Gavin Aronsen

Reporter

Gavin is a Mother Jones reporter in the DC bureau.

Full Bio | Get my RSS | Follow @garonsen

Gavin is an Iowa native, and covered the 2008 first-in-the-nation presidential caucuses for the Ames Tribune. He has also contributed to the Agence France-Presse, Daily Beast, Iowa Independent, Manhattan Media, and Village Voice.

Oakland Police Under a Cloud for Violent Occupy Crackdown

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Thu Oct. 27, 2011 8:49 PM PDT

As Iraq war vet Scott Olsen awaits surgery in an Oakland hospital, Mayor Jean Quan and the Oakland Police Department are under a cloud for their aggressive crackdown against #OccupyOakland on Tuesday night. Olsen was struck in the head by a projectile fired by police then in a violent clash with protesters. Precisely what struck him remains unclear, but the Guardian reported yesterday that a photographer documenting Olsen's injury went back to the scene and found a bean-bag round next to the bloody spot where Olsen went down.

Questions are swirling as to whether Oakland police used excessive force and violated the department's own crowd-control policy. The OPD denies that Oakland officers used flash-bang grenades and rubber bullets against the crowd, despite allegations to the contrary. (OPD spokespeople suggested that other law enforcement agencies may have used them.) Interim police chief Howard Jordan has admitted to the use of tear gas and bean bags, saying his officers used them as a defense against bottles, rocks, and paint thrown by angry protesters.

On Tuesday night I was at the intersection of 14th and Broadway, just outside Frank Ogawa Plaza, for several harrowing hours: I witnessed police officers firing projectiles indiscriminately into the crowd—not carefully targeting instigators, as OPD policy dictates. Freelance reporter Angela Bacca, who was also there, told me that upon arriving she "got tear gassed almost immediately," and then saw police fire bean-bag rounds at a woman carrying water to demonstrators to help them rinse tear gas out of their eyes and off their clothes. "They were just shooting at people trying to get them out of the way," Bacca said. "I definitely thought it was unprovoked." The OPD has not responded to requests from Mother Jones by phone and email for comment.

According to the OPD's policy, projectile bean bags can only be used narrowly and not for general crowd control:

Less lethal specialty impact weapons that are designed to be direct fired at a specific target ("Direct Fired SIM") including but not limited to flexible batons ("bean bags"), shall not be used for crowd management, crowd control or crowd dispersal during demonstrations or crowd events. (PDF)

The OPD policy spells out three specific circumstances in which bean bags can be fired on people: "against a specific individual who is engaging in conduct that poses an immediate threat of loss of life or serious bodily injury to themselves, officers or the general public when other means of arrest are unsafe," or "who is engaging in substantial destruction of property which creates an imminent risk to the lives or safety of other persons," and only "when the individual can be targeted without endangering other crowd members or bystanders."

TKTK: Schuyler Erle/Twitter A shot-filled bean-bag round held by a protester at Frank Ogawa Plaza Tuesday night. Schuyler Erle/TwitterThis isn't the first time the Oakland Police Department has been accused of excessive force. After demonstrators filled the streets of downtown Oakland in June to protest the death of Oscar Grant, the young black man shot and killed by a BART transit officer in 2009, the National Lawyers Guild filed a lawsuit accusing Oakland police of violating its crowd-control policy. The Guild put a statement on its Web site Wednesday condemning the use of force by OPD during Tuesday's clash, and said the department may have violated the same policy by deploying bean-bag rounds that night.

Mayor Quan has promised an investigation into police misconduct and expressed her "deepest concern for all of those who were injured." On Wednesday she made her first public appearance since returning from a trip to Washington, DC, where she said she wanted to "prevent last night's events from happening again" and announced plans to visit the plaza Thursday night in an attempt to smooth relations.

Joseph Carter of Iraq Veterans Against the War, who is organizing media interviews on Scott Olsen's behalf, told me police investigators have spoken with a handful of eyewitnesses about Olsen's injury, but says the department has yet to reach out to Olsen's family. There is no word from the OPD on when its investigation will be completed.

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Big Crowd Gathers at Occupy Oakland, Mayor Promises "Light" Police Presence

—By the Mother Jones news team

| Tue Oct. 25, 2011 9:37 PM PDT

Occupy Oakland the night of Wednesday, October 26th. j_sight/yfrogThe Occupy Oakland protests turned violent Tuesday evening when police officers cracked down with rubber bullets [OPD denies but said it could not speak from 15 other agencies on scene, see more on this below], tear gas, and flash-bang grenades on protesters marching through downtown Oakland. Around 75 people were arrested Tuesday morning when police dismantled the Occupy Oakland encampment in Frank H. Ogawa Plaza. A crowd is gathered there again tonight. What follows is a Storify roundup of news and eyewitness accounts, including from our own Gavin Aronsen (@garonsen), Tim McDonnell (@TimMcDonnell), and James West (@jameswest2010), who are on the scene.

NOTE: Because of some code updates at Storify, we haven't been able to update the live blog below. So here's the latest:

10:55 p.m. It was a peaceful night in Oakland. At a press conference, Mayor Jean Quan promised a "light police presence" for the next few days, to allow an opportunity for "dialogue" with the protesters. Shortly afterward, the Occupy Oakland General Assembly passed a proposal to organize a general strike November 2. (Historically, a general strike has meant that everyone participates—not just people in a particular union or industry, not even just workers. Students might stay home, cab drivers might park their vehicles, and so on. What this would look like in 2011 America has yet to be determined; as Gavin notes below, our last general strike came just after WWII. In Oakland.

