whats the kid hitting up on the window write? minus the hair, that was me in highschool...all day, except i woulda been hittin the panels, ceilings, door, outsider AND window hahaha, ey tragik you know where to get any old dj project compilations, im talking like way old tho..... #6...let me know wassup
H.O.M.E.Y'S PAINT NEW MURAL ON 24TH AND MISSION
- Thread starter LadyTragik
- Start date
i honestly would rather see the wall blank than the new mural.i aint saying that ya'll had anything for painting over the old 1......but this 1 is too damn friendly for the whiteys moving into the hood. like sleepy said, shoulda painted starbucks and white people since that was the whole point of taking down the old 1. everybody just misses the old one. not even scraps would tag on it. this 1 will evntually get tagged on.
Are you shitting me? Do you even get the point of the mural? Maybe you missed the part with the Brown Berets who fought for the rights of latinos & xicanos everywhere, especially in the bay area. or the sideways american flag with prison bars representing the constant abuse of immigrants (mexico) and the disregard to immigrant rights or the "stereotypical" terrorists who are automatically assumed guilty and have to surrender at the mercy of any type of authority/dictatorship no matter how innocent they. or maybe you missed the old farmers who worked the fields day in and day out with shitty pay and even shittier housing (many of these farmers are your parents or grandparents who eventually saved, came and bought these houses in the mission) Or maybe you missed the kid on the bus which many of us can relate to with those long ass 14 Muni bus rides and the tagging all over inside to pass time and make ur mark - Or maybe it was the part where all the young folks were sittin around eachother puttin everyone up on game about their ancestors & revolutionary heroes... right? cause who gives a fuck about cesar chavez? might as well put a starbucks cup instead of Cesar? or Pancho Villa..Che Guevara..Zapata..a good plain old white wall would do better than images of them. Who cares about them? Oh and the Zapatistas, probably didn't catch them in the mural either.. and if you did, you probably don't care about them either. Who cares about shit that's happening in Mexico that the US and a corrupt government is responsible for. Who cares about fellow xicanos and latinos fighting for their rights in other countries, countries your families are from, countries some of you were born in - but who cares? as long as you still get to go home and sleep comfortably in your soft bed with a clean soft pillow in a house boomin with air conditioning.
Did you miss the image of Corn? some of you probably don't even know what Corn represents to.. look it up.
I could go on..but what for? many of you choose to stay and bask in your ignorance. go ahead, let Starbucks put up an ad - better than all this crap..right?
Did you miss the image of Corn? some of you probably don't even know what Corn represents to.. look it up.
I could go on..but what for? many of you choose to stay and bask in your ignorance. go ahead, let Starbucks put up an ad - better than all this crap..right?
H.O.M.E.Y's make front page of SF WEEKLY:
Article:
Trigger on front page
Rene, Director of H.o.m.e.y's:
The War On Gangs
With murders on the rise, City Attorney Dennis Herrera is cracking down on gangs using a legal tool critics say smacks of McCarthyism
By Martin Kuz
Published: August 22, 2007
A police car rolls down Oakdale Avenue past a public housing complex as worn and ashen as a Dust Bowl barn. Broom still in hand, Tau Calo has stepped outside her ground-level apartment to cool off from sweeping its linoleum floors, beads of sweat dotting her face. She watches the black-and-white cruiser crest a small hill and disappear.
Calo moved into the five-bedroom unit with her husband and their five children in 1996. In their Hunters Point neighborhood, a place thick with subsidized housing located a Hail Mary toss from Candlestick Park, crime and poverty collide. Cops have long been part of the area's daily life, arriving with sirens squalling when mayhem erupts. But officers patrolling the streets on a quiet weekday afternoon — that's a relatively new spectacle.
"The police come by more often," Calo says. "It's a lot better than it was before."
She's referring to the time before last November, when City Attorney Dennis Herrera obtained a civil injunction against the Oakdale Mob, creating a so-called safety zone in the neighborhood. Among other restrictions, the court order prohibits the gang's members, suspects in a dozen homicides since 2003, from publicly consorting within the safety zone's four square blocks. Those caught violating the ban risk a stint of up to six months in the county jail.
For the 49-year-old Calo, whose building sits in the heart of the safety zone, the beefed-up police presence spawned by the injunction has eased her maternal anxiety. Two years ago, while her youngest son, then 12, stood with friends on the sidewalk, a gunman opened fire at a group of men clustered near them. A bullet pierced the leg of Calo's 20-year-old son, who had shown up moments earlier to bring his little brother home. (The older brother recovered.)
The area's chronic violence remains enough of a concern that Calo forbids her youngest to stay outside after dark. Yet with the gang apparently scattered, she says the neighborhood has calmed over the last nine months. The curbside drug trade has dissolved. Fewer bursts of gunfire interrupt the night. "We're happy the police are doing their job," Calo says. "We don't feel so scared anymore."
Calo lives about a block from the Captain Shorey Community Center, where workers have set up a folding table for a sidewalk cookout. Hot dogs and hamburgers sizzle on an electric grill as tendrils of smoke curl skyward, an inviting signal to passers-by hungry for lunch. The food sales will fund a field trip to Santa Cruz for children attending the center's day-care program.
Sheryl Perkins returns most days to the street where she grew up, visiting family and old friends. Waiting in line to buy a hot dog, she flays authorities for depicting the area as gang-infested.
"It's just neighborhood people, not gangs," says Perkins, a teacher at nearby Charles Drew Elementary. "They're out here because they can't find work." She believes city officials could better staunch street crime by expanding after-school and social programs for youth and providing more job training for young adults. "Give the money to this center," she says. "Then it wouldn't have to be out here raising money." A squad car drifts past while she talks.
On a short brick wall behind the table sits a man in his late 20s, wearing jeans, a green sweatshirt, and a black nylon do-rag. He offers a blunt rationale for declining to divulge his name. "I'm on that list," he says, referring to the Oakdale Mob injunction. His employer fired him last year after learning of his alleged gang affiliation, he claims, and months passed before he found a construction company willing to hire him. He worries that history might repeat itself if his new employer reads his name in the paper.
The man refuses to disclose why he landed in prison a few years ago. Yet he blames the injunction for hindering his ability to move forward. "I did wrong back then," he says. "But I did my time, paid my debt. How long do I got to be harassed?"
His question, along with the differing opinions of Calo and Perkins, reveals the complexities of a churning citywide debate on gang injunctions, a discussion amplified by a recent spike in murders. Entering the week, this year's homicide total stood at 67. The figure puts San Francisco on a pace comparable to 2005, when it recorded a 10-year high with 96 killings. (The city tallied 85 murders last year.)
