Oscar Did Not Die in Vain R

“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain” 85
“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain”: Revelous

Citizen Journalism, Righteous/Riotous
Work, and the Gains of the Oscar Grant
Moment in Oakland, California
César “che” Rodríguez*
O
scar Grant was a 22-year-old father from Hayward,
California, who, on New Year’s Eve 2008, heeded his mother’s
advice by traveling to New Year’s Eve festivities in San Francisco’s
Embarcadero district on BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) com-
muter rail system. Following an altercation, the train’s operator called BART
police and stopped the train at Fruitvale Station in Oakland’s largely Latino
and immigrant district. BART police officer Anthony “Tony” Pirone ar-
rived first, and witnesses credit Pirone with escalating the situation between
Grant, his friends, and people on that train, which ultimately resulted in
officer Johannes Mehserle fatally and extrajudicially shooting Grant (Bulwa
2010a,b, Bulwa & Swan 2018, Chimurenga 2014).
Normally, law enforcement officers and agencies that harm, maim, and
kill people produce impunity for themselves through cultural and juridical
processes. These processes rely on a lack of public transparency and produce
a lack of public accountability. Yet, people—from revelers to revolutionar-
ies—disrupted these patterns and outcomes. People resisted police violence
prior to and well after Grant’s murder amidst social contradictions that
blossomed into a period of intensified struggle between people on the one
hand and the state and capital on the other. I use the phrase the Oscar Grant
moment1 to refer to this period of struggle in Oakland—from just before
Oscar Grant, a young Black man, was murdered by Mehserle on January
* César “che” Rodríguez (crodrig@sfsu.edu) attended public schools from pre-K to PhD,
including community college at the College of San Mateo and Skyline College. Educational
equity and pipline programs—such as Head Start, TRiO Student Support Services, and
the Ronald E. McNair Scholar Program—played a critical role in his education. In other
words, the social wage and investments in human development are vital. He now works as
an Associate Professor in the Criminal Justice Studies Department at San Francisco State
University. His work focuses on racialism, capitalism, hegemony, and social movements.
Social Justice Vol. 48, No. 3 85

86 César “che” Rodríguez
1, 2009 (at least) to November 5, 2010—when Mehserle was sentenced

to two years for involuntary manslaughter in a Los Angeles courthouse.
Through the condensation of popular self-activity, popular social bodies
made considerable and historic gains by breaking the cultural and juridical
production of police impunity, as well as by forcing public transparency and
accountability over BART police.
Yet these gains are obscured by at least two tendencies in the dominant,
written archives of Western society: the criminalization of mass mobiliza-
tion, especially rebellion, within corporate media, and the fatalistic academic
narrations that fixate on state violence and social structure at the expense,
even erasure, of the historical veracity of successful popular struggle from
below. Ultimately, this article aims to intervene against journalistic and
popular repudiations of popular struggle, particularly rebellion, and against
despondent renderings of the Oscar Grant moment within academia by
illustrating what people accomplished in this moment, and how.
Specifically, this text demonstrates three claims. First, revelers turned
citizen-journalists on the train with Grant broke the cultural production
of police impunity as they produced and distributed impromptu video
footage that neutralized the information management and narrative fram-
ing strategies that law enforcement officers and agencies normally deploy
to exonerate themselves. Secondly, mass mobilizations, direct actions, and
rebellions followed, with the rebellions apparently playing a significant role
in breaking the juridical production of police impunity, resulting in the
historic incarceration of a law enforcement officer for an on-duty murder.
Finally, this intense period of activism forced one-off modicums of public
transparency and accountability over BART’s police department via reports
that demonstrated police dereliction and reforms that illustrate the failures
thereof in preventing further instances of police violence.
Racial Capitalism and the Oscar Grant Moment
In retrospect, the Oscar Grant moment became the first episode in a decade-
long broader pattern of struggle against the manifestation of racial capitalism
within the United States. I understand racial capitalism as a particular—not
universal, indomitable, nor inevitable—parasitic social order that, since
its inception within Europe, requires the cultural ordering of racialism to
legitimate the material violences necessary to reproduce itself across time
and space: expropriation, exploitation, exclusion, and, in moments of crises,
the attempted extermination of negatively racialized people (Kelley 2000,
2017, Robinson 2000).
Racial capitalism accounts for the conditions in Oakland’s flatlands,

