On October 14, almost 4 dozen civil rights organizations (including Oakland Privacy) wrote to the Chair and Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers about pending reform to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
*Oakland’s Public Safety Committee will take up the ICE raid on November 14 at 6pm at City Hall after chair Desley Brooks and at-large council rep Rebecca Kaplan asked for the report. The Chief of Police is expected to attend.*
After completing an investigation of the West Oakland ICE raid of August 16, Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission concluded that “all evidence presently known supports that the Oakland Police Department participated in a raid on August 16 that led only to a civil immigration arrest, in violation of Oakland’s Sanctuary City policy and OPD Immigration Policy 415.”
The Commission unanimously recommended that the City Council require the Oakland Chief of Police present a report on this raid to the Council at a public hearing.
The investigation further concluded that “of the nine most material representations on the matter made by the Oakland Chief of Police, research supported that six were false and one more is likely false.”
Video of the Privacy Advisory Commission Public Hearing on October 5, 2017
The investigation findings and exhibits can be read here.
On October 3, the Oakland City Council unanimously approved a new ordinance subjecting all local law enforcement agreements with federal partners to abide by the city’s laws and undergo civil rights and privacy reviews.
The ordinance is modeled after San Francisco’s 2011 civil rights ordinance and will be implemented by Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission.
A large community coalition brought forward the ordinance including CAIR, Asian Law Caucus/AAJC, Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club, Veterans for Peace, Strike Debt Bay Area, Latino Task Force, Jewish Voice for Peace Bay Area, First They Came For The Homeless, Defending Rights and Dissent, Coalition for Police Accountability, Center for Media Justice, California Sanctuary Campaign, Block by Block Organizing Network, ACLU-Norcal and Media Alliance. Thank you to all of them for their dedication.
Text of the Ordinance. Press Release. Coalition Support Letter , More information on Trumpintelpro.
238 human rights organizations,(including Oakland Privacy), demanded that the White House rescind the latest iteration of the unconstitutional and discriminatory “Muslim ban” executive travel order. In an open letter released on September 27, 2017, the groups stated ““If you refuse to rescind this unlawful order, we commit to do all in our power to protect those communities being targeted by EO-3 and to support litigation to defeat this unconstitutional ban. History will long remember, and we will not quickly forget, this singular assault on America’s commitment to freedom of religion.”
Read the full letter and list of signatories here:
Muslim_Ban_3.0_Sign_On_Letter_to_Trump_Administration_9_27_17
This September 2017 article in the NYU Law Review by Elizabeth Joh gives a few shoutouts to the work of Oakland’s Privacy Advisory Commission and OP member Mike Katz-Lacabe.
Download the full article below.
A dozen community members affiliated with various Bay Area nonprofit organizations observed the 2017 Urban Shield Expo and Anti-Terrorism training drill. The Stop Urban Shield coalition collated their observations and issued an event report card.
The report concluded:
Urban Shield is fundamentally about “defeating the enemy.” This is primarily due to the federally mandated requirement that trainings and exercises of the program have a “nexus to terrorism.”
Urban Shield is structurally unable to address concerns of police militarization, racism, and xenophobia, and is heavily steeped in a warfare culture.
Read the full report card here. Urban-Shield-Report-Card