Public Comment

A crowd showed up at City Council on October 2, 2023. It was a new crowd, a young crowd, full of people who hadn’t been there before. And many of them appeared to be new to council’s procedures. There were also a few older activists, mostly to add local color, and to be reminders of a rich and energetic past. Energy was high for this one because the consternation, the outrage, was also high. Indeed, when a councilmember tried to placate the crowd by welcoming it as beautiful and joyful, he was boo’ed down for being patronizing. The crowd wasn’t joyful. It was incensed. 

What had happened? These days, only an abuse of police power will draw that kind of crowd to this alleged apex of local city politics. After all, the murder of George Floyd and Bryonna Taylor shut down cities across the nation for four months. What was the issue? 

Was it the closing of a “Chess Club” that had been in existence on a broad open unused corner of the city for two years? Was that the issue? That corner, some four hundred square feet of unused space, had once been the apron to the front door of a bookstore, right there on Telegraph Ave. It was a famous bookstore, host to some of the more popular readings on the Berkeley scene. It had been driven out by the owner of the bookstore himself. He made the fatal mistake of accusing the homeless who hung around that block of being fascist because they were obstructing business 

Given the number of businesses closed down by the government’s policy over Covid, that name would be reasonable in the government’s case as well. Gone were the main café hangouts of the people. Gone. 

But this chess club, which met in the open, under blue summer skies, a simple testimony to the inspiration of chess lovers, had had maybe ten chess tables set up on the corner of Telegraph and Haste St., with sets all ready for those sportive enough to take their own combativity with a grain of salt, and try a new opening. You can always tell the young oficionados by their insouciance at inventing the most impressive and imaginative experimental openings. With nothing to lose and nothing to gain but a reputation, those guys pull out all the stops. It is not only acceptable; it is valued and respected. Chess is a game of respect. To close this Chess Club is to close down respect for people and for community. That was something a number of speakers at the City Council said, loud and clear. 

“What were we supposed to do with the Chess Club,” a councilperson asked naively. Among the hoots that the question elicited, someone said, “Just leave it alone.” 

So what was the issue? Was it police abuse? There was plenty of question about that. The owner of the building shut the Club down Saturday night, all by himself (with some friends.). Why all of a sudden did he decide to shut the Club down, after honoring it with passivity for two years? No warning, no due process. He just did it. It wasn’t even the cops who shut it down. They stepped in after it was down and brutalized the guy who was the Club’s chair – put him in the hospital, gave him a concussion, twisted his arms enough to get the attention of the press, with videos going viral. He was arrested without due process, and brutalized. 

Those two aspects are inseparable; shutting down the Club and brutalizing its chairman. A hundred people showed up at City Council because shutting down the Chess Club was associated with police brutality. And it happened again on Thursday, Oct. 5, five days after the first incidence of brutality. A guy at the club (which had been set up again) was called by name from a passing car. He ran to his own car, got in it, and found himself being dragged from the car by three cops who had converged on him, as if waiting. Within seconds, 7 more cop cars appeared on the scene, stopping traffic and harassing people gathered at the Club. The cops didn’t try to talk to this guy, they gave him an order. When he refused, they punished him right there on the street for his “refusal of a direct order,” as if he was a grunt in the infantry being given orders by a sargeant. 

Why did the owner of the building, whose front door apron had been used as a place to play chess and to convene a chess community, suddenly decide, after two years, to close it down. It was the city. And they did it without due process. 

The City Council of Berkeley, or the City Manager of Berkeley, or the two of them patting each other on the back and working together, decided they were going to close down the Club. But you can’t just do that on Telegraph Ave. And you can’t just do that one block from People’s Park. You have to get someone else to do the dirty work for you, a proxy to stand in and make it look legit (like the US had done, using NATO and the Ukraine as its proxy for attacking Russia). The government of Berkeley, the City Council and the City Manager, decided they wanted that Chess Club out of there. So they put pressure on the building’s owner. The city fined him $500 a day as long as the Chess Club was there. And that went on for 100 days. You do the math. 

So the owner got sick and tired of that, and evicted the Club (without due process) from the veranda of his unused building. 

