SFPD gets their canopies

Shortly before midnight last night, 50 SFPD officers marched into the Occupy SF encampment. The officers aggressively removed the camp's two canopies. Then, they trashed and seized the belongings and supplies of the camp. The 150 camp members and supporters attempted to block the streets to prevent the DPW trucks filled with their belongings from driving away.
A number of participants tried asking the SFPD to end this intimidation and asking the truck drivers to show their support. Instead they were met with swinging batons and were nearly run over as the first truck filled with supplies was leaving. Protesters who laid down in the street to block the police vans from leaving with those arrested were beaten with nightsticks and thrown to the curbs.
The results of the night were five arrests, one injury, one serious injury, and a vivid reminder of who's side the police stand on.
The SFPD tore-down and trashed many of the personal belongings of the camp. They need our support to rebuild. Go to occupysf.com for a list of items required.

Join today's General Assembly meeting at 6pm at Justin Hermann Plaza (Embarcadero BART Station) to show your solidarity.

SFPD tries to shoot fleeing suspect in the back, accidentally shoots two bystanders

Early this morning, cops in San Francisco were chasing a "wanted" suspect and shot at him as he fled. They missed the suspect, but shot two innocent bystanders instead. The suspect did not shoot at the police as he ran away from them, begging the question: why were they trying to kill him in the first place?

SFPD manipulating youtube video footage?

In the photo above, courtesy of Race for the Times, it appears as though the "shiny object" in the infamous youtube video slowly morphed over time into a "shiny gun-looking object" to conveniently coincide with SFPD claims that Kenneth Harding had a gun and fired at the police officers who shot the teenager in the back while he ran away from them after being approached about a $2 transit pass.
I witnessed this morphing first hand and in real life. There's actually a discussion that took place online last Monday that can prove that. At the start of the conversation, I was adamant that there is no gun in the video. Later that afternoon, I conceded that the object looked more gun-like after I had rewatched the video on another computer, and I just assumed that the resolution must have been better. Maybe that was the case, maybe it wasn't. The pic in the upper right above does seem to have better resolution than the previous two, but I do find it odd that someone would feel compelled to repost a video with better resolution.
I do have to disagree with the bottom two screen grabs above though. That is the object picked up by the "man in the hoodie" allegedly apprehended by SFPD on Saturday night, but who is apparently still on the loose with that flat rectangular object seen in the video. That is not the "same object" as the top three screen grabs above. The morphing "shiny gun-looking object" is actually several yards further away from where Harding lay dying, but the fact does still remain that it slowly morphed into a gun over the course of time.
What is noteworthy about the bottom two screen grabs though is that a police officer is caught standing just a few feet away from the object when the "man in the hoodie" picks it up. The cop is facing the object, and sees the "man in the hoodie" pick it up, and does not react in any way. Since the cop is facing the object, which is likely a cell phone, he is also facing the "shiny gun-looking object" which lays just a few yards further away. I would hope that police officers would be trained to spot shiny handguns sitting on dirty sidewalks in broad daylight. Especially when they are trying to contain a crime scene. Especially when they're securing a crime scene that involved an officer involved shooting. In fact, if any of those police officers (and there were many as you can clearly see) believed that the victim had fired at officers, their first immediate concern would be to secure the weapon for their own safety, as well as for evidence.
But none of the officers are looking for a gun. Most of them actually turn their back on the victim and focus on crowd control immediately after the shooting. While they can't be blamed for that part, it is not believable at all that neither job training nor survival instinct would kick in at that point. The video evidence clearly proves that the majority of the officers on the scene do not consider Harding to be any kind of threat, and they are clearly not concerned with looking for any kind of weapon on the scene.
This case is not in any way helping with the already-suspect public image of the SFPD.

SFPD has already lost credibility with the public. Many have forgotten it was just three months ago SFPD was rocked with a scandal that involved dozens of felony cases being dropped because cops were shown on video behaving in unethical manners ranging from falsifying reports, illegally searching suspects, stealing from victims etc. What was shown was believed to be the tip of the iceberg and as a result a federal investigation was launched.

If that wasn’t enough, the scandal, which was the largest in the recent history of the San Francisco Police Department, wasn’t discovered and “policed” by the department itself. It was Jeff Adachi, the city’s public defender, and private defense lawyers who did the heavy lifting. Much of the scandal took place during the tenure of former Police Chief George Gascon, who now serves as district attorney. Talk about conflict of interest. At last count, a whopping 57 felony cases were dropped.
-SF Bay View

This case only continues the "consistent pattern of malfeasance" that Adachi uncovered.

