top
San Francisco
San Francisco
Indybay
Indybay
Indybay
Regions
Indybay Regions North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area North Coast Central Valley North Bay East Bay South Bay San Francisco Peninsula Santa Cruz IMC - Independent Media Center for the Monterey Bay Area California United States International Americas Haiti Iraq Palestine Afghanistan
Topics
Newswire
Features
From the Open-Publishing Calendar
From the Open-Publishing Newswire
Indybay Feature

Mission Tenants at Station 40 Battle Eviction as SFPD Murders Amilcar Perez-Lopez

by FireWorks
On February 26th, San Francisco Police gunned down Amilcar Perez-Lopez, a 21 year-old man who had just gotten off work. Police claim that Amilcar was wielding a knife and lunged at them, forcing them to shoot him in the street. Neighbors and witnesses claim a much different version of events. They claim that police fired into near-by homes and kept residents inside while they concocted a story to deliver to the media. Over the next several days, people took to the streets and faced down police as they attempted to white-wash their latest murder, just as they did to Alex Nieto. At the same time, residents at Station 40, a radical community space and home to many tenants, announced that they were fighting their eviction. Drawing connections between the development of condos and the ongoing police violence throughout the city, the residents of Station 40 called on others to join them in their fight "to maintain, defend, and build collective, autonomous, and working-class space in this neighborhood."
mission.jpg
On Thursday, February 26th, San Francisco police officers shot and killed Amilcar Perez-Lopez, a 21-year old man and Mission resident. While police describe Amilcar as a knife-wielding man that was a danger to police and was attempting to steal a bicycle, other residents widely dispute this claim. According to an article in Mission Local, “his friends and neighbors said…[he was a] hardworking Guatemalan immigrant who was trying to get his cell phone back from the man police said he was trying to rob.” The article goes onto state “Neighbors Bill Simpich and Florencia Rojo had been speaking to witnesses and friends since Thursday’s shooting. “None of the witnesses interviewed to date support the police claim that Amilcar ever threatened to steal the bicyclist’s bike,” Simpich said.”

Making matters even more tragic, is that Amilcar and his room-mates – just like so many other Mission residents, are currently under threat of eviction from their home. On the evening of his death, Perez-Lopez was involved in an altercation, according to neighbors, after Perez-Lopez gave his phone to a friend who then refused to give it back. A fight ensued and police then arrived, later claiming that Perez-Lopez “slashed at them” with a knife. Police then shot and killed the 21 year-old, leaving his body on the street while the made neighbors stay in their homes while they worked on their story for the press. Police bullets sprayed throughout the neighborhood, hitting neighbors’ doors.

Just like in the killings of Alex Nieto, the off-duty security guard and community college student, the actual facts of what happened to Amilcar are much different than the lies that the police put out in the press. Police always murder people twice, first through tasers, guns, and choke-holds – then in the media owned by the rich and powerful.

As soon as Perez-Lopez’s body hit the ground, police began work to cover themselves and hide their fault in the murder. They portrayed Amilcar as a threat to the community and to themselves – someone that deserved to die. For most long-term Mission residents, largely working-class and of color, the actions by the police signal only another act of war against the broader population that the police see as an enemy. After all, who is it but the police who comes to evict you? To stop you from picketing your landlord, or occupying a vacant home? The police work for the rich.

Police harassment of the community, namely black and brown residents, is nothing new – and stems from the violent colonization, genocide, and displacement of the region’s original inhabitants, the Ohlone people. In the current period, from police targeting low-riders, to the recent beating of young black men walking the streets of the Mission, the police are an occupying army that is designed to keep down the poor and oppressed population.

While these actions are egregious to many, to the newer, more upscale residents that are flocking to the neighborhood, the actions by the police make perfect sense: they keep them safe from the rabble. In an article on Mission Local, Mission tech workers shared their low opinion of the lives of those destroyed by police violence. “It doesn't give me pause at all. It only concerns you if you are a gang member,” said Rob Villanueva, a graphic designer and photographer who lives on Valencia.”

