Occupy Irvine: State of Play, 10/25 (pre-Council Mtg)

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I’ve been putting this one off for a while because it just seems like there’s too much to write.  But I’ll be leaving soon for the Irvine City Council meeting, so I guess now is the time for a “State of Play” report.

(I'll be the one with the carnation in my lapel.)

Today is going to be the first chance for the Irvine City Council to look the angry hordes peaceful demonstrators who have been plaguing the city trying to raise public consciousness about the Occupy Wall Street movement and how it affects even us here in placid Orange County straight in the eye.  So far as I know, we plan to be on our good behavior — we won’t demonstrate the “human microphone” except upon request — but then we’re pretty much always on our good behavior.  “The Village,” as we like to call it, is peaceful and a good place to hang out and meet like-minded folks — and unlike-minded folks, as the denizens range from far-left liberals to Democratic Party guys like me to Ron Paulites to anarchists to placid Irvine residents to libertarians to God knows what.  We don’t always agree with what different people out there on the lawn and sidewalk say, but everyone enjoys the vibrancy of the experience.  And now we’re taking it indoors.

Your newest good neighbors

I’ve been on the Civic Liaison Committee for Occupy Irvine, which has meant being one of three people talking with the Assistant City Manager and one of the Police Department Commanders on several occasions, once with the City Attorney, and with various police lieutenants, sergeants, and officers.  (We did use the human microphone for one officer last Saturday to try to find a witness to a traffic accident, but without success — beyond amusing him.)

Here’s something that may surprise some readers: Occupy Irvine has not, to date, engaged in civil disobedience — which means intentionally breaking the law.   This is not because people are against it in principle, or because they are afraid of the personal consequences, or because they think that the city’s interpretations of its laws are correct.  It’s because of two things: (1) we want to fit in with and work with the community and (2) we think that we can work out a reasonable arrangement with the City Council to do so.  We think that we should receive permission to be on the lawn in front of City Hall.  Cities across the country have granted such rights to their Occupy demonstrations, although sometimes the site of the occupation has been moved.  We think that we’re a pretty great group of people and that the city should want to work with us rather than against us.

The city is generally friendly.  The police officers, despite occasional miscommunication problems, are generally respectful.  We are friendly and respectful in return.  The problem that the city has with our doing either of the two things that it doesn’t want us to do can be summed up in one familiar sentence:

“If we let you do it, we’d have to let everyone else do it.”

Some people out on the law seems to think that that’s OK: they should let everyone else do it as well.  Others of us think that there is really not what lawyers call a “slippery slope” here, so that one day you decide to let Occupy Irvine stay on the lawn for a month and when the month is over you get a letter from the KKK saying that your lawn is now going to be their permanent headquarters.  We think that by the nature of our speech (which is largely about people losing their homes — get it?), by our track record of good behavior, by the national nature of this protest, by the support form churches and others in the community, and so on, the city can license our presence without endangering its further regulatory options.  One good piece of evidence is that Los Angeles and many other cities have made the decision to, temporarily or indefinitely, allow protesters to stay.

Taking a stand (or, more recently, a sit-without-sleeping)

The City has never budged from its basic position that we have to vacate the park (it’s really a large front lawn, but they say it’s a park, so that’s what I’ll call it here) between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.  And we’ve done so.  During the day, we have “easy-ups” (canopies) and tents and a generator and extension cords and chairs and a podium and mikes and amps and a keyboard or two on the lawn.  Each night at 9:15 or so, we break it down and move it into a generously donated truck, where it is driven away to spend the night elsewhere.  We’re off the lawn by 10:00.  Come 6:00, people come back and set up the village for the next day.

Do I make this sound fun, like the cheery labor of a bunch of elves?  It’s not.  It’s hard work, it takes up a lot of time that could be put to better use, and people resent it.  But people in the movement are stubborn and tenacious — and if this is what “we’re not moving” means — well, we haven’t yet moved.  (At 8 p.m. tonight, it will have been 250 consecutive hours of occupying the corner.)

People would like to settle in a bit.

