Public Comment

Here’s an outline of the incident. It happened on Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019. There’s a demonstration on Telegraph Ave. for preserving People’s Park. People are in the street, making their case because they are being driven out of the park. A car comes up behind them, and can’t get through. As one commentator says, “The protesters themselves report that the car was not passively behind the march, but was in fact menacing the march in an attempt to drive through.”

In other words, the driver threatens them with the car. Perhaps he is also honking his horn, or yelling at them to get out of his way. Whatever he is doing, it is far from support, and far from being neutral. They turn on him, beat on the car (he is that close to them), and throw stuff at it. He gets pissed, decides to drive around them, show them that they have no business disrupting his world with their damn politics. He drives around them at Durant, runs up onto the curb and sidewalk at Noah’s Bagels, and as he drives down the sidewalk, runs over the legs of a blind homeless black man who is sitting against the wall with his legs out in front of him. The driver then just drives off.

How many crimes were committed here? With respect to a person on foot (aka pedestrian), a car is a lethal weapon. To threaten a person on foot, in the street, on the sidewalk, anywhere, with a car is to threaten them with a lethal weapon. To intentionally hit and kill a person with a car is murder. To intentionally hit and not kill a person on the street or sidewalk is attempted murder. That is the existentiality of it. With respect to a car, a human is unarmed. These “park protectors” are only carrying signs, and food, and their desire to count in this society. Against that desire to count, which goes on foot in order to be seen as human, the machine called a car is nothing but a lethal weapon. 

To drive over a sidewalk to show your scorn for people who are demonstrating a political problem they are having with the powers that be (aka “seeking redress of grievances”) is to commit road rage. To leave the scene, even though the driver says he did not know he had hit anyone, is to commit hit-and-run. But then again, a homeless black man is an entity to which many white drivers are themselves blind. Regardless of this driver’s contempt for the people on the street, to drive on a sidewalk is reckless endangerment. 

All this because people are being thrown out of a park. Leave the park alone, and you won’t find the people who live there marching down any streets. 

Okay, how many felonies are there in that story? Well, it depands on how many individuals the driver threatened with his car when he pushed his car into the group of marches on the street, and which got them so mad that they retaliated. Lets say he threatened two, as a liberal estimate. I count seven felonies. 

You know how many crimes the cops count in their report on this incident? The police released a report the next day which got forwarded through the Mayor’s office. In it, the cops list two or three counts of vandalism and damage to the car. That’s all. Their attention does not go beyond the issue of property. Unless it’s the property of the homeless, in which case they will confiscate it. 

The police report says, “According to the driver, at least two or three people from the group turned towards him unprovoked and began hitting his car.” If they could start hitting the car by turning toward it, then the car was already in the midst of the demo. For the car to be doing that is itself a provocation. But for the cops, the entire incident was an attack on the car. For them, the driver was the victim, and the demonstrators were the perps. For the cops, the man with the assault rifle is the victim, and the people he points it at are the assailants. Well, that fits. When a cop shoots a person in the back because he’s walking away, doesn’t he then say it was self-defense? 

The cops weren’t there, however. They made their story up from video security footage and talking to only one side, namely, the driver. They didn’t get to interview any demonstrators because they weren’t there. Other cops talked to other witnesses who only reported attacks on the car (according to the police reports that this report reported). They apparently discounted what the demonstrators might have had to say, or what witnesses might have said about what led up to the attack on the car. 

Lets look at this idea of the incident being unprovoked. This is California. There are laws here that give pedestrians right of way. To fail to yield right of way to a pedestrian in a cross walk is a moving violation. That’s the law. There are also ethical concerns that accompany that law. A driver must give pedestrians the right of way even if they are not in a crosswalk because the driver has a lethal weapon in his hands. If a pedestrian is in the street, even in a lane, humane ethics say you don’t try to knock him out of the way with your car in order to get by. 

When you encounter a demonstration, you also give it right of way, as a question of political ethics. As a march goes through an intersection, cars on the cross street have to wait for the march to go by. You know why? Two reasons (besides the legal ones). The first is that they are human. The second is that, when people have to get out on the street to make a point, or just to let the world know that they exist, it is because they have already exhausted other means of gaining that recognition, other means of expressing their needs or concerns, or of simply participating in a dialogue. After they petition and are ignored, after negotiations have broken down in threats and ultimatims, after the urgent request that power listen and hear what “the people” are saying, and the request encounters silence, then people organize and get out on the street. The People’s Park issue has been around 45 years, and this latest “to do” about it has been going on for a couple of those years. So after all else fails, and the powers that be start cutting down trees, people get out on the street. 

These demonstrators have to be respected. That is, unless you secretly dream of concentration camps for dissidents. They are people with a purpose, they have a community, they have a certain unity of activity in the world, and they are not out to injure or disparage other people. They are not just spectators on their own destiny, however. They are trying to live life in a society that consciously and intentionally abjures any responsibility for them. Let rents go up, if people can’t keep up, to hell with them. If emergency rooms close and people get hurt or sick, to hell with them. If factories close and move to other parts of the world, and people can’t find jobs, to hell with them. Right? Isn’t that the trajectory of this society today, and for the last 30 years? Why do you think a government shutdown could go on as long as it has? 

So this driver, trying to use the street to get somewhere, decides he has priority over these dissidents, and the cops decide that they will agree with him. To hell with the law. 

Do you think the City Council will demand that the driver be charged? Or will it toady to the police? It should have been actively seeking an equitable outcome to the People’s Park issue – if for no other reason than that the people who live in that park (aka live in the park) are Berkeley residents. But don’t hold your breath. And “hit-and-run” is becoming a little too routine. Why would that be?