which house Native, Black, Asian, and Latinx communities, and which are
characterized by high rates of working poverty, underemployment, and un-
employment, as well as an atrophied social wage, or decline in redistributive
social programs (East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy 2008, 2012)
(for a fuller demonstration of racial capitalism in Oakland circa 2009, see
Rodríguez 2020). This converges with national patterns as US political and
economic elites, via neoliberal revanchism, further saturated working-class
communities of color with militarized, aggressive policing, which, in the
wake of an atrophied social wage produced by neoliberal abandonment,
advances gentrification and is increasingly applied to all matter of complex
social issues—from homelessness to substance use to impoverished public
education (American Public Health Association 2018, Kelley 2020, Vitale
2017).The incongruent application of state violence to individuated instances
of social maladies, maladies ultimately structured in racial capitalism’s mass
production of racialized impoverishment, inevitably results in spectacular
instances of police violence. Indeed, one study found that three men are
killed by law enforcement every day (Edwards et al. 2018).
This broader national pattern is reflected in Oakland. Housing became
particularly extractive through former Mayor Jerry Brown’s 10K plan (circa
1999–2007), which gentrified Oakland, resulting in rent increases and evic-
tions that dovetailed with the foreclosures of homes financed by predatory
subprime mortgages during the Great Recession (Beyers & Brown 2008,
Carson 2005, Causa Justa :: Just Cause 2013, Nguyen & Marshall 2003).
Brown’s mayorship also expanded Oakland police’s budget, staff, and reach,
which resulted in high-profile police violence (e.g., the Oakland Riders),
costly settlements for class-action lawsuits for civil liberties violations, an
increasing pattern of police killings, and federal oversight of Oakland police
(Artz 2012, BondGraham 2019, Fagan et al. 2000, Id 2009c).
While the application of saturation policing to historically expropriated,
exploited, excluded, and negatively racialized communities, along with the
ensuing forms of quotidian and extraordinary police violence, is not neces-
sarily new, what is new is the proliferation of cellular phones with cameras
and the ability to distribute footage produced therein via the internet. This
results in impromptu citizen-journalist footage produced through renegade
sousveillance (a monitoring of the relatively powerful, from below by the
relatively powerless) that generates what Cedric Robinson (2007, xiii) called
“fugitive, unaccounted-for-elements of reality”—empirical texts that escape
law enforcement agencies’ ability to enclose, manage, and frame information
within the discursive patterns of racial regimes. These texts allow working-
class people to preempt the self-exonerating narrative strategies of law
enforcement officers and agencies after they harmed, maimed, and/or killed.
Mass mobilizations and community organizing, even rebellions, often follow
in protracted battles to pursue justice in the name of a new martyr.
And so, in the past decade, we have seen struggles mounted from below
in the names and places of Jacob Blake (Kenosha, Wisconsin), Breonna
Taylor (Louisville, Kentucky), George Floyd (Minneapolis, Minnesota),
Freddie Gray (Baltimore, Maryland), Eric Garner (Staten Island, New York),
Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri), Alex Nieto and Luis Gongora Pat
(San Francisco, California), and many more working-class people—mostly
of color, largely Black and across the spectrum of genders and sexualities, and
almost all living in socio-spatial terrains of exploitation, abandonment, and
toxicity characteristic of racial capitalism. The Oscar Grant moment was the
first of its kind in this last decade of struggle, one in which working-class
peoples—across traditions of struggle—produced knowledge and history
through struggle. The lessons learned and victories claimed, and how they
were made, by people in struggle during the Oscar Grant moment are of
note. Yet, their fidelity has been archived to varying degrees in activist lit-
erature, academic texts, and mainstream journalism.
Academic Coroners and the Journalistic Prose of Counterinsurgency
Perhaps the most accurate historical accounts of the political mobilizations