Two nights after police murdered Amilcar, calls began circulating on social media calling for a march against police violence at the spot near where Amilcar was gunned down. Despite a huge police presence on the streets that would have contained a gathering of over 100 people, around 30 people took to the streets, holding banners and chanting against the police. Those taking to the streets drew connections between gentrification and the recent police killings of Alex Nieto, O’Shaine Evans, and Matthew Hoffman.

There is a rich history in the Mission District, and in other working-class neighborhoods, of such a militant responses to police killings, which often have lead to riots, the looting of businesses, and direct clashes with the police. In recent years, this resistance has broken out in the wake of the police murders of Kenneth Harding, Jr. in 2011, the BART police killing of Charles Hill, a homeless man in 2011, as well as various police shootings in 2012 in the Mission. In all of these cases, people took to the streets attacking banks, yuppie businesses, and police property.

Only two days after the march, residents at the long running collective home and radical event space, Station 40, formed over 11 years ago, announced that they would be fighting their eviction by their landlords. Station 40 is located at 16th and Mission and their landlords own most of the adjacent buildings. The connection between the near-by development of a huge condo project by Maximus, LLC, and their threat of eviction is not lost on the residents at the space. By evicting tenants that have given them literally millions of dollars over the years and then selling the building to developers, the landlords stand to make massive amounts of money.

According to a statement made by Station 40 members read at a press conference at the 16th and Mission BART Plaza:

About a week ago, we received eviction papers (an unlawful detainer) from our landlords, Ahuva, Emanuel, and Barak Jolish. Their legal documents aim to displace the dozen of us tenants from our affordable, eleven-year-old home, Station 40, located at 3030B 16th Street. It is no coincidence that Station 40 is being evicted on the same intersection as the hotly contested proposed development by Maximus Real Estate Partners of a 350-unit luxury apartment building in what is a predominantly working-class neighborhood.

They go on to draw a connection between racist police violence in the neighborhood and their own eviction:

Tragically we’ve seen developers like Maximus Real Estate Partners and their shadowy peons from the “Clean Up the Plaza” campaign look at the community at 16th and Mission as nothing more than a barrier to their riches. In 2013, we started to see Clean Up the Plaza placards everywhere. This was strange since no one seemed to know who was behind the campaign or what its agenda was. It soon became clear when Maximus announced its intention to build a 350-unit luxury apartment building that would take out a whole corner of businesses, a plaza used by hundreds of poor—mostly black and Latino people—and cast an ominous shadow over the playground of nearby Marshall Elementary.

It turns out that one of the political consultants for Maximus, Jack Davis, is one of the main organizers of the Clean Up the Plaza scheme. Then the police occupation of the plaza began. Day and night, SFPD menaced over those who kick it in the plaza, such as immigrants, SRO residents and people without homes, addicts, working people, multigenerational families, and outcasts of all stripes. We watched from our windows across the street in horror as more and more of these people were targeted, criminalized, and disappeared. Everyday people, the very people who make up the heart and soul of San Francisco cannot compete with this apparatus that is set up to work against them. The property “rights” of millionaires trump the basic needs of the rest of us to simply live.

Then there’s the police state. Not only will the police come and literally force you from your home if you refuse to leave, but they also contribute to the project of gentrification by disappearing working-class and poor black and brown residents. In a city of 6 percent black residents (in 1980 it was 13 percent), the SF County Jail is made up of 56 percent black prisoners. To paint the picture in even more stark terms, in the last year SFPD has murdered Alex Nieto, O’Shaine Evans, Matthew Hoffman, and just days ago, Amilcar Perez-Lopez. These men, three men of color, and Hoffman, a poor man struggling with his mental health, represent the demographics of the folks who are being lost right now in San Francisco.

We gotta say it: the phenomena of rampant police murders, the banishment of thousands of longtime residents from city centers, all those forced to live on the streets, and the increasing number of poor people getting warehoused in jails and prisons—2.5 million people nationwide—signals that our society condones state-sponsored ethnic cleansing that targets black and brown residents. All this is happening while mysterious fires are destroying the homes of working-class people throughout the Mission District, leaving the next-door condos completely intact, and the city moves on plans to build an even bigger jail to replace the one at 850 Bryant. We know that the eviction of our space is a stepping-stone toward the eviction and demolition of this entire block. As of yet, the Jolish family has made no offer that we could accept and still hold our heads high. We want to maintain, defend, and build collective, autonomous, and working-class space in this neighborhood. We cannot accept any offers that do not make that possible. Even if we were made such an offer, we do not conceive of winning in solely individual terms. The choice to stay and fight is also a choice to fight for this neighborhood as a whole. We want to stay, but we also want everyone else to stay as well.