A rash of shootings and stabbings has turned the summer bloody in the Western Addition and the Mission, with police ascribing much of the carnage to gang skirmishes. Herrera has reacted by pursuing a pair of civil injunctions against gangs in each district. His lawsuits charge that the groups, by virtue of committing murders, robberies, and assaults, dealing drugs, and vandalizing property, pose a public nuisance.
In targeting three Western Addition gangs — Chopper City, Knock Out Posse, and Eddy Rock — Herrera seeks to carve out two different safety zones that would cover a combined 12 square blocks. His other proposed injunction would delineate a safety zone five times that size in the Mission to quell the Norteño gang.
The orders would impose safety-zone constraints akin to those enforced in Hunters Point. The 76 alleged gang members named in the lawsuits could receive jail time for hanging out together in public, throwing gang signs, or recruiting new members. The suspected Norteños also would be banned from wearing red, the gang's color, and would face a curfew between 10 p.m. and sunrise.
The Oakdale Mob injunction, the first such order slapped on a San Francisco gang, established Herrera as arguably the city's leading anti-crime crusader. This time around, despite solid support from police officials and residents in the affected areas, he finds himself under siege from a coalition of neighborhood advocates and civil libertarians. Their criticism surged last month with the release of a think-tank study that asserts injunctions fail to deter gang crime. Herrera's foes further argue that such court orders inhibit young men from leaving the streets behind, circumvent their civil rights, and sanction racial profiling by police.
Unlike the Oakdale Mob case, in which only one attorney took up the defendants' cause, the latest lawsuits have attracted a swarm of criminal defense and civil lawyers. They're shrouding their legal strategy in advance of hearings on the proposed injunctions, scheduled for Sept. 18 in Superior Court. In the interim, as the rest of San Francisco marks the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, it's a season of upheaval in the streets.
A sprawling mural in a parking lot near 24th and Capp streets depicts a series of scenes vibrant in color and tone, united by a theme of Latino perseverance. The images range from protesters marching in an immigration rally to a man reading a book to a clutch of youngsters. The man, Rene Quiñonez, points to his likeness — shaved head, trimmed mustache and beard — as he stands before the painting, his presence its own tribute to perseverance.
Quiñonez serves as executive director of Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth, or HOMEY, the group that created the mural. The nonprofit organization works with troubled youth and young adults to herd them away from gangs. The 30-year-old Quiñonez makes an apt mentor, given his recent escape from thug life.
The ex-Norteño member grew up in the Mission near Del Sol Park, the son of a single mother who struggled to support her two children. Lured into the gang by older neighborhood kids, Quiñonez began selling weed and crack in his mid-teens to help his family stay afloat. He dropped out of high school, and though he later earned his GED and enrolled at San Francisco State, the streets usurped better intentions. Quiñonez expanded his drug operation to ease the financial burden of new fatherhood; his venture met a sudden end when federal authorities busted him in 2001.
He served a year in prison before volunteering with HOMEY to fulfill his parole agreement. Observing the group's caseworkers, most of them former gang members, he realized that the program's strength derived from its authenticity: The counselors were proof that you could leave gangs behind. He had found his future.
But Quiñonez frets that such efforts to reform wayward youth could suffer if the proposed injunctions win approval. He and fellow advocates vouch for several people named in the city's lawsuits who claim to no longer belong to gangs. A handful of the defendants volunteer in outreach programs with HOMEY and its ilk, conveying the kind of streetwise credibility to which Quiñonez responded. He contends that the injunctions, by branding those volunteers as police targets, would hamper the ability of grassroots groups to connect with young men and women.
"If someone's name is in the injunction, kids are going to think about staying away from him," Quiñonez says. "But it's the people who've been in gangs who can go into the streets and get kids to trust them."
Authorities estimate that more than 300 Norteños live in the Mission; the city's lawsuit identifies 32 purported members. The injunction would create a safety zone of 60 square blocks, bracketed by César Chávez, Valencia, and 21st streets and Potrero Avenue, a wide swath of the district's southern half.
Police link the Norteños, or Northerners, to 18 murders in the Mission since 2004, the grisly fallout of a simmering turf struggle with the Sureños, or Southerners. The two statewide gangs, both born inside the California prison system during the 1960s, long have warred for control of the Mission's drug trade, sometimes catching bystanders in the crossfire. In June, while standing at the intersection of 24th and Harrison streets, an area inside the proposed safety zone, a 15-year-old boy was gunned down. He had no gang ties, according to police, but may have been mistaken for a Sureño.
Summer has brought similar spasms of gang chaos to the Western Addition. Court records describe Chopper City and Knock Out Posse as "archrivals" of Eddy Rock. Their neighborhood feud flared during a 12-hour span in June, with tit-for-tat shootings injuring eight gang members, among them a 16-year-old boy. The bloodshed followed a weeklong clash in February, when two men were killed and a third injured in separate incidents. A 13-year-old girl also was shot and wounded, an attack linked to an Eddy Rock member. Police suspect the gangs in at least a dozen homicides over the last four years.
Among the more than 65 members who belong to one or another of the three Western Addition gangs, Herrera's proposed injunction names 44 reputed associates. The safety zone for Chopper City and Knock Out Posse would stretch across six square blocks, bordered by Turk, Divisadero, Ellis, and Steiner streets, a rectangular tract that includes two subsidized housing complexes. The safety zone for Eddy Rock, covering a parcel of almost identical size two blocks directly east, would encompass Yerba Buena Plaza East, a public housing project that serves as Eddy Rock's base.
Herrera filed the twin lawsuits in June. A month later, as it happened, the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., published a hefty report that raises doubts about whether injunctions and police crackdowns stunt gang violence.
The study's authors analyzed the anti-gang strategies of several metro areas, saving their harshest critique for Los Angeles. The city enforces 33 injunctions against 50 gangs, court orders that cover 61 square miles and name more than 11,000 alleged members. Yet L.A. owns "the dubious honor of being the gang capital of the world," the report states, counting some 40,000 members and, in 2005, more than 11,000 gang-related crimes.
"If injunctions and mass arrests were the answer, you'd think Los Angeles would be sitting pretty," says Judith Greene, the study's co-author.
Greene argues that too many cities, expecting police to tame gangs overnight, emphasize "heavy-handed" enforcement tactics instead of prevention programs. Injunctions multiply the error, she says, isolating youth from social services while reinforcing their allegiance to the streets. "Kids get in and out of gangs quickly, for the most part," she says. "But if you exclude them from those programs and deny them job opportunities, it's going to have a bad effect. ... They're going to feel they have no other options."
Her appraisal elicits an unlikely echo from Gary Hearnsberger, head of the Los Angeles district attorney's hard-core gang unit. "Cities have been doing suppression for a long time," he says. "I won't say it's ineffective, but it hasn't solved the problem."
