Entries Tagged 'Checkpoints' ↓

Interview with Denika Chatman on her son’s recent killing by San Francisco Police Department for not paying his $2.00 train fare. His slow death, and the lack of medical assistance provided, was well documented on civilian video recordings at the scene. His mother recounts her son’s life, and her relations with the police, including a SWAT team that was sent to her house following the killing:

“The way that the police have been talking to me, degrading me – they feel like they have the right to do it to me.”

Interview by Natasha Reid for the SF Bayview Newspaper:

sfbayview.com/2011/hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned-an-interview-with-the-mother-of-kenneth-harding/

April 11, 2011: Eva Galperin for EFF:

“The Electronic Frontier Foundation joined civil liberties and privacy groups in criticizing a proposal from the San Francisco Entertainment Commission that would require all venues with an occupancy of over 100 people to record the faces of all patrons and employees and scan their ID’s for storage in a database which they must hand over to law enforcement on request. If adopted, these rules would pose a grave threat to the rights of freedom of association, due process, and privacy in San Francisco.”

www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/04/eff-san-francisco-entertainment-commission-don-t

For the full text of the letter sent to the San Francisco Entertainment Commission by several privacy rights groups on April 12, 2011:

www.eff.org/files/SFclub-privacy-final-press.doc

From IndyBay:

“During Cinco de Mayo celebrations, residents of San José faced daytime checkpoints, citations, and arrests on a scale not matched by any other festival of the year. By 10 pm the focus appeared to be diverting cars and mostly-Latino youths from the downtown area, effectively evacuating the city center and shutting down street celebrations on two nights.”
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There are a bunch of pics up at IndyBay as well.

From Mother Jones:

“Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments—operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunk drivers. An investigation by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley with California Watch has found that impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated an estimated $40 million in towing fees and police fines—revenue that cities divide with towing firms. In addition, police officers received about $30 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

…

Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods. Cities where Hispanics are a majority of the population are seizing cars at three times the rate of cities with small minority populations. In South Gate, a Los Angeles County city where Hispanics make up 92 percent of the population, police confiscated an average of 86 vehicles per operation last fiscal year.”

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These things are specifically designed to steal people’s (specifically immigrants’) cars and to channel cash into the pockets of tow companies and cops.  More interesting: people at the UC can stop it!