser guidelines are.

I guess these items disappeared down the same black hole that swallowed up any public hearings on the police surveillance of peaceful political protest. (Last July then-Mayor Mathews unilaterally declared the new surveillance "guidelines" after the Rotkin damage-control PSC--which allowed police to do pretty much what they were doing.)

I felt the following article might be relevant to this thread.

posted at the counterpunch website at http://www.counterpunch.org/
January 24, 2007
Your Local Police Force Has Been Militarized
The Empire Turns Its Guns on the Citizenry
By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

In recent years American police forces have called out SWAT teams 40,000 or more times annually. Last year did you read in your newspaper or hear on TV news of 110 hostage or terrorist events each day? No. What then were the SWAT teams doing? They were serving routine warrants to people who posed no danger to the police or to the public.

Occasionally Washington think tanks produce reports that are not special pleading for donors. One such report is Radley Balko's "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America" (Cato Institute, 2006).

This 100-page report is extremely important and should have been published as a book. SWAT teams (Special Weapons and Tactics) were once rare and used only for very dangerous situations, often involving hostages held by armed criminals. Today SWAT teams are deployed for routine police duties. In the US today, 75-80% of SWAT deployments are for warrant service.

In a high percentage of the cases, the SWAT teams forcefully enter the wrong address, resulting in death, injury, and trauma to perfectly innocent people. Occasionally, highly keyed-up police kill one another in the confusion caused by their stun grenades.

Mr. Balko reports that the use of paramilitary police units began in Los Angeles in the 1960s. The militarization of local police forces got a big boost from Attorney General Ed Meese's "war on drugs" during the Reagan administration. A National Security Decision Directive was issued that declared drugs to be a threat to US national security. In 1988 Congress ordered the National Guard into the domestic drug war. In 1994 the Department of Defense issued a memorandum authorizing the transfer of military equipment and technology to state and local police, and Congress created a program "to facilitate handing military gear over to civilian police agencies."

Today 17,000 local police forces are equipped with such military equipment as Blackhawk helicopters, machine guns, grenade launchers, battering rams, explosives, chemical sprays, body armor, night vision, rappelling gear and armored vehicles. Some have tanks. In 1999, the New York Times reported that a retired police chief in New Haven, Connecticut, told the newspaper, "I was offered tanks, bazookas, anything I wanted." Balklo reports that in 1997, for example, police departments received 1.2 million pieces of military equipment.

With local police forces now armed beyond the standard of US heavy infantry, police forces have been retrained "to vaporize, not Mirandize," to use a phrase from Reagan administration defense official Lawrence Korb. This leaves the public at the mercy of brutal actions based on bad police information from paid informers.

SWAT team deployments received a huge boost from the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which gave states federal money for drug enforcement. Balko explains that "the states then disbursed the money to local police departments on the basis of each department's number of drug arrests."

With financial incentives to maximize drug arrests and with idle SWAT teams due to a paucity of hostage or other dangerous situations, local police chiefs threw their SWAT teams into drug enforcement. In practice, this has meant using SWAT teams to serve warrants on drug users.

SWAT teams serve warrants by breaking into homes and apartments at night while people are sleeping, often using stun grenades and other devices to disorient the occupants. As much of the police's drug information comes from professional informers known as "snitches" who tip off police for cash rewards, dropped charges, and reduced sentences, names and addresses are often pulled out of a hat. Balko provides details for 135 tragic cases of mistaken addresses.

SWAT teams are not held accountable for their tragic mistakes and gratuitous brutality. Police killings got so bad in Albuquerque, New Mexico, for example, that the city hired criminologist Sam Walker to conduct an investigation of police tactics. Killings by police were "off the charts," Walker found, because the SWAT team "had an organizational culture that led them to escalate situations upward rather then de-escalating."

The mind-set of militarized SWAT teams is geared to "taking out" or killing the suspect-- thus, the many deaths from SWAT team utilization. Many innocent people are killed in night time SWAT team entries, because they don't realize that it is the police who have broken into their homes. They believe they are confronted by dangerous criminals, and when they try to defend themselves they are shot down by the police.

As Lawrence Stratton and I have reported, one of many corrupting influences on the criminal justice (sic) system is the practice of paying "snitches" to generate suspects. In 1995 the Boston Globe profiled people who lived entirely off the fees that they were paid as police informants. Snitches create suspects by selling a small amount of marijuana to a person who they then report to the police as being in possession of drugs. Balko reports that "an overwhelming number of mistaken raids take place because police relied on information from confidential informants." In Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, 87% of drug raids originated in tips from snitches.

Many police informers are themselves drug dealers who avoid arrest and knock off competitors by serving as police snitches.

Surveying the deplorable situation, the National Law Journal concluded: "Criminals have been turned into instruments of law enforcement, while law enforcement officers have become criminal co-conspirators."

Balko believes the problem could be reduced if judges scrutinized unreliable information before issuing warrants. If judges would actually do their jobs, there would be fewer innocent victims of SWAT brutality. However, as long as the war on drugs persists and as long as it produces financial rewards to police departments, local police forces, saturated with military weapons and war imagery, will continue to terrorize American citizens.