The report's conclusions read like gospel to Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's public defender. He labels injunctions "a form of McCarthyism," charging that the orders strip legal protections from reputed gang members in and out of the courtroom.
The accused in a criminal proceeding receives court-appointed counsel if unable to afford an attorney, a guarantee absent in civil cases. As a result, gang injunctions often sail through court without a fight; lacking the money to hire a lawyer, the defendants stay away. The outcome amounts to an end-run around due process, Adachi says, as losing the civil suit exposes them to criminal prosecution if they violate the order.
Meanwhile, inside the safety zone, they are deprived of certain civil liberties, without having been convicted of a crime. "Basically, it's allowing police to unilaterally name gang members and harass them," Adachi says. He intends to argue in court next month that his office can provide counsel to injunction defendants because of the potential they face for criminal prosecution.
Damone Hale represented an alleged Oakdale Mob member in last year's injunction suit. The man, who maintained he had left the gang, lost his case, as city attorneys argued that he still acted as a leader of the group and fingered him as a suspect in three murders. (Hale's client declined to comment to SF Weekly, as did several people identified in the two proposed injunctions.)
Hale views injunctions as a lazy way for authorities to squeeze an alleged gang member without taking the time to build a criminal case, contributing to a slow erosion of civil rights. "It's gang members today. What about tomorrow? Who's next? We're losing our rights because of fear."
Most of the alleged Oakdale Mob members live outside the city, a fact that diminishes the injunction's impact on them. In contrast, many of those listed as defendants in the pending cases reside in San Francisco, some of them inside the proposed safety zones. Already treading on the economic margins, they could tumble off the edge if the city prevails in court. Employers might decide against retaining or hiring a suspected gang member. Friends and relatives may cut off contact, lest the police peg them as gang associates, while some families could find something as ordinary as eating at a restaurant fraught with jeopardy: The lawsuits name at least two sets of brothers.
The possibilities trouble HOMEY's Quiñonez. Years removed from running with the Norteños, he continues to undergo laser treatments to erase the gang tattoos that blotch his chiseled upper body. The Smurf figure on his left bicep alludes to his old street nickname, bestowed for his short stature. The fading black ink reminds him that he, too, once scrounged for purpose.
"People always said to me, "Rene, you have potential.' But potential means nothing if you don't have support," he says. "Instead of forcing these people into a corner, give them to us to work with. That's how we can hold them accountable."
Some news reports refer to an injunction as a "stay-away order." The term implies that a gang member must refrain from so much as entering the designated neighborhood. In fact, as long as he avoids public association with other reputed gang members and heeds the rest of the court order's conditions, he can live, work, and move freely within the area.
Dennis Herrera stresses that detail as he sits in his City Hall office, an airy space with large, oblong windows that let in the gray morning light. Dressed in tan slacks and a white shirt, his collar unfettered by a tie, the city attorney wants to clarify what he calls "misrepresented" aspects of his campaign against gangs.
Opponents of his plan fear that police would exploit the injunctions to perform neighborhood sweeps. Herrera counters that safety-zone restrictions would pertain strictly to the individuals named in court records. Nor would officers hold the authority to add names to the list. City attorneys would handle that task after reviewing evidence and case files, he says, and likewise would offer purported gang members the chance to prove why they should be removed from an injunction.
As for whether they should be named in the lawsuit at all, he replies, "They can make their argument in court. That opportunity is there."
Herrera defines gangs as a public nuisance, likening them to polluters and slum lords in their damage to the greater good. Yet in attempting to create safety zones, he says, "An injunction isn't a panacea. It's only one tool." Indeed, on the broader subject of eradicating street violence, he avows the need for after-school and job programs to aid low-income residents. At the same time, Herrera asserts, if gangs insist on settling their territorial disputes with gunfire, law enforcement can't limit its role to simply zipping up body bags.
"This isn't an either-or proposition," he says. "We as a city have to develop strategies to help young people. But you can't ignore the other side of the coin. We have to be there to protect the streets."
The city attorney's office submitted thousands of pages of documents to support its claims against reputed gang members, going so far as to amass photos of their tattoos. The cases rely heavily on declarations from officers with the SFPD's gang task force, recounting a seemingly endless litany of incidents dating back to the mid-1990s. The reports, chronicling misdeeds ranging from tagging property with graffiti to shootings and assaults, illuminate the city's entrenched and brutal street culture. A sampling:
—Four suspected Eddy Rock members wearing ski masks shot up a corner market on Divisadero in May while attempting to kill an alleged Chopper City rival. The man sustained a bullet wound to his abdomen — one month after another suspected Eddy Rock member shot him in the arm as he walked to the same store.
—Police arrested a purported Norteño member in March after he allegedly stabbed a Sureño in the neck. (The victim lived.) The incident happened near 24th and York streets, an area considered Norteño turf, a few blocks from where the alleged perpetrator himself had been stabbed seven months earlier.
—In 2004, a suspected Norteño accosted a pregnant woman walking on 22nd Street, asking whether she belonged to a gang. The man, carrying a baseball bat, forced her to unzip her sweatshirt, revealing her blue T-shirt — the Sureños' color. As the man slammed the bat into her head, arms, and legs, she curled up on the ground, managing to protect her fetus. The man was later convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.
The number of gang-related murders in San Francisco this year stands at a dozen. Despite the relatively modest figure, police officials report a surge in violent crime in the Western Addition and the Mission, owing primarily to battles over drug turf. In theory, the safety zones would enable officers to choke off the sidewalk commerce, with alleged members unwilling to risk arrest for an infraction as minor as loitering or breaking curfew.
"We're not going to eliminate the gang," says Yvonne Mere, a deputy city attorney assigned to the Norteño case. "But hopefully, we'll start to erode their turf."
Or as Marty Vranicar says, "Moving a drug operation isn't just a matter of relocating down the street."
Vranicar heads the Los Angeles City Attorney's gang unit. Like Herrera, he points out that the Justice Policy Institute, the think tank that criticizes the use of injunctions, upholds a mission of promoting alternatives to incarceration. Both he and Herrera mention another study, conducted in 2000 by a UCLA professor, that shows violent crime drops by 5 percent to 10 percent inside a safety zone during its first year.
"An injunction isn't the end-all, be-all solution," Vranicar says. "But when people are dying, something has to be done. If San Francisco wants to head off its gang problem, you can't just wait for it to go away."
