Yet another camera with a photographer and a blog

Wednesday night I was a member of the security crew for another rally and march in response to the shooting of Oscar Grant III by a (now former) Bart police officer. It was a roller coaster of an evening, and an experience. It has left me with more questions and thinking than answers. It was not something I would call ‘fun’, and falls into the realm of ‘not something I would want to do again’ while at the same time falling into ‘something I would do again, if a call for help went out’, if that makes sense.

I suppose I should back up a little bit here, and fill in how I got to this point. For me, this all started on New Year’s Eve, with the shooting of Oscar Grant. We were hosting a NYE party that night, and we had someone come back from the Bart station, asking us for a place to crash for the night because something had happened there, and the station had been closed, and he heard screaming and crying and there were police. (Later, I heard from two other friends who had been there a few minutes earlier, and caught cabs to elsewhere. I believe we had other friends who had gone home through that bart station a few minutes before things happened).

Fast forward a week from there, and I come home to the fruitvale bart station from being in the city, and walk into the middle of a rally being held to protest the shooting. I had my camera with me and started taking pictures of the event. Things dispersed from there, and I wandered home, not realizing that a large portion of the crowd had moved into downtown oakland. At home, I watched the news (multiple live feeds simultaneously), as they marched on city hall, were addressed by Dellums, and then as groups of people broke off and started causing the problems that much of the rest of the country read about last thursday morning.

Much of the coverage angered me, because they were focusing on the rioting, not the peaceful (if angry) rally that had occurred before hand. This, among other things, fed a desire to be at future events, to photograph them, to document them in their entirety, the good and the bad. That was re-inforced by a handful of people who heard about either the shooting and/or the rally itself from my photos/writeups on them, and not the main stream media. It left me feeling that if I documented what I saw, even if it only informed a few people, there was some good coming out of that.

A conversation the next day went into what had gone wrong with the rally. One of the people involved in the conversation mentioned that at rallies they had organized/were involved with, they provided their own security to deal with problematic people before the problems exploded (I have some more thoughts on this whole dynamic that are probably better saved for a different post).

That got me thinking about the next rally that CAPE was organizing. I thought to myself, I know of multiple groups of people who do security type things. Maybe not directly, but I know people who know them. I wonder if I could track some combination of them down, and ask them to help out for future events. My assumption was that CAPE themselves would be thinking about security for future events as well, but that more bodies/experience couldn’t ever hurt.

For a variety of reasons, everything didn’t come together for me (contact information on either side, names, etc…) until about 48 hours before the next rally, the one this past wednesday. I sent out emails to people, and I also reached out to CAPE, asking them if they’d be interested in me contacting the people I had contact info for. I also introduced myself to them, and my interest in photographing future events. I also, because I do these things, offered up server space/domain services for them.

They told me about an organizing/security training meeting for the rally. I decided to go to this, both to meet people, and to gather information to pass along to people that I was still hoping to grab for security. I sat in on the security meeting, listening to the training, listening to the questions and answers, asking my own questions. I went into the meeting planning on saying something like “Hi, i’m here to get information for other people I hope will help out, my focus at the event will be photographing.”

As the meeting went on, however, it became clear to me that photographing this event was going to be the wrong contribution for me to make. They needed people on security, badly. Now, I have no illusions about my security background. I’ve done the “stand around” kind of security for random concert/event things in the past – where people are generally well behaved to begin with. I knew I would be a body for them, I also knew that my individual contribution to them would be minimal. However, for me, this was a case where the sum was greater than the parts. On some level, I felt that the more people who were there, the more visible they were, the lower the odds were of shit going down badly.

So, I volunteered. I was assigned a team, given the name of my team leader and a time to show up. I offered to grab a few grms radios to contribute – as they didn’t have enough radios to go around to all the security team leads. The ‘training’ was basic. It mostly focused on things like our chain of command (you see something – tell your team leader, who will have a radio, who will get the professionals). It was some basics of de-escalating a situation. It was driving home the point that there were going to be groups of people there who were professional security, people who did this for a living, and that those were the people who would handle the most direct issues/engagements with people.

It was also made clear that our focus was on protecting the people attending the event: from people trying to cause trouble, from accidents, and from the police. We would be containing flash points before they turned into waves going through the entire crowd. We would be trying to calm things down before the police were given a reason to go in and take care of things in their own, erm, ‘fashion’.

Some of my questions focused on the “after the event”. I was curious how we would get people to head home afterwards, without dumping potentially thousands of people into the street/transit system at once. My questions here turned out to be more prescient than i would have ever expected.

After the meeting we broke out, and I headed home. Yulia guessed fairly quickly before I said much of anything that I ended up volunteering for security. I made some light jokes about it, emailed my boss to let him know i was leaving work early the following day, and we crashed out for the night. Thursday morning, I did my usual work stuff, and started getting some anxiety about the coming night. Nothing I could put my finger on, I think just some generalized concern that maybe I put myself in over my head. I saw the news about the Bart officer being arrested, and felt a sense of relief, hoping that would at least calm some tempers.

I went out to radio shack, grabbed some radios, parked the car, and headed to the bart station to go up to 12th street and on to the rally.

(continued in the next post – hopefully later today)