Why did the city suddenly decide it didn’t want the Club to stay in existence? They have their formulaic reason: people complained, sidewalks were blocked, there were drugs on the scene, there were people just hanging out (vagrants), and … (and in a whisper) many of them were black. Oh yeah! 

When the cops say they get complaints, it is just hype. The cops know what they want to do, but looks for an excuse to just go to the City Manager, who can then make her own decision as to how to put the onus on the City Council. The whole thing is the workings of a sick piece of machinery. The council and the manager are a sodden group of people who love to play cop. They’re the ones who did it. 

They did it in a way that allowed them to say “we didn’t do anything, the owner did it.” The cops can say, “we didn’t do anything, the chess players did it.” And so on. And now, there’s a rumor that the city wanted the chess club closed because it expressed support for People’s Park. If that’s true, then it is cause for impeachment, for suppressing a political position, for acting in an overtly anti-democratic fashion. If that is true, it means that this city has definitely become a police state, with the City Council playing the role of police command, and squelching whatever holds a different opinion. 

But we all know what is missing from those excuses and rationalizations. It is the concept of autonomy. The cops, the "elected" officials, the political managers, none of them can stand the idea of the people being autonomous, or doing something on their own. It violates their corporate souls to their utmost depth. Corporations can’t stand autonomy; they have to be in control. That is what the US has against Cuba. It has been uncompromising about its sovereignty. It’s not a dictatorship; one of the first things the revolution did in 1960 was arm the people. You can’t dictate to an armed people; they will shoot you. That was what defeated the Bay of Pigs invasion. And now, the City Council of Berkeley wants to get in on the corporate act by suppressing the autonomy of a bunch of chess players. It’s what they have had against People’s Park all along. 

And that was another theme the crowd focused on, the term "community" as it was done by people rather than to them. Again and again, speakers squeezing their outraged meanings into their minute of "input," that the city of Berkeley had committed the cardinal sin of demolishing an autonomous and organized (from the bottom, not the top) and intelligent community of people. 

Do you think the cops or the councilmembers can live with that kind of sovereignty? Why do you think they put up all those surveillance cameras around town? Do you think that is to curtail crime? Don’t buy the hype. It’s you they are interested in. Why do you think the city has contracted to get Automated License Plate Readers to put on trees and cop cars? Do you think that is going to curtail crime? Read a few of the BPD crime reports, and then try to convince yourself that what shows up on arrest records in Berkeley is anything but PTSD or economic stress or emotional loneliness. The next time you see a crowd of cops handcuffing a black person (young or old, employed or homeless), ask yourself about that crime wave they keep talking about. 

Well, the federal government also talks about a crime wave (at the national level???). They do it for the same reason as the local cops, to distract from the outrage at cop killings that led to months of city-stopping demonstrations during the summer of 2020. 

And when the city closed down the homeless encampments, they used provocateurs and planted garbage (like the cops plant drugs on people in order to arrest them). It is finally coming out in public disquisitions that the homeless are better off in encampments that can give them democratic care for each other rather than living alone in a room somewhere (pace: Liza Doolittle). 

And chess is a meeting of minds, something for which the city can only express contempt. So it gives someone (a proxy) an excuse to trash the boards and “clean up” the mess made by people hanging out. n 

The police claim they received complaints, and then they violate the law and their oath of office by withholding due process (handcuffing, beating, etc.). Who would believe them? Some of them kill – the national average is now 1000 a year, killed by the police in the US, mostly people of color. Nothing happens to them, meaning the entire industry is in on it. The cop who killed Sean Monterrosa in 2020 in Vallejo just got his job back, with back pay, even though the coroner’s report says Monterrosa was shot in the back of the head. 

The democratic way to handle this stuff is to be out in the open. Let the complaints that the cops say they get be made public, so that they can be discussed by people from both sides, pro and contra. A communal or dialogical resolution could then be made to it. And that way, we would know that those complaints were real, and not the latest form of planting evidence on people. That way, we could all come up with ideas and resolutions to problems that don’t involve men with guns. Chess players, for instance, would have much better ideas about how to navigate out of a situation than a cop trained to impose their military “obedience paradigm” on people, with all the despotics that go with it.