Los Angeles prosecuted some 350 safety-zone violations in 2006. So far, the Oakdale Mob injunction has yielded only three arrests. While Adachi and others continue to describe the Hunters Point neighborhood as a "war zone," citing a July shooting that left a man injured, police estimate the crime rate has fallen by 80 percent. "It's not an incarceration issue," says Capt. Kevin Cashman of the department's investigations bureau. "It's about dissuading people from this kind of illegal activity."
In that respect, Lt. John Murphy, who heads the police homicide unit, compares the city's use of injunctions to federal authorities applying federal racketeering laws against gangs. Three years ago, after the Down Below Gang committed a string of killings to protect its Sunnydale drug enterprise, the FBI arrested a dozen top members on federal conspiracy charges. No murders occurred in the neighborhood over the next seven months.
Similarly, Murphy says, the city's proposed injunctions, by targeting the "shot callers" who direct gang activity, could cool tensions in the Western Addition and the Mission. "It's like with a riot. You have the loudest guy screaming, "Let's break windows!' Then the police take him away and everyone stops and looks around and says, "Why the hell are we breaking windows?'"
Erick Arguello has heard his share of complaints about broken windows from business owners in the Mission. President of the Lower 24th Street Merchants and Neighborhood Association, Arguello relates that insurers, weary of paying claims on storefronts shattered by gunshots, refuse to indemnify proprietors against such damages.
Arguello has lived in the Mission since 1963, when he arrived with his parents from their native Nicaragua. He recalls growing up in the district as a period of relative peace. Times have changed. Two years ago, he saw a man step from a car near 24th and New Hampshire streets, run toward a group of men, and begin firing. Some months later, while walking in the same vicinity, a friend of Arguello's had to crawl under a van to dodge an afternoon shootout between rival gangs. By his unofficial count, in July alone, at least seven people were shot in the Mission.
Arguello extolls grassroots groups that try to steer young gangbangers straight. But he believes creating a safety zone could mute the gunplay and sirens that supply his neighborhood's nightly soundtrack. "We have to try to do whatever we can," he says. "The gangs aren't going to go away on their own."
An apparent drug-turf skirmish in the Tenderloin last month climaxed with a man gunning down Charles Rollins. To most, his death matters less than the five sentences it received in the Chronicle. To Herrera's critics, the episode lays bare an intrinsic flaw in his putative gang crackdown.
The 20-year-old Rollins belonged to the Oakdale Mob. His murder suggests that injunctions, rather than discourage gang members to abandon the streets, simply persuade them to migrate to another corner of the city. So insists Western Addition activist Daniel Landry, a member of the African American Community Police Relations Board.
"You take one neighborhood's problem and you give it to someone else," he says. "How does that help?"
A self-described former gang member, Landry, 38, possesses the body art and rap sheet to prove it. His right wrist bears a tattoo that reads "KO," a reference to King's Originals, a forebear of Knock Out Posse; his time with the gang led to a two-year prison term in the early '90s on a drug conviction.
Landry draws on his street experience in his work with Brothers for Change, a Western Addition advocacy group that preaches violence prevention. As much as he's evolved since his gang days, however, the woes of the city's poorest areas remain the same, he says. "The trouble you have isn't really with gangs. The emphasis should be on getting guns and drugs out of the community. You do that, you take care of your problem."
But for those burdened with the job of gun and drug removal — namely, the cops — Herrera's proposed injunctions represent a chance to reclaim neighborhoods slipping toward entropy. Lt. Ernie Ferrando, head of the gang task force, notes the decline in violence since the Oakdale Mob injunction went into effect. "It's about taking out the worst of the worst, that 1 percent responsible for most of the crime," he says. "That will give you something to build on in that neighborhood."
And while an injunction may dislodge reputed gang members from a neighborhood, Yvonne Mere, the deputy city attorney, offers another perspective. "How many law-abiding citizens have been displaced by the crimes that have gone on in that particular area? How many have had to leave because of the gangs?"
Nonetheless, on the subject of whether the gang task force will pursue only the people named in an injunction, skepticism abounds among Western Addition and Mission activists. They perceive the proposed orders as a license for police to engage in racial profiling, removing even the pretense of probable cause. "They've stopped me on the street," says Roberto Gonzalez, a program coordinator with the Central American Resource Center, or CARECEN, whose dark hair falls below his shoulders. "I have long hair and I'm walking outside — that's enough reason for them right there."
Anamaria Loya, executive director of La Raza Centro Legal, tells a story she heard about an officer mocking a group of young men in the Mission earlier this month. "You're all on the gang injunction list," the cop purportedly said. "Hope you have a lot of money for lawyers, otherwise you're going down." Such anecdotes, whether entirely unembellished as they pass from one listener to the next, provoke sharp resentment among the Latino community.
"There's an undercurrent of rage in dealings with law enforcement," Loya says.
There's also anxiety that injunctions could hasten gentrification. In Hunters Point, not far from the safety zone created by the Oakdale Mob court order, a 1,600-home subdivision sprouts by the day. Last month, the Board of Supervisors narrowly approved a plan for a 60-unit condo project along César Chávez Street — the southern border of the proposed safety zone — that will further shrink the Mission's low-income housing options. Against that backdrop, Henry Hernandez, a CARECEN caseworker, sees the potential injunctions as the first wave in what he dubs "ethnic cleansing."
"In 20 years, we're not going to have our community anymore," he says. "That's what the city wants. That's what the injunctions are for."
Herrera, suffice it to say, thinks otherwise, and he reacts calmly to speculation that he wants to speed gentrification or grease his political fortunes. "When folks are frustrated, they see City Hall as a monolith — the monolith that doesn't want to help them. [But] I think we're all aware that we have a gang problem in San Francisco, and something needs to be done."
In a season of upheaval, that's perhaps the only point on which everyone agrees.
Article:
Trigger on front page
Rene, Director of H.o.m.e.y's:
The War On Gangs
With murders on the rise, City Attorney Dennis Herrera is cracking down on gangs using a legal tool critics say smacks of McCarthyism
By Martin Kuz
Published: August 22, 2007
A police car rolls down Oakdale Avenue past a public housing complex as worn and ashen as a Dust Bowl barn. Broom still in hand, Tau Calo has stepped outside her ground-level apartment to cool off from sweeping its linoleum floors, beads of sweat dotting her face. She watches the black-and-white cruiser crest a small hill and disappear.
Calo moved into the five-bedroom unit with her husband and their five children in 1996. In their Hunters Point neighborhood, a place thick with subsidized housing located a Hail Mary toss from Candlestick Park, crime and poverty collide. Cops have long been part of the area's daily life, arriving with sirens squalling when mayhem erupts. But officers patrolling the streets on a quiet weekday afternoon — that's a relatively new spectacle.
"The police come by more often," Calo says. "It's a lot better than it was before."