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts [at] yahoo.com

"Police said they still don't know why Carter allegedly broke into the cafe. During an interview with police he reportedly expressed frustration that he had recently been displaced from his camp site. " --Santa Cruz Sentinel Jan 25 2007

[Becky Johnson writes:] While I don't know Kriston Carter, nor do I approve of what he did at La Vie yesterday, its obvious that marginalized people, some of whom are already mentally unbalanced, yet who are continually harassed for Sleeping or survival protection from the elements, can only be driven to desparate acts like this. While the police acted properly to remove Mr. Carter without loss of life, the campaign of ticketing (nearly 60 a month ---up from the 3 or 4 a month rate of citations of 2000) is likely to push more people "over the edge" of sane behavior. This case is yet another example of why we need to end the Sleeping Ban and set up safe zones for homeless people.


The Sentinel story Becky critiques is titled "LaVie! recovers after showdown
By Terri Morgan January 25 and can be found at http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ archive/2007/January/25/local/stories/05local.htm

Another interesting segment of the Sentinel story reads:

"Carter was eventually subdued by a Taser and booked into County Jail on suspicion of burglary, felony vandalism, possession of marijuana, and resisting arrest after being medically cleared at Dominican Hospital. His bail has been set at $27,000....Tuesday's road closures forced about a dozen nearby businesses to shut down, and made it difficult for people to reach other businesses nearby....The standoff was costly for about 20 businesses, according to David Handloff, owner of More Music on Front Street. Handloff said the six-hour street closure cost him between $1,000 and $1,500, and he was upset about the loss and the way the situation was handled. "I don't want to see anybody brutalized by the police, but this seemed like a giant case of overkill," Handloff said. "Why did it require the crippling of half of downtown Santa Cruz" Handloff also questioned why it took police so long to resolve the issue....Police have not yet tallied the cost of the operation, but Friend estimates overtime pay for the Emergency Services Unit will run into several thousand dollars."


Police commandeered and shut down two whole streets for 8 hours. What was this? Another training exercise to justify the kind of bloated spending used in the bogus "war on terror"?

I note we don't get a real estimate of the total taxpayer cost of this latest police "demonstration". All that's mentioned is the "overtime pay for the Emergency Services Unit." I suspect it is significantly more, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars more.

There's also no estimate of the actual damages that Carter caused in the restaurant, though he did get a $27,000 bail.

Perhaps the police have some video to show how Carter "resisted arrest" requiring him to be tasered? Don't hold your breath.

And the possession of marijuana charge shows us that the police have not forgotten their real priorities in Santa Cruz.

Becky Johnson alerted me to this story. Her comments only include the first paragraph ending with "safe zones for homeless people". The rest of the commentary is mine.

I want the entire SCPD fired, and to have Robert Norse and Becky Johnson replace them in uniform. I bet they could find a better solution to the kinds of injustices that have been visited upon the victim Kriston, not to mention others. Besides, I'd like to see them in uniform. It would make the mall so much better for all transients.

This entire thread is a perfect example of why so many people laugh at Santa Cruz. Jumping to conclusions that this guy was "political", blaming the police for everything (who don't write homeless laws, by the way), downplaying the threat of "one guy with scissors" as Norse does. OK, Robert, next time, why don't they call you and YOU can disarm the guy with scissors?

This is the lamest "typical Santa Cruz incident" since the rape victim who tried to INTERFERE with the police investigation of her own rape.

For the record, I OPPOSE the homeless bans, sleeping ban, etc. But blaming the police when it appears they got something RIGHT for once and perhaps prevented some violence is ludicrous. Guaranteed if the guy had stabbed someone because the cops DIDN'T show, there would be an Indybay thread " Patriarchal violence explodes downtown, police nowhere in sight!"

Since Constable Norse and Constable Johnson are so concerned about wasting taxpayer dollars, none of which seem to come from them, by the way, perhaps they could stop suing the city every first and third Monday of the month. I bet that would help. And next time someone starts up with a pair of scissors, perhaps the Constabulary of the Righteous can put on their helmets, grab some paper and rock, and save the day for all of us.

SCROLL UP: where I wrote "the police acted properly to remove Mr. Carter without loss of life..."
.

Becky, please tell me you're not siding with the cops! You know that the Victim Kriston was tricked into this by the cops and the Sentinel. And what is with that HUGE truck? I live in something smaller than that. Pigs! Give me some taxpayer money!!! Becky, if I see you in a constables helmet, I, for one, WILL salute you!!! And Saint Robert!!!!

Hey, is that TROLL I'm smelling here? I think some people in this discussion might be getting jacked by some folks. :)

-a kind warning from a regular sniffer

I really wish all this energy being wasted throwing insults back and forth would be put into some real action trying to overturn the sleeping ban and other such laws. The fact is that police forces have been militarized in recent decades (read article above). That being said, lets focus this energy into getting a ridiculous law targeting homeless people challenged. Go to the courthouse Atrium on Wed and contribute an intelligent idea. Get in touch with HUFF or Tim Rumford. Do what you have to but stop throwing insults back and forth over who worded the story better- most of us are all on the same fucking side!

if this was 6 hours or 8 hours, given that he wasn't well-armed, it turns the situation somewhat. The police darting in within 5 minutes would almost be a worse situation. It was actually quite patient of them, in a way, as long as they dont' charge the guy for disrupting businesses for this length of time. A mental health social worker would be the type expected to take that long talking someone down rather than getting bored and pushing things along. I suppose you'd have to be there.
Santa Cruz police do seem to follow different policies than other cities I have lived in. In the suburbs, I never saw a homeless person at all and you could get response for minor graffiti. In some other areas, they would ignore someone lying on a sidewalk square peeing on themselves. Here it seems like there are special zones that you could draw a line around where the enforcement rules shift around.