Type Investigations, formerly the Investigative Fund, looked into what happens when a city goes ahead and builds a Domain Awareness Center without a transparency ordinance in place.
St Louis did that with their “Real Time Crime Center”. Here is what happened.
On January 22, 2019, the Oakland City Council passed on second reading an ordinance that ends any and all municipal cooperation with ICE, including traffic assistance.
The ordinance, which makes permanent the policy of total non-cooperation, stems from the citywide protest after a West Oakland ICE raid in August of 2017 followed the end of the formal OPD-ICE Memorandum of Agreement.
After a lengthy investigation by Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission revealed that the raid on a Guatemalan family had nothing to do with human trafficking, the City Council embraced the new total non-cooperation policy and moved to formalize it as a municipal ordinance.
Six years of protest, public comment and politicking have finally created a light at the end of the Stop Urban Shield tunnel.
On January 14th, 2019, after five months of hearings, leg work and votes, the Alameda County Urban Shield Task Force finished its assigned task. The Task Force was voted into being by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors back in March of 2018 when the Board voted to “end Urban Shield as it is currently constituted.” It began work in September, 2018 and at its last meeting approved a set of recommendations to be presented to the Supervisors that would radically transform Urban Shield from a militarized SWAT Team and weapons extravaganza into a true emergency preparedness conclave and suite of field exercises relevant to the Bay Area.
Tell the Alameda County Board of Supervisors to fully support the recommendations of the Ad-Hoc Committee.
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A coalition of more than 80 racial justice, faith, and civil, human, and immigrants’ rights groups, including Oakland Privacy, today sent letters to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google demanding the companies commit not to sell face surveillance technology to the government.
[read more]
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January 11 brought the sad news that East Bay alternative weekly the East Bay Express, which had been under financial duress for a while, would be laying off its entire editorial staff and greatly reducing operations. The newspaper’s demise as a staffed publication was immediately caused by a lawsuit by the paper’s former sales manager which awarded back overtime pay and legal fees totaling $750,000 or more.
The loss of the local investigative reporting done by the East Bay Express, which almost always led and spurred later coverage by the region’s dailies, is incalculable. In Oakland itself, where the paper’s reporting was the accountability agent for Oakland municipal government for the past decade, and throughout the East Bay.
Oakland Privacy benefitted enormously from the Express’ tough reporting and as a colleague of mine put it; “It’s safe to say that without the Express, Oakland would have a Domain Awareness Center”. And it wouldn’t have a privacy commission, OPD would still be cooperating with ICE, and BART would not have a transparency ordinance. Among many other things.
We can’t thank you enough, Express, specifically former reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham. It’s a sad day for Oakland and for journalism.
The second iteration of Alameda County’s Urban Shield task force is formulating their final recommendations to implement a resolution by the County Board of Supervisors to re-constitute the Homeland Security-funded annual disaster preparedness drill.
In a seven hour meeting, the five member task force voted for several recommendations, a bunch via an uncontested consent motion and a few more substantive ones on a 3-2 vote.
Among the more substantive recommendations were to:
[read more]
Other areas of discussion included data collected from volunteers, observers and some journalists who attend the exposition and training drill, which includes social security numbers, drivers license numbers and telephone numbers, as well as criminal background checks, and which is kept in a database for a year after collection.
The task force will also be discussing the Alameda County evaluation process after it was learned that the 2018 evaluation team from Louisiana State University included former Miami-Dade officer Manuel Malgor who participated in a notorious botched sting operation called the Redland Killings. During the Redland Killings, 4 men were shot at a marijuana buy while attempting to run away including the department’s own informant, who was shot 20 times. The Florida AG’s office called the case “disturbing” and officers were investigated for possible suppression of evidence. Miami-Dade paid out $1.3 million dollars in civil penalties. [/read]