She's referring to the time before last November, when City Attorney Dennis Herrera obtained a civil injunction against the Oakdale Mob, creating a so-called safety zone in the neighborhood. Among other restrictions, the court order prohibits the gang's members, suspects in a dozen homicides since 2003, from publicly consorting within the safety zone's four square blocks. Those caught violating the ban risk a stint of up to six months in the county jail.
For the 49-year-old Calo, whose building sits in the heart of the safety zone, the beefed-up police presence spawned by the injunction has eased her maternal anxiety. Two years ago, while her youngest son, then 12, stood with friends on the sidewalk, a gunman opened fire at a group of men clustered near them. A bullet pierced the leg of Calo's 20-year-old son, who had shown up moments earlier to bring his little brother home. (The older brother recovered.)
The area's chronic violence remains enough of a concern that Calo forbids her youngest to stay outside after dark. Yet with the gang apparently scattered, she says the neighborhood has calmed over the last nine months. The curbside drug trade has dissolved. Fewer bursts of gunfire interrupt the night. "We're happy the police are doing their job," Calo says. "We don't feel so scared anymore."
Calo lives about a block from the Captain Shorey Community Center, where workers have set up a folding table for a sidewalk cookout. Hot dogs and hamburgers sizzle on an electric grill as tendrils of smoke curl skyward, an inviting signal to passers-by hungry for lunch. The food sales will fund a field trip to Santa Cruz for children attending the center's day-care program.
Sheryl Perkins returns most days to the street where she grew up, visiting family and old friends. Waiting in line to buy a hot dog, she flays authorities for depicting the area as gang-infested.
"It's just neighborhood people, not gangs," says Perkins, a teacher at nearby Charles Drew Elementary. "They're out here because they can't find work." She believes city officials could better staunch street crime by expanding after-school and social programs for youth and providing more job training for young adults. "Give the money to this center," she says. "Then it wouldn't have to be out here raising money." A squad car drifts past while she talks.
On a short brick wall behind the table sits a man in his late 20s, wearing jeans, a green sweatshirt, and a black nylon do-rag. He offers a blunt rationale for declining to divulge his name. "I'm on that list," he says, referring to the Oakdale Mob injunction. His employer fired him last year after learning of his alleged gang affiliation, he claims, and months passed before he found a construction company willing to hire him. He worries that history might repeat itself if his new employer reads his name in the paper.
The man refuses to disclose why he landed in prison a few years ago. Yet he blames the injunction for hindering his ability to move forward. "I did wrong back then," he says. "But I did my time, paid my debt. How long do I got to be harassed?"
His question, along with the differing opinions of Calo and Perkins, reveals the complexities of a churning citywide debate on gang injunctions, a discussion amplified by a recent spike in murders. Entering the week, this year's homicide total stood at 67. The figure puts San Francisco on a pace comparable to 2005, when it recorded a 10-year high with 96 killings. (The city tallied 85 murders last year.)
A rash of shootings and stabbings has turned the summer bloody in the Western Addition and the Mission, with police ascribing much of the carnage to gang skirmishes. Herrera has reacted by pursuing a pair of civil injunctions against gangs in each district. His lawsuits charge that the groups, by virtue of committing murders, robberies, and assaults, dealing drugs, and vandalizing property, pose a public nuisance.
In targeting three Western Addition gangs — Chopper City, Knock Out Posse, and Eddy Rock — Herrera seeks to carve out two different safety zones that would cover a combined 12 square blocks. His other proposed injunction would delineate a safety zone five times that size in the Mission to quell the Norteño gang.
The orders would impose safety-zone constraints akin to those enforced in Hunters Point. The 76 alleged gang members named in the lawsuits could receive jail time for hanging out together in public, throwing gang signs, or recruiting new members. The suspected Norteños also would be banned from wearing red, the gang's color, and would face a curfew between 10 p.m. and sunrise.
The Oakdale Mob injunction, the first such order slapped on a San Francisco gang, established Herrera as arguably the city's leading anti-crime crusader. This time around, despite solid support from police officials and residents in the affected areas, he finds himself under siege from a coalition of neighborhood advocates and civil libertarians. Their criticism surged last month with the release of a think-tank study that asserts injunctions fail to deter gang crime. Herrera's foes further argue that such court orders inhibit young men from leaving the streets behind, circumvent their civil rights, and sanction racial profiling by police.
Unlike the Oakdale Mob case, in which only one attorney took up the defendants' cause, the latest lawsuits have attracted a swarm of criminal defense and civil lawyers. They're shrouding their legal strategy in advance of hearings on the proposed injunctions, scheduled for Sept. 18 in Superior Court. In the interim, as the rest of San Francisco marks the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love, it's a season of upheaval in the streets.
A sprawling mural in a parking lot near 24th and Capp streets depicts a series of scenes vibrant in color and tone, united by a theme of Latino perseverance. The images range from protesters marching in an immigration rally to a man reading a book to a clutch of youngsters. The man, Rene Quiñonez, points to his likeness — shaved head, trimmed mustache and beard — as he stands before the painting, his presence its own tribute to perseverance.
Quiñonez serves as executive director of Homies Organizing the Mission to Empower Youth, or HOMEY, the group that created the mural. The nonprofit organization works with troubled youth and young adults to herd them away from gangs. The 30-year-old Quiñonez makes an apt mentor, given his recent escape from thug life.
The ex-Norteño member grew up in the Mission near Del Sol Park, the son of a single mother who struggled to support her two children. Lured into the gang by older neighborhood kids, Quiñonez began selling weed and crack in his mid-teens to help his family stay afloat. He dropped out of high school, and though he later earned his GED and enrolled at San Francisco State, the streets usurped better intentions. Quiñonez expanded his drug operation to ease the financial burden of new fatherhood; his venture met a sudden end when federal authorities busted him in 2001.
He served a year in prison before volunteering with HOMEY to fulfill his parole agreement. Observing the group's caseworkers, most of them former gang members, he realized that the program's strength derived from its authenticity: The counselors were proof that you could leave gangs behind. He had found his future.
But Quiñonez frets that such efforts to reform wayward youth could suffer if the proposed injunctions win approval. He and fellow advocates vouch for several people named in the city's lawsuits who claim to no longer belong to gangs. A handful of the defendants volunteer in outreach programs with HOMEY and its ilk, conveying the kind of streetwise credibility to which Quiñonez responded. He contends that the injunctions, by branding those volunteers as police targets, would hamper the ability of grassroots groups to connect with young men and women.
"If someone's name is in the injunction, kids are going to think about staying away from him," Quiñonez says. "But it's the people who've been in gangs who can go into the streets and get kids to trust them."
