Cops and Councilmembers: Citizen Influence, ASAP

.

.

.

This is the third and (for now) concluding part of a trio of “pre-occupation” diaries addressing the prospects for violence this weekend in Irvine when an unknown number of Occupy Irvine protesters plan to ignore the city’s ban on staying in a public park between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

Part One: http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2011/10/will-irvines-occupiers-face-legal-consequences/.

Part Two: http://www.orangejuiceblog.com/2011/10/occupy-irvine-state-of-play-sat-oct-15/

This segment addresses the prospects for a political solution to this confrontation along the one that was brokered in Los Angeles — and whether, if it is possible, it would likely come before or after police citations and arrests.

The answer, as usual, is “I don’t know” — but I do have some thoughts.

NYPD police supervisor on the attack; Mayor Sukhee Kang with Councilmembers Beth Krom and Larry Agran

As I have said, I am on the Civic Liaison Committee for Occupy Irvine; as it stands, I am one of (most likely) two lawyers who will be talking to our “point of contact,” the Special Events Sergeant for the Irvine Police Department, about events this weekend and beyond.  I can’t and won’t pretend to be a disinterested party.  But I have my perceptions of events that I might as well share openly; from my perspective, transparency only helps.

I’ve noted previously that we seem to have a possible train wreck coming this weekend, as early as 10 p.m. tonight.  I can’t stop people from occupying the park during the hours it is closed for public use and am not even disposed to try; all I can do is make people considering occupation aware of the demands and warnings of the Irvine police.

I’ve been informed that nothing that Occupy Irvine has planned for the day — rally, protest, marches — is illegal; the police, in fact, are happy to facilitate lawful exercise of Occupy Irvine’s free speech rights.  (Actions that might violate the law are of course possible during the day, but they are not planned by Occupy Irvine and from what I can tell will not be tolerated by Occupy Irvine participants.  No one plans to block the streets or sidewalks, throw firebombs, invade Iraq based on fake information and innuendo, violate securities trading laws, or anything of the kind.)

Where the police draw the line is with violation of city ordinances — even such a benign and often-honored-in-the-breach ordinance such as that of being in the park after closing time.  They say that the “city and state laws will have to be obeyed.  They hope and expect that everyone will obey the law.  If that does not happen, that would create a fluid situation in which they will decide on appropriate actions to take.“

Is that a bluff?  I don’t think so.  I think that it would be a very bad idea for anyone to stay in the park on the presumption that the police won’t arrest them and confiscate their belongings.  That doesn’t mean that I think it will happen; that means I don’t think that anyone, at all, should count on its not happening.

Why might it not happen?  How can people like you, Dear Reader, make it less likely to happen?  That is the subject of this post.

Why the police might stay their hand this weekend

(1) It’s expensive

The first reason I’ll offer is the most mundane: expense.  Protesters — who, in other parts of the country, have generally shown great care not to create lasting damage to their occupation sites and have made pointedly open efforts to keep them clean — are simply not likely to cause any damage to Civic Center Park between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.  Cost to Irvine taxpayers: $0.00.

Now, a police raid will probably come, if at all, after 10:00 — after, in fact, the lawn sprinklers have done their evening’s watery work.  Depending on how many cops they send out — which itself depends on the number of protesters — that means a lot of police overtime.  Overtime is expensive.  Arresting people — especially lots of people at night — is intensive work.  Assuming — well, make the presuming — that they don’t want to harm people, simply avoiding stepping on people and the panic reactions that that might elicit is tricky.  Lawsuits could ensue; those could be expensive as well.

Other cities have recently experienced debacles in trying to arrest and prosecute (or pretend to be about to prosecute, which itself raises civil rights concerns) too many Occupy protesters at one time.  San Francisco, Denver, Boston, some portions of New York — do the justice systems there (composed of who read the papers enough to know that the Occupy movements are generally held in substantial sympathy by the public) really want to have all of this dumped in their laps?  That’s more expense.  If it were necessary, that would be one thing, but if it isn’t necessary….

(2) The political branches of government might reach a deal

In Occupy LA, under fairly similar circumstances, I’m told that the overnight protesters slept on the sidewalks for a couple of days and then reached a deal with the City Council to allow them to Occupy in peace.  (Yes, some people have gotten arrested, but some people want to get arrested, and I don’t have any problem with the police arresting those whose revolutionary fantasies it fulfills.  Most protesters, I believe, don’t want to be arrested; they just want society to have to stop denying its problem: rapacious. untrammeled, and unpunished crony capitalists gaming the system to heighten income inequality and destroy the middle class.)

