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In alliance with the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) we organized the October 23, 2010 labor and community rally for Justice for Oscar Grant. On that day the ILWU shut down the Bay Area ports in solidarity. Our mission is to educate, organize and mobilize people against police and state repression. Sisters and brothers! The Oscar Grant Committee invites you to join us in this vital struggle.

We meet on the 1^st Monday of each month
You can join our discussion list by sending a blank (doesn’t even need a subject) email to

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Due to the New Year’s Holiday the January 2nd meeting of the PAC has been cancelled. A Special Meeting has been scheduled for Wednesday January 8th from 5-7pm at City Hall in Hearing Room 1.  

Agenda items of possible interest:

4. Chief Privacy Officer report – Privacy Principles status update and implementation
5. Chair/Vice Chair report – 2020 planning, PAC annual report, report tracking, agenda management
6. Surveillance Equipment Ordinance – OPD – Live Stream Camera Impact Report and proposed Use Policy – review and take possible action
7. Surveillance Equipment Ordinance – OPD – UAS (Drone) Impact Report and proposed Use Policy – review and take possible action

The precarity of Black girls’ lives in school have been made visible by Dr. Monique Morris. Through her writing, advocacy, and now film, PUSHOUT, we now have the language to describe and understand what we see happening to Black girls in schools. Morris’ work has inspired debate and legislation with the recent sponsoring of the Ending Punitive, Unfair, School-based Harm that is Overt and Unresponsive to Trauma (P.U.S.H.O.U.T) Act,” by representatives Ayanna Pressley (D- MA), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.). The law identifies the many students made vulnerable by race, gender, and disability positionality and outlines resources and policy recommendations to secure educational spaces for children.

Join Mills College, School of Education for its culminating Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action event: a screening of PUSHOUT and townhall panel discussion moderated by Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey. Dr. Monique Morris will provide opening remarks. In collaboration with the Mills College Black History Month programming and Ethnic Studies Department, we are proud to host this screening of PUSHOUT.

UPDATE: While this event is currently marked as “Sold Out” please join our Waitlist. As seats open up due to cancellations, individuals on our Waitlist will be contacted to secure their free ticket.

Join us in planning, organizing and building for the 6th Annual MLK Day Weekend, including the Monday, 1/20, Rally and March. Come to two remaining planning meetings on Wednesday, 1/8 at Omni Ballroom, and Wednesday, 1/15 at Eastside Arts Alliance, 2277 International Blvd, Oakland, CA 94606 both at 7pm.

We’re joining with many organizations to lift up the radical legacy of Martin Luther King all weekend long. We invite people and organizations to plan events all weekend, culminating in our 6th Annual Rally and March on Monday, 1/20, at noon at Oscar Grant Plaza, 14th and Broadway.

We want to lift up the struggles against ICE and Concentration Camps, for Housing for all, against school closures and cops in the schools. We will continue to support the families and community against police violence. We support movements for land and growing our own food. And we fully support the Oakland Climate Strike and Resilient Village organized by Youth Vs. Apocalypse and Mycelium Youth Network: https://www.facebook.com/events/573190676790237/

Look for updates to specific actions here and contact us with your ideas and proposals.

pic.twitter.com/fJ98EqLUkU

— Berkeley Copwatch (@Copwatch411) December 24, 2019

Reclaim the Commons – Enough is Enough – January 9

By now, many of us want to throw Facebook over the side of a bridge. Privacy violations, government orders, hate speech, disinformation, censorship …. the list goes on.

But here’s the reality. FB is a communications platform that reaches billions of people, a public town square and a powerful influencer. It isn’t easy to build up that kind of scale again and it won’t be quick.

Zuckerberg got lucky. It’s the people that make social media and we make it every day. It needs to work for us, not against us.

The world’s biggest social media platform has basically done nothing to head off massive disinformation campaigns, blatant lies and hateful extremism. It has put profits ahead of social good, the health of democracy, and the personal safety of many.

We’ve let them. But that can stop. We’re teaming up with a coalition of like-minded organizations and individuals to force Facebook to clean up its act.

On January 9th, we’re paying a visit to 1 Hacker Way to say the jig is up.

Even the company’s own employees know what needs to happen. Facebook just isn’t listening.