The fight by the Mission residents at Station 40 is only the latest battle in San Francisco by residents to stay in their homes as property values drive tenants by the thousands out of the city. Using a variety of means, ranging from arson to the Ellis Act, throughout the decades those that own property have managed to both legally and illegally drive out working-class and families of color from their homes while raking in billions in profits.

The constant boom and bust cycles of capitalism show the inherent crisis built within it, that ultimately as a system offers nothing for those excluded and exploited by it but continued poverty and erasure from our homes. Politics, be it in the halls of power or by attempts from activists to “speak truth” to it, is a smoke screen to the real antagonisms at play within a society as deeply divided as ours only lines of race, power, and class.

The ongoing harassment of people in public plazas, homeless people in parks, as well as the rampant abuse and murder by San Francisco Police only points to a close relationship between the people that run the city, those that own property, and the pigs that protect them. Without the violence of the State; the police, the courts, and the jails – this system wouldn't be able to function.

Later on in the night of March 2nd, rage again boiled over at the police, who attempted to host a public meeting about the police shooting and explain the events to the public. Such as after the murders of Alex Nieto and Kenneth Harding, Jr., police have used these community forums as a means to try and diffuse anger and start a dialog within it. Often, this gives people the feeling that police “are listening” to their concerns, but of course, nothing changes.

This mirrors the way in which nationally Obama responded to the Ferguson revolt, calling for body cameras and better relations between the police and communities that they harass and murder. In these forums, police simply re-tell their version of the events to the neighborhood, which always disputes the claims of the police and grows angry. The meeting ends and people go home, frustrated as ever and things return to normal.

We have to set fire to this normalcy; this lie of social peace. We have to stop the police from continuing to have these meetings in our neighborhoods when they murder someone. We can’t allow them to spread lies about our friends and neighbors who they are killing. Block the doors, drive them out. We won’t get anything out of a dialog with them. We need to shut these meetings down and start fighting the police directly.

We can also take a cue from the Black Panthers and Brown Berets who used CopWatch programs to stop the police from harassing and brutalizing people in working-class communities of color. By arming themselves and observing the police, these groups showed a possible consequence to continued brutality. In Oakland, deaths while in police custody dropped. This isn’t because the police “did their jobs better,” it was because often police would let people go other than risk and engagement with an armed group of revolutionaries. The Panthers were successful because they stopped the police from doing their jobs – not because they forced them to do it better. CopWatch groups continue this tradition, get involved with Mission Copwatch today!

Along with direct support of those facing eviction, from showing up to picket landlords to standing in front of the doors to keep the pigs out, we call on everyone to attend the March 4th action in San Francisco. This protest intends to march on Maximus during their public meeting regarding the construction of the condo development at 16th and Mission. While we agree with the anger behind the event, the protest is planned to simply ask for more “affordable housing” in these developments, as opposed to trying to stop them from being carried out in the first place. This will get us no where. We do not want “market-rate” rentals at the bottom of new condo developments; people want to stay in their homes.

If we want to win, we have to act outside the law and the market. We have to occupy buildings, go on rent strike, and fight the police. We have to blockade the homes of those facing eviction and stop the construction of condos. At every turn, we’ll come up against the police and the violence that they use to keep poor, oppressed, and working-people down. We have to find the power that exists within all of us to stand up and hit back. This is why instead of simply asking that parts of their plan be changed, we call on everyone to stop this meeting from taking place! Shut it down!
Add Your Comments
Listed below are the latest comments about this post.
These comments are submitted anonymously by website visitors.
TITLE
AUTHOR
DATE
ntuit
Wed, Mar 4, 2015 10:21AM
We are 100% volunteer and depend on your participation to sustain our efforts!

Donate

$110.00 donated
in the past month

Get Involved

If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.

Publish

Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.

IMC Network