I’m presuming that Councilmember Larry Agran would go along with working out a deal to allow these non-violent protests to exist in peace if Councilmember Beth Krom and Mayor Sukhee Kang (probably in that order of likelihood) would agree to it, so I won’t discuss him further.  He won’t be the deciding “no” vote against a deal with Occupy Irvine.  So the question is: could Krom and Kang decide that Irvine would do better to emulate LA than Boston?

I don’t know — I hope to find out pretty soon!  But it seems to me to be at least conceivable.  This is within their rights.  This is a “special case” if there ever was one; no real damage to the city, serious costs of trying to repress it, and it is, in effect, agitation in favor of law and order, which has been largely absent in the case of the financial services industry because they have more top lawyers than those who would regulate them.  The public isn’t pissed off the some people are rich; the public is pissed off that vice is being rewarded and virtue punished.

(Note: I know little about Stephen Choi and Jeffrey Lalloway except that I understand both of them to be Republicans and on the conservative side.  I’m ignoring them in this essay because I assume that they would be unlikely to vote to negotiate while Kang voted not to, but perhaps one or both of them is a secret hero.  If so, great — I always enjoy finding decent Republicans.)

Is it really a bad political tack for the Council to say “we’ll tolerate this for a while and see how it goes?”  I don’t think it is.  Krom and Kang would not have to endorse Occupy Irvine, but just decide that — as with what I will bet is a fair amount of underage drinking and illegal drug use in and around the UCI community — it makes more sense to use one’s discretion to tolerate it for now.

Now, if that’s true, put yourself in the shoes of the Irvine Police Department.  If they are eager to go bust some heads (or even issue some citations), that means that they have to do so this weekend — but then being quickly undercut by the City Council would be embarrassing.  There’s no compelling reason for speed; this isn’t a “loose nuke” sort of threat.  If the City Council may well think that the LA City Council wasn’t so dumb, do the police really want to escalate events so that reconciliation becomes less likely?  Why would Occupy Irvine want someone like me to negotiate on their behalf at all, if the I.P.D. gets to wreak some havoc first and “chalk up a win”?

That leads to another problem with short-term action:

(3) It’s irrevocable

If the City thinks that arriving by night would mean that Irvine would not be subject to the same sorts of videos and reports that have shamed Boston and Denver, it is probably mistaken — and not just because some people in wealthy Orange County can afford night-vision lenses.  Having decided to weigh in on a peaceful protest by night — symbolism that will not be lost on students of totalitarian movements (which, I hasten to add, I don’t consider the I.P.D. to be) — changes not only the police force’s relationship with the citizenry, but its’ sense of self.  If you go whack around non-violent protesters in the dark, you have to spend the next while (maybe the rest of your career) living with that, and the easiest way to resolve the cognitive dissonance between “I did this” and “this is wrong” is to decide that “this is right” — that it’s OK, that it justifiable, that it’s desirable.

Some police may decide that, like the proverbial animal who becomes dangerous once having tasted human blood, they like this relationship to the public.  (It seems to have happened, for example, in Fullerton.)  Do individual officers want to work on that sort of a force; do police supervisors want to lead it?

Maybe they think that such an action would be quickly forgotten.  A given officer may want to go back to being “Officer Friendly” on Monday morning after having busted some noggins on Saturday night.  The lesson of the Occupy Protests, however, is that that’s not likely.  The public really is, no fooling, fed up.  Where violent police actions have taken place; the crowds have tended to grow; witness New York.  Whatever trust and cooperation may have existed between New York police officers — and even more so the white-shirted supervisors, like the one pictured above — before these days of rage will not return soon and perhaps at all.

Irvine has a choice to make in that regard — but it doesn’t have to make that choice this weekend.  It can wait and consult with the City Council.  It can work to ratchet down tensions rather than escalate them.  There’s a world of difference between “No Business As Usual” and “Burn It All Down”; placid Orange County, I submit would strongly prefer protesters who are at heart civil activists than ones who are nihilists.  (Of course, we’d prefer that of our financial services companies as well….)

So, in the short term, Irvine would be smart to see how protests go through the weekend.  (That — or by saying so, I’m goading them into overreaction because that helps the movement by making it grow to revolutionary proportions more quickly.  Nahh, I’m being sincere.)  But what about in the longer term?

Why the police might stay their hand indefinitely

(4) Irvine’s going to look bad.

Let’s say — and I’m just guessing here — that you’re a civic leader, a community leader, a business leader, a prospective member of the medical or academic faculty, and you don’t like unrest.  Let me ask you something: would you rather have people peacefully hanging out in a park overnight or would you rather have blood in the streets, the children of wealthy Newport Beach residents showing their stitches on Facebook, grainy night-vision video of beatings, and the like?  Which makes you more likely to decide to stay in Irvine rather than moving to Lake Forest?

