Plan B Forum

The public spectacle of Mario Woods's death, witnessed in person by a Muni bus carrying schoolchildren home from nearby Bret Harte Elementary and untold more across the country via social media, is the kind of graphic depiction of excessive police force that prompted uprisings and rioting in cities across the U.S.

But where black youth in Ferguson, Mo., Cleveland, New York City, Baltimore, and Los Angeles have taken to the streets en masse, the response in San Francisco has been more contained. The Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood may have been the crucible in which Alicia Garza, one of the three co-founders of Black Lives Matter, formed her politics, but with so few African Americans remaining in the city, it seems unlikely that San Francisco will become the next flashpoint in the developing narrative of racial uprising in U.S. urban cores.

A vigil and march last Thursday night in the Bayview was shepherded into the St. Paul of the Shipwreck Church for a community meeting that focused on organizing resistance. SFPD's town hall the next night drew a significant crowd, but calls from some protesters for the community to leave the meeting and march through the neighborhood went largely unheeded. On Monday, the local chapter of the NAACP called for another meeting, this time in the Fillmore, the one-time "Harlem of the West."

"People meeting and unifying and organizing is just as important as street protesting," says Biko Eisen-Martin, a teacher, poet, and activist who has been working with the Black Lives Matter Bay Area chapter since the night of Woods' death. "Even though we're down to 3.5 percent, we're a strong 3.5 percent."

Eisen-Martin and BLM have released a list of demands that includes charging the police officers who killed Woods with murder. They are uninterested in proposals by the SFPD and the mayor to amend police use-of-force policies by attempting yet again to equip San Francisco police with Tasers and increase de-escalation training for police.

"The police are aware of how to apprehend people peacefully," Eisen-Martin says, referencing instances where the SFPD has apprehended white suspects — like the man, also armed with a knife, who stole a police cruiser and drove it to Treasure Island in October — without killing them. "They just don't do that with black people. They shoot them like dogs. When police know that they can no longer shoot us with impunity, they won't do it anymore."

Joe Guy wrote:So what do you think about this?

Lord Jim wrote:Absolutely no excuse for all those shots... But one shot in the leg should have been enough to get the guy to drop the knife and no longer be a threat ...

Fafhrd wrote:

Joe Guy wrote:So what do you think about this?

Actua;;y. it would be nice if the person with the camera (or whatever that was) had a vocabulary beyond "fuckin".