Authorities estimate that more than 300 Norteños live in the Mission; the city's lawsuit identifies 32 purported members. The injunction would create a safety zone of 60 square blocks, bracketed by César Chávez, Valencia, and 21st streets and Potrero Avenue, a wide swath of the district's southern half.
Police link the Norteños, or Northerners, to 18 murders in the Mission since 2004, the grisly fallout of a simmering turf struggle with the Sureños, or Southerners. The two statewide gangs, both born inside the California prison system during the 1960s, long have warred for control of the Mission's drug trade, sometimes catching bystanders in the crossfire. In June, while standing at the intersection of 24th and Harrison streets, an area inside the proposed safety zone, a 15-year-old boy was gunned down. He had no gang ties, according to police, but may have been mistaken for a Sureño.
Summer has brought similar spasms of gang chaos to the Western Addition. Court records describe Chopper City and Knock Out Posse as "archrivals" of Eddy Rock. Their neighborhood feud flared during a 12-hour span in June, with tit-for-tat shootings injuring eight gang members, among them a 16-year-old boy. The bloodshed followed a weeklong clash in February, when two men were killed and a third injured in separate incidents. A 13-year-old girl also was shot and wounded, an attack linked to an Eddy Rock member. Police suspect the gangs in at least a dozen homicides over the last four years.
Among the more than 65 members who belong to one or another of the three Western Addition gangs, Herrera's proposed injunction names 44 reputed associates. The safety zone for Chopper City and Knock Out Posse would stretch across six square blocks, bordered by Turk, Divisadero, Ellis, and Steiner streets, a rectangular tract that includes two subsidized housing complexes. The safety zone for Eddy Rock, covering a parcel of almost identical size two blocks directly east, would encompass Yerba Buena Plaza East, a public housing project that serves as Eddy Rock's base.
Herrera filed the twin lawsuits in June. A month later, as it happened, the Justice Policy Institute, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., published a hefty report that raises doubts about whether injunctions and police crackdowns stunt gang violence.
The study's authors analyzed the anti-gang strategies of several metro areas, saving their harshest critique for Los Angeles. The city enforces 33 injunctions against 50 gangs, court orders that cover 61 square miles and name more than 11,000 alleged members. Yet L.A. owns "the dubious honor of being the gang capital of the world," the report states, counting some 40,000 members and, in 2005, more than 11,000 gang-related crimes.
"If injunctions and mass arrests were the answer, you'd think Los Angeles would be sitting pretty," says Judith Greene, the study's co-author.
Greene argues that too many cities, expecting police to tame gangs overnight, emphasize "heavy-handed" enforcement tactics instead of prevention programs. Injunctions multiply the error, she says, isolating youth from social services while reinforcing their allegiance to the streets. "Kids get in and out of gangs quickly, for the most part," she says. "But if you exclude them from those programs and deny them job opportunities, it's going to have a bad effect. ... They're going to feel they have no other options."
Her appraisal elicits an unlikely echo from Gary Hearnsberger, head of the Los Angeles district attorney's hard-core gang unit. "Cities have been doing suppression for a long time," he says. "I won't say it's ineffective, but it hasn't solved the problem."
The report's conclusions read like gospel to Jeff Adachi, San Francisco's public defender. He labels injunctions "a form of McCarthyism," charging that the orders strip legal protections from reputed gang members in and out of the courtroom.
The accused in a criminal proceeding receives court-appointed counsel if unable to afford an attorney, a guarantee absent in civil cases. As a result, gang injunctions often sail through court without a fight; lacking the money to hire a lawyer, the defendants stay away. The outcome amounts to an end-run around due process, Adachi says, as losing the civil suit exposes them to criminal prosecution if they violate the order.
Meanwhile, inside the safety zone, they are deprived of certain civil liberties, without having been convicted of a crime. "Basically, it's allowing police to unilaterally name gang members and harass them," Adachi says. He intends to argue in court next month that his office can provide counsel to injunction defendants because of the potential they face for criminal prosecution.
Damone Hale represented an alleged Oakdale Mob member in last year's injunction suit. The man, who maintained he had left the gang, lost his case, as city attorneys argued that he still acted as a leader of the group and fingered him as a suspect in three murders. (Hale's client declined to comment to SF Weekly, as did several people identified in the two proposed injunctions.)
Hale views injunctions as a lazy way for authorities to squeeze an alleged gang member without taking the time to build a criminal case, contributing to a slow erosion of civil rights. "It's gang members today. What about tomorrow? Who's next? We're losing our rights because of fear."
Most of the alleged Oakdale Mob members live outside the city, a fact that diminishes the injunction's impact on them. In contrast, many of those listed as defendants in the pending cases reside in San Francisco, some of them inside the proposed safety zones. Already treading on the economic margins, they could tumble off the edge if the city prevails in court. Employers might decide against retaining or hiring a suspected gang member. Friends and relatives may cut off contact, lest the police peg them as gang associates, while some families could find something as ordinary as eating at a restaurant fraught with jeopardy: The lawsuits name at least two sets of brothers.
The possibilities trouble HOMEY's Quiñonez. Years removed from running with the Norteños, he continues to undergo laser treatments to erase the gang tattoos that blotch his chiseled upper body. The Smurf figure on his left bicep alludes to his old street nickname, bestowed for his short stature. The fading black ink reminds him that he, too, once scrounged for purpose.
"People always said to me, "Rene, you have potential.' But potential means nothing if you don't have support," he says. "Instead of forcing these people into a corner, give them to us to work with. That's how we can hold them accountable."
Some news reports refer to an injunction as a "stay-away order." The term implies that a gang member must refrain from so much as entering the designated neighborhood. In fact, as long as he avoids public association with other reputed gang members and heeds the rest of the court order's conditions, he can live, work, and move freely within the area.
Dennis Herrera stresses that detail as he sits in his City Hall office, an airy space with large, oblong windows that let in the gray morning light. Dressed in tan slacks and a white shirt, his collar unfettered by a tie, the city attorney wants to clarify what he calls "misrepresented" aspects of his campaign against gangs.
Opponents of his plan fear that police would exploit the injunctions to perform neighborhood sweeps. Herrera counters that safety-zone restrictions would pertain strictly to the individuals named in court records. Nor would officers hold the authority to add names to the list. City attorneys would handle that task after reviewing evidence and case files, he says, and likewise would offer purported gang members the chance to prove why they should be removed from an injunction.
As for whether they should be named in the lawsuit at all, he replies, "They can make their argument in court. That opportunity is there."