I think that most people in the area would prefer indulging a little overstaying in the park.

Has your opinion of Denver or Boston improved or worsened in the past few days?  Do you have contempt or admiration for the gentle hand being used in Los Angeles?  Our individual answers will differ, but I think that more people are in the latter category — especially when the former category is so easy, starting this weekend, to avoid.

Irvine is not a city that has to be successful.  If you’re in Massachusetts, you’re going to have to deal with Boston; if you’re in Colorado, you’re going to have to deal with Denver.  You don’t even have to deal more than minimally with Irvine if you’re in the Southern half of Orange County.  We all have a stake in peace as well as in justice.  Irvine needs, wants, and should have peace.  How many times need the lesson be learned that, once people have become aroused, peace does not come by an iron fist?

(5) The City Council will likely come around sooner or later anyway

Imagine a near term future where Irvine looks like the worst of Lower Manhattan.  As the police dig themselves in, the prospect of police abuses becomes all the greater.  (Nothing against the I.P.D. in particular, but that’s pretty much how it works everywhere.)  How long, even if they don’t want to seem to be coddling protesters at the outset, do you think that Beth Krom and Sukhee Kang continue to stand behind an “iron fist” response?

The situation will tend to become not only more violent, but more expensive.  A violent Irvine occupation will start to attract the hard-core activists who are now in LA and who want to stare down what they see as abusive police.  The “Gold Coast” of Orange County is a very tempting tourist destination for people who might want to spend a winter in what they see as a pivotal battle in the Occupy movement.  Does Irvine want to be that battleground?  Los Angeles has begged off; does this wealthy part of Orange County want that fight?  “From South Coast Plaza to Newport Center, from UCI to Corona del Mar, we shall fight to the last!”  That doesn’t sound like Orange County to me.  (Remember, this is a libertarian part of town.)  Does Irvine flat-out want the cost of being the epicenter of the “warm weather” rebellion in the U.S.?

I don’t think so.  Beth Krom is a talented and ambitious Democrat; she is not going to want this on her résumé.  Sukhee Kang is running against John Campbell, who can be somewhat unhinged.  He might well be calling for people to be held in stocks and caned within a week (especially if people decided to focus on certain automobile dealerships.)  Mastery in containing the situation, while Campbell melts down, could be Kang’s ticket to Congress.  He’s not going to get Campbell’s core votes anyway, but he could do well by demonstrating his grace under fire.

(Note: I don’t have any reason to believe that Kang — unlike, I suspect, Agran — is actually sympathetic to the Occupy movement; he strikes me as a pretty centrist Democrat.  But the good thing about centrist Democrats is that they tend to be pragmatic — and pragmatism argues in favor of a restrained response here.  I leave it to the Tea Parties and Minutemen to convince Campbell that he, too, should be pragmatic.)

So, again, if the City Council is likely to come around eventually, and you’re making decisions for the Irvine Police, do you want to poison the possibility of reconciliation?  It may seem unfair for me to ask that, as one who seeks to negotiate on behalf of Occupy Irvine, but I don’t think it is: if this takes an ugly turn, if I can’t do my part to fend off disaster, then I expect to quickly be replaced by someone with a more jaundiced view of the situation.  This is not a paying gig anyway; in fact, it’s a time-and-money-sucking gig.  But if I were the I.P.D. and I didn’t want an escalating confrontation, I would want to deal with someone like me rather than some of the veteran Occupy activists that I met on Thursday night because they are, if you get the reference, honey badgers.  Arrests, no arrests — they can play on either way.

What you can do (besides showing up at the rally)

The rally will be well underway and the march complete by the time this article is published, so chance are you’ve already shown up there if you’re disposed.  If you aren’t going (and especially if you’re not sleeping there), then there are three things for you to do:

• Contact Larry Agran
• Contact Beth Krom
• Contact Sukhee Kang

This is not rocket science.  This is the center-left (reading bottom to top) Irvine City Council majority.  If there has been no dire action taken before Monday at 6 a.m., these are the people who can stop it later that day.  (I’ve slotted in studying more of the Irvine Municipal Code for tomorrow, but I assume that they have provisions something like emergency meetings in, well, emergencies.)

The City Manager, who could have acted, chose not to act.  I don’t fault him for that, although I was disappointed (as I thought most of what I’ve written above was obvious); I don’t know his relationship with the City Council — what they do and don’t expect of him.  But the hot potato has been tossed right into the laps of the elected officials.  They can decide what to do in all but the immediate short-term.

You, perhaps, can help to influence them to do the smart, wise, and just thing.  That’s what you can do.  This really is what democracy looks like.