and erudite political analyses of the Oscar Grant moment come from the
self-reflexive literature produced by and for activists in struggle during
the Oscar Grant moment (Advance the Struggle 2009; Bring the Ruckus
2009; Chimurenga 2014; Ferrer 2009; Herzing 2010; Herzing & Ontiveros
2010; Raider Nation Collective 2010a,b; Unfinished Acts 2009, 2012). These
merit close study by those concerned with matters of mass mobilization and
community organizing, the specific instance of the Oscar Grant moment,
and the broader pattern of racist state violence and social struggle that the
Oscar Grant moment represents. Their analysis of rebellions and nonprofits
is particularly important, as these texts reflected long standing debates over
direct action, rebellion, and nonviolence, and produced necessary criticisms
of the nonprofit industrial complex.
Some academic engagements with the Oscar Grant moment do capture
the significance of the moment (Brooks & Arnold 2017, Carr 2016, McNair
2019, Owens & Antiporda 2017, Praxis Project 2010, Sheppard 2016).
They provide brief timelines that make note of the citizen journalism and
activism that made Oscar Grant’s name known across the world and that
secured a modicum of justice in his name. However, the aforementioned
are rare, compared to the majority of academic engagements with the Oscar
Grant moment that are characterized by common limitations. Academics
frequently list Grant’s name as one of many people murdered by police,
which reduces the Oscar Grant moment to just his murder, to just an in-
cident of state-sponsored racism and repression (Brown 2015, 109; Cobb
2010, 23, 158; Dean 2016; Jones-Brown 2009; Loyd 2012, 432; Matias et
al. 2014; Norwood 2014; Ogletree 2010, 75; Parks & Hughey 2012; Phillips
2011, 85; Spence 2011, 97; Vest 2013, 2). While certainly not intentional,
such a rendering occludes the popular self-activity that made Grant’s name
known globally.
Other academic texts provide more in-depth analyses of Mehserle’s ex-
trajudicial police murder of Grant, yet despondently fixate on Grant’s murder
and, in doing so, focus on racist state violence at the expense of successful,
popular mobilization (Stephens 2009, Taylor 2013, Tibbs 2009). These texts
tend to represent the racism that informed the murder of Grant as exemplary
of a static, transhistoric, transgeographic phenomenon. Conversely, by not
demonstrating racial capitalism as reproduced across time and space through
historically and geographically specific projects and networks (as illustrated,
for instance, in Osuna 2020), such analyses preclude insights on racial capi-
talism’s reproduction, reify racial capitalism’s self-purported inevitability and
indomitability, and occlude strategic sites for popular intervention in the
struggle for the abolition and supersession of racial capitalism.
Furthermore, such analyses despondently misrepresent popular mobiliza-
tions and implicitly reify social structures (and, on rare occasions, elites) as
the subject of history. Such renditions of history occlude popular capacities
to produce history and knowledge through struggle (for an example of
work that does reflect these capacities, see Olmos 2019), as working-class
people of color are represented as passive victims of the machinations of
social structures and elites. For instance, one text suggested that solidarity
statements—“I am Oscar Grant” or “We are Oscar Grant”—were, at worst,
bourgeois consumptions of other people’s pain, or, at best, recognitions by
people that they too are “thus disposable” (Taylor 2013, 195). Such despon-
dency of analysis epitomizes what Clyde Woods (2002, 65–66) refers to as
the product of “academic coroners,”those who—not necessarily intentionally,
but nonetheless ultimately—“provide a priori support for the conclusion
that impoverished ethnic communities are passive and disorganized.” This
pattern within the Western academy is disconcerting, given the reckoning

forced upon it by the mobilizations that birthed Ethnic Studies (Robinson
2013, Woods 2002).2
Moreover, by way of corporate, mainstream media, the first draft of his-
tory authored by the fourth branch of government, the popular self-activity
that condensed during this moment, is represented problematically or insuf-
ficiently, if at all. Within the corporate media, popular self-activity in this
moment—especially the two rebellions that occurred within two weeks of
Mehserle’s extrajudicial murder of Grant—was represented through the
“prose of counterinsurgency” (Guha 1994). The investments and epistemol-
ogy of corporate media notwithstanding, the criminalization of rebellion is,
at the very least, attributable to the methodological praxis of corporatized
journalism. People institutionally positioned to suppress rebellion—police
officials, local business owners, and even nonprofit workers—became key
sources in initially framing the rebellions within corporate media coverage.
The mainstream media, in turn, amplified narrations of the rebellions from
these vantage points, along with their finger-wagging, pearl-clutching,
criminalizing characterizations of rebellions.
To be fair, people understandably feel concerned when windows are broken,
things are taken, and fires are set. Yet such journalism reifies and launders
capitalist valuations of private property and antidemocratic epistemologies of
law enforcement into the historical record and our collective understanding
of this moment through the ostensibly neutral praxis of journalism. And so,
rebellions, or riots, remain commonly understood as irrational acts of self-
sabotage and destruction accomplished by undeserving peoples manipulated
by nefarious, “outside” opportunists. Yet perhaps that is not so.
Some Methodological Notes
This article is based upon archival research drawn from the aforementioned
literature written by activist-intellectuals rooted in abolitionism, anarchism,
Marxism, as well as revolutionary Third and Fourth World nationalisms
that mobilized during this moment (Advance the Struggle 2009; Bring the
Ruckus 2009; Herzing 2010; Herzing & Ontiveros 2010; Raider Nation
Collective 2010a; Unfinished Acts 2009, 2012). I draw upon these texts because
they bypass the anti-social movement bias of mainstream, corporate media
(particularly regarding rebellions), and provide immanent, self-reflexive,
empirically accurate accounts as well as politically erudite analyses of the
Oscar Grant moment, specifically the first month ( January 2009).
I found these texts by studying the material published by journalists,