Herrera defines gangs as a public nuisance, likening them to polluters and slum lords in their damage to the greater good. Yet in attempting to create safety zones, he says, "An injunction isn't a panacea. It's only one tool." Indeed, on the broader subject of eradicating street violence, he avows the need for after-school and job programs to aid low-income residents. At the same time, Herrera asserts, if gangs insist on settling their territorial disputes with gunfire, law enforcement can't limit its role to simply zipping up body bags.
"This isn't an either-or proposition," he says. "We as a city have to develop strategies to help young people. But you can't ignore the other side of the coin. We have to be there to protect the streets."
The city attorney's office submitted thousands of pages of documents to support its claims against reputed gang members, going so far as to amass photos of their tattoos. The cases rely heavily on declarations from officers with the SFPD's gang task force, recounting a seemingly endless litany of incidents dating back to the mid-1990s. The reports, chronicling misdeeds ranging from tagging property with graffiti to shootings and assaults, illuminate the city's entrenched and brutal street culture. A sampling:
—Four suspected Eddy Rock members wearing ski masks shot up a corner market on Divisadero in May while attempting to kill an alleged Chopper City rival. The man sustained a bullet wound to his abdomen — one month after another suspected Eddy Rock member shot him in the arm as he walked to the same store.
—Police arrested a purported Norteño member in March after he allegedly stabbed a Sureño in the neck. (The victim lived.) The incident happened near 24th and York streets, an area considered Norteño turf, a few blocks from where the alleged perpetrator himself had been stabbed seven months earlier.
—In 2004, a suspected Norteño accosted a pregnant woman walking on 22nd Street, asking whether she belonged to a gang. The man, carrying a baseball bat, forced her to unzip her sweatshirt, revealing her blue T-shirt — the Sureños' color. As the man slammed the bat into her head, arms, and legs, she curled up on the ground, managing to protect her fetus. The man was later convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.
The number of gang-related murders in San Francisco this year stands at a dozen. Despite the relatively modest figure, police officials report a surge in violent crime in the Western Addition and the Mission, owing primarily to battles over drug turf. In theory, the safety zones would enable officers to choke off the sidewalk commerce, with alleged members unwilling to risk arrest for an infraction as minor as loitering or breaking curfew.
"We're not going to eliminate the gang," says Yvonne Mere, a deputy city attorney assigned to the Norteño case. "But hopefully, we'll start to erode their turf."
Or as Marty Vranicar says, "Moving a drug operation isn't just a matter of relocating down the street."
Vranicar heads the Los Angeles City Attorney's gang unit. Like Herrera, he points out that the Justice Policy Institute, the think tank that criticizes the use of injunctions, upholds a mission of promoting alternatives to incarceration. Both he and Herrera mention another study, conducted in 2000 by a UCLA professor, that shows violent crime drops by 5 percent to 10 percent inside a safety zone during its first year.
"An injunction isn't the end-all, be-all solution," Vranicar says. "But when people are dying, something has to be done. If San Francisco wants to head off its gang problem, you can't just wait for it to go away."
Los Angeles prosecuted some 350 safety-zone violations in 2006. So far, the Oakdale Mob injunction has yielded only three arrests. While Adachi and others continue to describe the Hunters Point neighborhood as a "war zone," citing a July shooting that left a man injured, police estimate the crime rate has fallen by 80 percent. "It's not an incarceration issue," says Capt. Kevin Cashman of the department's investigations bureau. "It's about dissuading people from this kind of illegal activity."
In that respect, Lt. John Murphy, who heads the police homicide unit, compares the city's use of injunctions to federal authorities applying federal racketeering laws against gangs. Three years ago, after the Down Below Gang committed a string of killings to protect its Sunnydale drug enterprise, the FBI arrested a dozen top members on federal conspiracy charges. No murders occurred in the neighborhood over the next seven months.
Similarly, Murphy says, the city's proposed injunctions, by targeting the "shot callers" who direct gang activity, could cool tensions in the Western Addition and the Mission. "It's like with a riot. You have the loudest guy screaming, "Let's break windows!' Then the police take him away and everyone stops and looks around and says, "Why the hell are we breaking windows?'"
Erick Arguello has heard his share of complaints about broken windows from business owners in the Mission. President of the Lower 24th Street Merchants and Neighborhood Association, Arguello relates that insurers, weary of paying claims on storefronts shattered by gunshots, refuse to indemnify proprietors against such damages.
Arguello has lived in the Mission since 1963, when he arrived with his parents from their native Nicaragua. He recalls growing up in the district as a period of relative peace. Times have changed. Two years ago, he saw a man step from a car near 24th and New Hampshire streets, run toward a group of men, and begin firing. Some months later, while walking in the same vicinity, a friend of Arguello's had to crawl under a van to dodge an afternoon shootout between rival gangs. By his unofficial count, in July alone, at least seven people were shot in the Mission.
Arguello extolls grassroots groups that try to steer young gangbangers straight. But he believes creating a safety zone could mute the gunplay and sirens that supply his neighborhood's nightly soundtrack. "We have to try to do whatever we can," he says. "The gangs aren't going to go away on their own."
An apparent drug-turf skirmish in the Tenderloin last month climaxed with a man gunning down Charles Rollins. To most, his death matters less than the five sentences it received in the Chronicle. To Herrera's critics, the episode lays bare an intrinsic flaw in his putative gang crackdown.
The 20-year-old Rollins belonged to the Oakdale Mob. His murder suggests that injunctions, rather than discourage gang members to abandon the streets, simply persuade them to migrate to another corner of the city. So insists Western Addition activist Daniel Landry, a member of the African American Community Police Relations Board.
"You take one neighborhood's problem and you give it to someone else," he says. "How does that help?"
A self-described former gang member, Landry, 38, possesses the body art and rap sheet to prove it. His right wrist bears a tattoo that reads "KO," a reference to King's Originals, a forebear of Knock Out Posse; his time with the gang led to a two-year prison term in the early '90s on a drug conviction.
Landry draws on his street experience in his work with Brothers for Change, a Western Addition advocacy group that preaches violence prevention. As much as he's evolved since his gang days, however, the woes of the city's poorest areas remain the same, he says. "The trouble you have isn't really with gangs. The emphasis should be on getting guns and drugs out of the community. You do that, you take care of your problem."
But for those burdened with the job of gun and drug removal — namely, the cops — Herrera's proposed injunctions represent a chance to reclaim neighborhoods slipping toward entropy. Lt. Ernie Ferrando, head of the gang task force, notes the decline in violence since the Oakdale Mob injunction went into effect. "It's about taking out the worst of the worst, that 1 percent responsible for most of the crime," he says. "That will give you something to build on in that neighborhood."
And while an injunction may dislodge reputed gang members from a neighborhood, Yvonne Mere, the deputy city attorney, offers another perspective. "How many law-abiding citizens have been displaced by the crimes that have gone on in that particular area? How many have had to leave because of the gangs?"
