SCPOOS
The Santa Cruz Police Off Oakland Streets (SCCPOOS) initiative was an organizing campaign (click here for a primer on what organizing is) that I designed and implemented in my hometown during the 2020 summer iteration of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. The policy goal of the campaign was to get the Santa Cruz Police Department to stop sending officers to Oakland to police BLM demonstrators, who were experiencing disproportionate violence at the hands of the Oakland Police Department (OPD). The Santa Cruz Police Department (SCPD) was treating local Santa Cruz protestors with dignity and restraint, which it publicly patted itself on the back for. SCPD, and then Chief of Police Andy Mills, were strong public proponents of the principles of community policing and anti-racism. However, SCPD sent officers to OPD via the system of mutual aid, a contradiction to community policing, to the values undergirding respecting the First Amendment protest rights of local demonstrators and to community policing which posits that police serving a community should be proportionally ethnically similar to the community they police. This was brought to my attention via social media intelligence of SCPD officers pictured in Oakland during BLM protests. I publicized the findings, authored and disseminated an online petition garnering over 10 thousand signatures (I used the emails from this petition to disseminate campaign information), brought the initiative to in-person demonstrations, hosted a die-in outside the SC police department, talked to the mayor and Chief Mills, organized email and city council call-in campaigning for residents, and digitally organized around the initiative on my personal Instagram. The initiative remained faceless, I was an invisible instigator of voicing residents' discontent with the hypocritical policy and the initiative gained local media traction and sufficiently embarrassed Chief Mills (who is a decent guy and I think came to understand why this practice was wrong). The initiative was supported by a number of local activists and organizers, without whom I could not have garnered attention to the issue. SCPD stopped sending officers to Oakland because of the stink I made for them with the campaign.
The Petition I authored and distributed that garnered over 10,000 signatures and used as a mean to distribute campaign updates and drive resident engagement.
I was touched to see that folks made signs in reference to the initiative and brought them to local protests. I stopped feeling like a lone political analyst in my room, and felt like someone contributing to something real after seeing this.
The die-in I participated in/helped organize, during a night of contentious protest. Covered by the SC Sentinel, mentioning the initiative.
When I had the idea for this campaign, and saw how driven to act in solidarity for Black lives my community was, I knew that I wanted try and make non-violent direct action and group chanting a part of the campaign. Working for Drew Glover, a teacher of Kingian nonviolent direct action theory, I learned about the power of chants and music in social movements. I explicitly named the initiative a phrase that could be chanted by a crowd while clearly conveying the goal of the initiative. This video is some of that chanting that took place outside the Santa Cruz Police Department during a night of nonviolent, contentious protest. Organizing people is hard work, shared music and chanting is a tried and true tool for boosting movement cohesion that I highly recommend organizers utilize.
Long after the campaign, I scraped and analyzed the transcripts from the City Council public comment to assess the effectiveness of the call-in campaign (launched June 7th) with some very simple NLP and a vizzer. I used the count of the word "name" as a proxy to get the number of callers and the word "Oakland" as a proxy for initiative mentions; and compare these counts with the pre-initiative city council meeting public comment. Key takeaway: tons of callers calling in and talking about policing after George Floyd's homicide and a little less than ten callers mentioning the initiative explicitly.