Monday's community press conference in the Bayview

Since following the twists and turns of the ever-changing official version of the story being spewed out by the police and their lapdogs in the corporate media is crazy-making, here's a video of Monday's community press conference in the Bayview. You'll notice that even though people are really passionate about the subject and frustrated with the lack of truth coming out from the police department, listening to them actually makes you feel like the world makes sense.

The story gets crazier

Of all the lunacy going on all over the world right now, San Francisco might be the biggest drama queen of them all.
Specifically, I'm talking about the SFPD shooting of 19 year-old Kenneth Harding over a $2 transit pass, a case which saw three different bombshells dropped today.
1) Police Chief Greg Suhr, fresh from last night's "evacuation" from the Bayview Opera House, struck back by announcing that Harding was killed by a .38 caliber bullet that doesn't match either the guns issued to the cops or the gun allegedly found on a "parolee" identified by a youtube video.
And oh yeah, apparently, that guy either had a different shiny gun-looking object at home than the one he allegedly picks up in a youtube video that doesn't seem to exist on youtube, or the shiny gun-looking object lying on the ground in the youtube video that actually does exist on youtube is totally unrelated to the officer-involved shooting of Harding (as in the handgun was just lying on the sidewalk several yards from where a guy shot himself, and two different witnesses took both guns, and all the shell casings from the scene without several cops seeing anything). In either scenario, at least one gun is missing.
It is also possible that there were no guns other than those being fired by the police. Just because they weren't officially issued a .38 doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't shoot Kenneth Harding with a .38. Also, there were several other armed law enforcement officers on the scene, possibly UCSF security? One officer with a machine gun can be seen in video footage. What other kinds of guns were there?

2) Despite claims that officers had possession of Harding's gun 6 hours after the shooting, police are still seeking the "man in the hoodie." That also means that they raided some other random dude's house and arrested him and took his shiny .45-caliber gun for no reason other than to lie and say that they found Harding's gun (i.e. "proving" that Harding had shot at officers and deserved to be murdered).
However, if the "man in the hoodie" still has Harding's gun, then that means that the "man in the hoodie" really did pick it up off the sidewalk several yards in front of Harding's dying body. That means that Harding shot himself in the head, and then hurled the gun several yards forward. I'm no physicist, but I think that if a man shot himself with his right hand in the right side of his head while running at full speed forward, the gun he used wouldn't end up as far in front of him and as far to his left as the alleged shiny gun-looking object is in the now-infamous youtube video.
It is much more believable that Harding, assuming he had a gun and fired on officers in the first place, instinctively hurled the gun forward once he had already been shot...by the police.
Even if you take the "self-inflicted" wound theory seriously, you still have to be concerned that two cops fired 9 or so shots on a busy street, and only one hit the intended target in the leg.
That's the incompetent version of the wild wild west.
Over a $2 transit pass.
Eyewitnesses from the neighorhood claim that Harding was shot 5 times in the back of the neck. I am assuming that this includes people who were close enough to hear, and possibly see, the impact of multiple bullets, but that is only an assumption.

3) The woman in Seattle that Harding is being accused of mudering was not pregnant as previously reported. Hmmm. Who said she was pregnant, and why?

What the Bayview witnesses saw

Police in SF murder second man in 2 weeks

On Saturday July 16, at 4:40 pm. a 19 year-old man was shot 6 to 10 times by SFPD, and his lifeless body was left in plain view in a pool of blood. He had originally been detained by officers for not possessing a MUNI transfer pass. Police claim that he was armed and fired at them (while running away) before they murdered him, but it took almost 6 hours for them to produce the alleged handgun.
Another video was posted on youtube that claims to capture footage of the handgun, but it is far from conclusive regarding whether or not the shiny object is in fact a weapon. The person who took the footage doesn't appear interested in the alleged handgun while they are filming the video, so it's hard to know if they knew whether or not it was a gun when they were shooting the video, or if they decided that after hearing the police account and viewing their footage on a bigger screen.
The video does not focus on the alleged weapon, but it does catch a witness on the scene pointing to and picking up a shiny, flat, rectangular object (it looks like a cell phone) that had been lying on the ground several feet from where the alleged gun was allegedly lying. He does not point to any other objects lying on the ground, nor does he appear to be looking at anything else on the ground. The witness disappears off camera after that and is not seen again. Police have claimed that this footage proves that the man picked up the gun and hid it from police for 6 hours.

This killing happened 13 days after the lethal shooting of homeless man Charles Blair Hill on the Civic Center BART platform by BART police.

A press conference has been scheduled for noon by SF Education Not Incarceration, the Idriss Stelley Foundation & the SF Bayview Newspaper. It will take place at the corner of 3rd Street & Oakdale.

Interestingly, the SF Bay View website has been down all morning...