What happens during the graveyard shift from 10-6?  People go out to the sidewalks.  We were first told that we were supposed to walk around continually, like a dance marathon or a very slow parade.  Then people began to slump and sit.  People began to bring chairs.  The city would not agree that we could bring chairs, but didn’t quite say that we couldn’t, either.  We knew that we couldn’t lie down.  We’re not supposed to sleep — probably the largest imminent issue we have with the city — even in our chairs.  I’m not there overnight so I don’t know from personal experience how well this is enforced.  (Well enough for people to be grumpy about it, at a minimum.)

Last weekend, after those of us on the Civic Liaison committee thought that we had pretty much gotten the go-ahead to be on chairs, we were informed (or rather a few people not on the committee were informed) that chairs were not acceptable after all and people could be cited for having them on the sidewalk.  By Monday night, this was reversed.  (If the aim has been to keep us off balance, in my case at least it has been working.)

What’s going on with all the sidewalk stand/sit/slump/sleep jazz?  It’s basically this.  The city professes to be just fine with our exercising our First Amendment rights on the sidewalk overnight — it just doesn’t want us to give the appearance of “camping” or “lodging.”

One could imagine a couple of possible reasons for that.  The first is that it has been a pretext and they really just want to use sleep deprivation — a low-level form of torture, by the way, but we’re not accusing the city of that — to make us uncomfortable enough to GO HOME.  The city’s version is that they are just really, really, really determined not to set a bad precedent that they would have to honor for everyone.

It may strike you at this point that the KKK is not likely to show up in Irvine and demand to be allowed to sleep on the sidewalk.  (They’d soil those lily white robes!)  So what’s the precedent Irvine is worried about here?  It’s not quite said out loud, but I think everyone understands the subtext: it’s the homeless.  Irvine suffers from a profound case of “homelessphobia.”  One does not come to Irvine to see homeless people.  That’s the precedent that some of us think they don’t want to set.  (I have to admit, Irvine’s approach to discouraging homeless people from hanging around is a lot better than, say, Fullerton’s, but that’s a low bar to clear.)

Keep that thought about the homeless in mind, because we’ll come back to it.

Why do we care about staying there, anyway?

Well, again, it’s symbolic free speech.  We (and like other such opinions here this is just my interpretation, not Occupy Irvine “policy”) are trying to make some related points:

(1) We represent the dispossessed.  More and more people are losing their homes due to to reckless and heartless and sometimes lawless operations of the financial services industry.  You don’t like a few demonstrators on your lawn?  Well, hang around, because there are going to be more and more of us.  (You might want to consider us time-travelers from the year 2015.)  Society either protects the middle class or homeless people — often surprised to find themselves homeless people — are what you get.  You can only demonstrate that point overnight.

(2) We are a village.  We are trying to model, publicly, the mutual cooperation and informal democracy that is needed at this point in our country’s history.  The take-down, put-up routine undercuts the message.

(3) We are an object lesson in social priorities.  Consider that what people stand to be cited for, most likely, is being in a park after hours.  Not exactly arson or armed robbery or even malicious mischief, is it?  (How would we ever show our faces in jail?)  Yes, those who are prepared to engage in it would be lawbreakers.  (By the way, in full disclosure, I’m not prepared to do so, essentially because I’m no longer a carefree single guy.  But things happen.)  But the notion that we are lawbreakers — that Irvine would put so much effort and expense into bringing us to justice, does invite people to ask a serious question: who are the lawbreakers here? Why does society prioritize bringing us to justice when real criminals and scoundrels have been able to run free because their power to influence the government is so great that acting against them becomes unthinkable?  That’s the question that we’d want people who see us, firsthand or in other reports, to ask.