As we write this, what's left of the protest crowd, still several hundred strong, is march-dancing down Broadway to the strains of classic pop. Meanwhile our reporters (whom you can follow on Twitter for live updates: @garonsen, @jameswest2010, and @timmcdonnell, having found the downtown Oakland BART station closed, are headed over to San Francisco in our editorial web producer's (@DireWolf11) car. Josh Harkinson, who covered Occupy Wall Street for us for the past few weeks, is there as well. So are several San Francisco supervisors, trailing conspicuous entourages.

Earlier tonight, James filmed protesters pulling down the fence around their former encampment. Says one: "You know, I gotta be honest, I think there's got to be some cooler heads in this conversation somewhere, and I welcome protesters saying that. But I'm not one of those people. I'm upset. I'm upset enough that I'm going to pull down some fences in city park that I helped pay for. You know what I'm not gonna do? I'm not gonna spit on anybody, I'm not gonna curse, I'm not gonna denigrate anybody."

James also interviewed the "Notorious Irish Guy," who shows off what he says is an injury from a rubber bullet (plus the bullet itself).

Now back to our roundup of events up to about 7:45 p.m., via Storify:

A woman in a wheelchair is teargassed as police disperse protesters at Occupy Oakland. @Adreadonymous/Twitter

Book Review: Thinking, Fast and Slow

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Sat Oct. 22, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Thinking, Fast and Slow

By Daniel Kahneman

FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

Our brains have two systems for decision making: One is fast and automatic, driven by emotion; the other is a slow and deliberate, if sometimes impractical, check on the first. This engaging book, a culmination of years of work in behavioral psychology that earned Daniel Kahneman the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, examines the interplay between these systems to explain why, for instance, we vote for attractive politicians and tend to be overconfident in our ability to predict the stock market. "The issue of which of the two selves matters more is not a question only for philosophers," Kahneman writes. It has real-life implications for politics and public policy.

The Right-Wing Media Assault on Occupy Oakland

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Fri Oct. 21, 2011 5:00 PM PDT

Nearly two weeks ago, demonstrators in Oakland pitched tents at a plaza outside City Hall to express solidarity with the month-long Occupy Wall Street protests in Manhattan. The encampment's population has since expanded to several hundred people at peak hours, with more protesters at a second location a few blocks away in a public park. The occupation has also become a convenient target of conservative rabblerousers, who have pointed to scattered incidents of violence and other reported problems to paint the Occupy Wall Street movement as a lowlife collection of drug addicts, communists, and militant anarchists. On Friday afternoon, the city posted notices saying those who don't leave the occupation will be subject to arrest.

Right-wing provocateur Andrew Breitbart and his associates have helped lead the charge against Occupy Oakland, highlighting unflattering local news reports to cast the occupation as a "rat-infested squalor with complaints of vandalism, public urination, sexual harassment, and sex in public." Breitbart alleged that a female TV newscaster was told by an occupier suspicious of the media that "we shoot white bitches like you around here." Blogger John Sexton pointed to an Oakland Tribune report of one man putting a substitute teacher in a chokehold ~~and another~~ who later had to be subdued with a board to the head after wielding a large knife. Others jumped on reports of complaints from the city about a rat problem. Occupy Oakland, Sexton declared (update: quoting the words of one police officer), had descended into a real-life "Lord of the Flies."

While there is truth to many of these reports, the reality of Occupy Oakland is less bleak. As a tall, red-bearded young man who introduced himself as Roger told me, "We didn't set up in a nice park in the middle of New York City. We set up in Oakland." And that's just it: The occupation is an experiment in self-governance; its problems are reflective of the problems of the city at large. The camp is open to all, and it attracts all kinds. Roger said he wished the media would focus more on its community-building successes, like the free food and clothing it provides and the sense of safety it's given the homeless living in an environment that might otherwise be even rougher.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Arrests and Pepper Spray at Occupy Des Moines; Governor Faults Protesters

—By Gavin Aronsen

| Tue Oct. 11, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

#OccupyWallStreet came to Iowa last week, with organized efforts in at least seven cities to date. It all began without incident in a park in Iowa City, where police checked in only to "protect us from possible drunk students walking by," according to one participant. But Sunday night, outside the state Capitol in Des Moines, officers arrested at least 30 adults and two minors after protesters refused to vacate a swath of state property they'd temporarily claimed as "People's Park." Claims of police misconduct were promptly flying about on Twitter.

At around 10:30 p.m., witnesses say, some 200 Iowans were peacefully protesting the cozy relationship between government and corporate America (not to mention the Fed) when two dozen Iowa State Patrol and city police announced that they intended to enforce an 11 p.m. curfew on state property.

When the officers returned half an hour later, about 100 people locked arms, says David Goodner, a longtime social-justice activist. Goodner was the first person arrested when police began to forcibly subdue protesters, at least one of whom was pepper-sprayed. Others, according to people at the scene, received scrapes and bruises as police dragged them away.

"I've never seen that many people arrested for an act of conscience in all my time working for social change in Des Moines," says Ed Fallon, a local radio show host and former Democratic state legislator who was among those arrested. (Disclosure: I volunteered on Fallon's gubernatorial campaign in 2006.) "What's unique about this is the Occupy Wall Street movement has spread to the heartland."

IowaPolitics.com shot this video of the arrests. Fallon is the man in the cap being arrested 15 seconds in.

Terry Branstad, the state's Republican governor, defended the officers' actions. At a statehouse news conference Monday morning, he said the police "acted in an appropriate and restrained manner." (Iowa State Patrol Sergeant Scott Bright told me that officers "didn't have any conversation with the governor" prior to the arrests.) Branstad went on to criticize the protesters. "I think we've got to be careful about casting blame and attacking people who we want to invest and create jobs," he told reporters. "I'm very concerned about not sending the wrong signals to the decision makers in business."

[Read more in the MoJo blog]