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
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.
In a huge public interest victory, the CA Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement bulk license plate scans (APRS) are not exempt from the California Public Records Act and constitute public records, overturning a Superior court decision.
On July 18, the Oakland City Council voted unanimously to terminate an existing agreement with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), one week after a similar unanimous vote in the Public Safety Committee. On August 16, HSI executed a warrant at a West Oakland Guatemalan household. HSI was accompanied by Oakland Police Department (OPD) officers.
No one had a clue the thing even existed. Buried deep within the consent agenda of the Oakland City Council for years, appropriations for the Domain Awareness Center and the implications thereof had gone unnoticed.