At today’s Alameda County Board of Supervisors meeting, 5+ hours of discussion ended with a decision that Urban Shield as currently constituted would end after the 2018 war games and exposition. The 4-1 vote, with Supervisor Scott Haggerty more or less voting no, left open-ended what Alameda County’s regional disaster preparedness activities would be in future years, but the Supervisors were decisive that it would not be the Urban Shield event, which began in 2007.
A series of embarrasing revelations from the presence of the Oath Keepers extremist group in an allied community fair, the use of racist target dummies, the presence of HSI/ICE, and slush fund donations from the likes of Blackwater seems to have finally pushed the Supervisors over the edge, in a lengthy meeting preceded by a 200 person rally and with dozens of public comments.
The future is here. An unholy mix of 1984, Minority Report and cyberpunk. In westernmost China, and increasingly everywhere in a country composing one seventh of humanity, the omnipresent surveillance state is a reality.
These photos were produced by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office in response to a public records request for photos of the 2017 war games exercise. These are culled from over 300 photos showing officers from the Homeland Security Investigations division of ICE being trained in SWAT techniques by Alameda County during Urban Shield 2017.