Which means we need to say it a little louder.

We will no longer tolerate the company’s paralysis in the face of the harm they are causing. They can take action and the public will make them.

We hope you’ll join Media Alliance, Global Exchange, Credo Action, Code Pink, MediaJustice, Courage Campaign and many others on January 9th.

We have a bus from SF to Menlo Park and back. Tickets are $15 R/T. Reserve a seat here.

If you are a meta type, here is the Facebook event for the Facebook protest.

If you can’t come, you can support the January 9 action online by participating in #BlackOutFaceBook. Replace your profile picture and cover photo with a black box to mourn our lost public commons and start the countdown to reclaiming it.

As we told the press:  We’re not willing to cede a communications network that reaches billions of people to the unfettered practices of a corporation that cares more about its profits than about our democracy. Not without a fight.

Happy Holidays and lets fix Facebook once and for all. (supported by the collective power of the MediaJustice network)
Take Action

Some agenda items of possible interest:

X. Use of Force Working Group
The Use of Force Working Group will present its revised draft report and a draft of the
Oakland Police Department Use of Force Policy, Department General Order (DGO) K-03.
The Commission will vote to approve the report and the revised DGO. This is item is
continued from 12.12.19. (Attachment 10).

XI. Presentation by National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform (NICJR) of Proposed Pilot
Juvenile Diversion Program
David Muhammad of NICJR will deliver a presentation on the Neighborhood Opportunity
and Accountability Board (NOAB) which will be a community based, restorative, youth
diversion initiative in Oakland. This is a new item. (Attachment 11).

Join the East Bay DSA’s Labor Committee for their regular Beer and Roses social. Hang out with other members who are interested in the labor movement, hear about what’s happening in EBDSA Labor Committee & learn how you can get involved.

We start a new book for the new year.  All are welcome at host Strike Debt Bay Area’s economics book group discussion.

We meet once a month.  For January we are reading the first three chapters of “Limits (Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care” by Giorgos Kallis (Amazon, Stanford University Press).  For February, the remaing chapters.  Not a problem if you will have missed January – the chapters are short and it is easy to catch up for February!

Previous books er have discussed include Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and Ellen Brown’s Banking for the People.

“In an era addicted to endless growth, Giorgos Kallis artfully explores the power of limits and the surprising freedom that they can unleash. A compelling―and fittingly concise―read for our times.” (Kate Raworth author of Doughnut Economics)

“Western culture is infatuated with the dream of going beyond, even as it is increasingly haunted by the specter of apocalypse: drought, famine, nuclear winter. How did we come to think of the planet and its limits as we do? This book reclaims, redefines, and makes an impassioned plea for limits—a notion central to environmentalism—clearing them from their association with Malthusianism and the ideology and politics that go along with it. Giorgos Kallis rereads reverend-economist Thomas Robert Malthus and his legacy, separating limits and scarcity, two notions that have long been conflated in both environmental and economic thought. Limits are not something out there, a property of nature to be deciphered by scientists, but a choice that confronts us, one that, paradoxically, is part and parcel of the pursuit of freedom. Taking us from ancient Greece to Malthus, from hunter-gatherers to the Romantics, from anarchist feminists to 1970s radical environmentalists, Limits shows us how an institutionalized culture of sharing can make possible the collective self-limitation we so urgently need.” – Book description.

Join us!

Gar Smith (he/him), Guest Speaker
An overview of the invisible health and environmental impacts of the “5G wireless revolution” that lies behind The Internet of Things.

Sunday Morning at the Marxist Library

Speaker will be Eugene E Ruyle, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, CSU Long Beach, currently with ICSS in Oakland. Gene will discuss his forthcoming book, Socialism for Americans: A Scientific Introduction to the Global Struggle for Socialism.

Gene’s  basic idea is that although socialism takes different forms in different times and places, the revolutionary core of socialism lies in those societies that have actually had socialist revolutions: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, Korea, Vietnam, China, and Cuba. But this does not mean that the struggle for socialism within the imperialist countries is not important. It obviously is, and it must be placed in its proper context. Socialists in the United States are advised to shed their parochialism and embrace a global solidarity with the surviving and thriving socialist camp countries of China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, and Laos, as well as other forms of socialism throughout the world.