Nonetheless, on the subject of whether the gang task force will pursue only the people named in an injunction, skepticism abounds among Western Addition and Mission activists. They perceive the proposed orders as a license for police to engage in racial profiling, removing even the pretense of probable cause. "They've stopped me on the street," says Roberto Gonzalez, a program coordinator with the Central American Resource Center, or CARECEN, whose dark hair falls below his shoulders. "I have long hair and I'm walking outside — that's enough reason for them right there."
Anamaria Loya, executive director of La Raza Centro Legal, tells a story she heard about an officer mocking a group of young men in the Mission earlier this month. "You're all on the gang injunction list," the cop purportedly said. "Hope you have a lot of money for lawyers, otherwise you're going down." Such anecdotes, whether entirely unembellished as they pass from one listener to the next, provoke sharp resentment among the Latino community.
"There's an undercurrent of rage in dealings with law enforcement," Loya says.
There's also anxiety that injunctions could hasten gentrification. In Hunters Point, not far from the safety zone created by the Oakdale Mob court order, a 1,600-home subdivision sprouts by the day. Last month, the Board of Supervisors narrowly approved a plan for a 60-unit condo project along César Chávez Street — the southern border of the proposed safety zone — that will further shrink the Mission's low-income housing options. Against that backdrop, Henry Hernandez, a CARECEN caseworker, sees the potential injunctions as the first wave in what he dubs "ethnic cleansing."
"In 20 years, we're not going to have our community anymore," he says. "That's what the city wants. That's what the injunctions are for."
Herrera, suffice it to say, thinks otherwise, and he reacts calmly to speculation that he wants to speed gentrification or grease his political fortunes. "When folks are frustrated, they see City Hall as a monolith — the monolith that doesn't want to help them. [But] I think we're all aware that we have a gang problem in San Francisco, and something needs to be done."
In a season of upheaval, that's perhaps the only point on which everyone agrees.
by the Arab Resource and Organizing Center
We are writing to ask for your support for a mural on 24th and Capp St that is under attack by Zionists. The mural depicts related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression. Its major theme is breaking down walls -- those in Mexico, Palestine, Iraq -- and the physical and social walls in our own communities here.
Homey Mural
The Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council are asking the youth artists from HOMEY to censor their work, and remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance. We stand behind the artists' creativity and conviction, and insist that Palestine hold its place on this mural amongst other struggles for liberation.
Write the Arts Commission expressing your support for this mural and the freedom of expression of the artists.
Sign on below or use as a sample letter. Please include your personal feelings on the mural, if you live or work in the area, as well as any community or organizational affiliations you have.
Arab Resource and Organizing Center ([email protected])
Please send a copy of all letters of support to [email protected].
Ellen Shershow, [email protected]
Jill Manton, [email protected]
Public Art Program, SF Arts Commission
25 Van Ness Ave, Suite 240
San Francisco, CA 94103
Dear SF Arts Commission,
I am writing to express my support of the mural on 24th and Capp in its entirety, including the positive images of Palestinian liberation struggles. I applaud the SF Arts Commission for their encouragement of self-expression and youth leadership development, and want to ensure that the Commission continues to allow for and insist on the artistic freedom of the HOMEY artists.
This mural represents the united struggles of people of color in the Mission, including the Palestinian and Arab community working with, living amongst, and supporting the young people of this neighborhood. The mural depicts self-determination for all and breaking down barriers as major themes. Just as residents of the Mission are fighting displacement locally and walls separating them from their homelands, so too are Palestinians.
As artists, you know the importance of freedom of creativity and the right to express strongly your beliefs and experiences. The muralist tradition has always been rooted in its depiction of popular history and struggle as experienced by the artist and the community the mural is being made in. To censor this narrative dismisses the central function, purpose, and power of the medium and the communities it speaks to. I hope this mural can not only visually represent self-determination, but also embody the self-determination of young artists and Mission residents through your help maintaining the integrity of the mural and the traditions and lived experiences which have inspired it.
The Arab Resource and Organizing Center is the next chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Francisco. At AROC, we seek to further our reach within our communities to address the needs of Arabs and others from South West Asian and North African countries here in the Bay Area, as well as in our countries of origin. Comment | Trackback | Print
MR
We are writing to ask for your support for a mural on 24th and Capp St that is under attack by Zionists. The mural depicts related images of struggle by indigenous communities against forces of imperialism, racism, and economic oppression. Its major theme is breaking down walls -- those in Mexico, Palestine, Iraq -- and the physical and social walls in our own communities here.
Homey Mural
The Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish Community Relations Council are asking the youth artists from HOMEY to censor their work, and remove or alter the portion of the mural depicting Palestinian resistance. We stand behind the artists' creativity and conviction, and insist that Palestine hold its place on this mural amongst other struggles for liberation.
Write the Arts Commission expressing your support for this mural and the freedom of expression of the artists.
Sign on below or use as a sample letter. Please include your personal feelings on the mural, if you live or work in the area, as well as any community or organizational affiliations you have.
Arab Resource and Organizing Center ([email protected])
Please send a copy of all letters of support to [email protected].
Ellen Shershow, [email protected]
Jill Manton, [email protected]
Public Art Program, SF Arts Commission
25 Van Ness Ave, Suite 240
San Francisco, CA 94103
Dear SF Arts Commission,
I am writing to express my support of the mural on 24th and Capp in its entirety, including the positive images of Palestinian liberation struggles. I applaud the SF Arts Commission for their encouragement of self-expression and youth leadership development, and want to ensure that the Commission continues to allow for and insist on the artistic freedom of the HOMEY artists.
This mural represents the united struggles of people of color in the Mission, including the Palestinian and Arab community working with, living amongst, and supporting the young people of this neighborhood. The mural depicts self-determination for all and breaking down barriers as major themes. Just as residents of the Mission are fighting displacement locally and walls separating them from their homelands, so too are Palestinians.
As artists, you know the importance of freedom of creativity and the right to express strongly your beliefs and experiences. The muralist tradition has always been rooted in its depiction of popular history and struggle as experienced by the artist and the community the mural is being made in. To censor this narrative dismisses the central function, purpose, and power of the medium and the communities it speaks to. I hope this mural can not only visually represent self-determination, but also embody the self-determination of young artists and Mission residents through your help maintaining the integrity of the mural and the traditions and lived experiences which have inspired it.
The Arab Resource and Organizing Center is the next chapter of the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Francisco. At AROC, we seek to further our reach within our communities to address the needs of Arabs and others from South West Asian and North African countries here in the Bay Area, as well as in our countries of origin. Comment | Trackback | Print
MR