(4) We are an affront.  One day protests — usually marches and rallies — are relatively easy to ignore.  An enlightened city (and Irvine is that) accepts that they will go on, and it just skates past them.  The event is over and people return to their regular lives.  An occupation is different, unsettling, confrontational even if quietly so.  It is not supposed to be happening! Yet there we are — here, sincere, and not intending to go away.  Orange County has been, for over 40 years, a place where people come to get away from the urban problems of Los Angeles.  People on the Gold Coast (of which I consider Irvine a part) want to believe that they have insulated themselves from the larger problems of society, even as their friends drop away as their jobs or businesses fail in the ruined economy or their mortgages go too far underwater to sustain.  We are not here to scare people or to freak them out.  But we do know that we’re unsettling — and that’s good, because the world is unsettled and Orange County should consider itself to be part of the world.  (If you disagree, that’s your right.)

Do we have a right to stay there?

There’s a case to be made that we have a right to stay on the lawn even without permission.  It would be a big fight, one that I think that everyone would rather avoid.  We have a right to stay there with permission — as has been granted, at different time over the past month, in Los Angeles, Eugene OR, Fort Wayne IN, Charlottesville VA, Fairbanks AK (!), one but not the other of the DC occupations, Iowa City, Dallas, and apparently (through open non-enforcement of the law), Charlotte NC, Portland OR, and New Orleans.  If Irvine granted at least a temporary permit, it would have plenty of company.

The case that we could stay on the sidewalk — no less disturbing to the city (whose approaches to removing the homeless have been detailed to me by several people on separate occasions) — seems stronger.  The city has cited three statutes that can justify warning and arresting people (either citing them, as with a speeding ticket, or taking them into custody.)

(1) Irvine Municipal Code 4-14-105

(2) Irvine Municipal Code 6-3-585 – Unauthorized camping.

It shall be unlawful for any person to camp or sleep overnight in a vehicle or otherwise, or to park a camper truck, camper trailer, tent trailer or other vehicle overnight upon any lands or easements owned by the City, except upon such portions thereof as may have been specifically designated and set aside by the City Council or the City Manager for such purposes.

Comment: this appears in Division 3 – TRANSPORTATION >> CHAPTER 5. – VEHICULAR TRAFFIC, PARKING REGULATIONS >>ARTICLE f. – CAMPING VEHICLES of the Municipal Code.  Do you think that it is intended to apply to people in bags — or to to “parking” “vehicular traffic”?  That last part was a hint.

(3) State Penal Code 647(e)

Comment: Is sleeping on a sidewalk lodging in a place where the word “place” appears in the context of “building, structure, or vehicle”?  Or does it seem like this addresses “squatting”?  Does it seem like this, unlike squatting, fits with the other items within the statute?

And here’s the other problem for Irvine: even if these ordinances did apply to sleeping on the sidewalk, they would likely not prevail over what is called “the necessity defense,” i.e. “I’m tired and I have no place else to sleep.”  Who is most likely to issue a necessity defense?  The homeless.  That is, where the sidewalk is concerned, the city appears to be trying to avoid setting a precedent that the homeless wouldn’t even need.

There’s more on the legal front, but I don’t want to lay down all of my cards right now.

The Sprinkler Thing

The last thing to note today is about “the sprinkler thing,” where the sprinklers in the areas where people were lying down — with their electronic equipment, a generator, and live extension cords — on the lawn at 9:00 on Saturday morning, a time when the park could easily be used by non-Occupy Irvine people as well.  The sprinklers evidently came on 3-4 times, ending at 9:45, each time with increasing pressure — enough to, in one case, literally blast the paint off of the wall near Alton Parkway.

The city apologized profusely for this.  They believe that it was an accident.  This area of the lawn is controlled by a contractor, not them.  They will investigate.  People who faced property damage (something reported to me, but not verifiable, for electronic equipment that had wisely not yet been turned on) can file claims against the city.  They’ve taken steps to avoid a recurrence.

All that is good.  And yet, while there’s no indication that the police were involved and it is not necessary that the city management could have been known, this could still have been sabotage at a lower level of city government (or by a contractor or other person with access to controls.)  It’s disturbing — it’s more dangerous than anything that the city professes to be concerned about.  We’re waiting to see what turns up in their investigations.

So: the meeting’s coming up!  I’ll be late, as is my custom, but I’ll look forward to seeing people there.