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.”
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.
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.
California’s Assembly Appropriations Committee, following the lead of law enforcement agencies invested in the secret and unaccountable use of ever more complex surveillance technologies, killed California’s statewide transparency ordinance today, ensuring that communities will not get a say in how they are watched.