activists, and community members on IndyBay (a local Independent Media
Center emerging from the broader Indymedia project) and San Francisco
Bay View (a historic Black newspaper). Both sites are important archives
for immanent coverage of the Oscar Grant moment.3 Yet not all groups
active in the Oscar Grant moment authored respective texts, and these texts
do not represent all groups. This merits mention given the intra-movement
debates that surfaced following the January 7 and January 14 rebellions.
To cross-reference the aforementioned texts while constructing a timeline
of events for January 2009, the first month of the Oscar Grant moment, I
referenced local, corporate newsprint to extricate observables (“facts”) from
the anti-social movement bias of corporate media framing. As an archive,
I also used tweets and comments on IndyBay articles published between
January 1 and January 7, 2009—however partial these perspectives may
have been—to construct a timeline of the popular sentiment and counter-
narrative following the BART police killing of Grant, and the release of
citizen-journalist footage thereof. I also studied two reports authored and
based on independent investigations of BART police conducted by Mey-
ers Nave (a local law firm) and the National Organization of Black Law
Enforcement Executives (NOBLE). Meyers Nave investigated the behavior
of BART officers the night they killed Grant (supplanting an internal affairs
investigation), and NOBLE conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the
BART police department.
Finally, a note on subjectivity and medium: as a Chicano, I am an alien
to this decadent world, one who travels across time, space, cosmologies, and
worlds—the worlds people like me come from, the dystopic ones we have
been forcibly brought into, and the utopic ones we are trying to reach. In
walking with others along red roads to reach that place meant for walk-
ing, I listen to and learn from them, gathering contraband of nurturing,
yet criminalized qualities—contraband that I then traffic across borders
via fugitive and clandestine means, all to redistribute with fellow travelers.
Corridos are Mexican ballads, the musical medium of popular wisdom and
historiography produced via the “alternative academ[ies] of the chaparral, in
the home, the barbershop, and all the other places where people gather [and
speak] with ‘gentle voices about violent things’” (Americo Paredes, cited in
Lipsitz & Rodriguez 2012, 116). Hyphy-corridos are that particular articu-
lation of two ways of knowing and being from below produced by peoples
navigating through and beyond racial capitalism, and who encountered each
other, not without contradiction, at that crossroads—the time and place
of the San Francisco Bay Area in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries when and where I have come into knowing and being (Lozano
2010). And so, this is a hyphy-corrido about the Oscar Grant moment, my
manner of following Cedric Robinson’s sound counsel and “record the noise”
(Robinson 2013).
The Production of Police Impunity
An understanding of police impunity is essential to appreciating the gains

of the Oscar Grant moment. Law enforcement officers that harm, maim,
and kill while on-duty are uniquely protected from accountability through
cultural and juridical processes, as well as the antidemocratic lack of public
transparency and accountability that law enforcement agencies and unions
produced through self-interested political maneuvering.
Most immediately, if a law enforcement officer kills or harms while on
duty, their employing agency, despite a conflict of interest, investigates and
thus commands exclusive dominion over the collection and dissemination
of information regarding an instance of police violence. This allows law
enforcement agencies to frame the extrajudicial murder in an excusatory
manner through the selective release, framing, and/or omission of informa-
tion. Generally, law enforcement officers exonerate themselves by claiming
fear before a perceived fatal situation (Lynch 2018, Pipkins 2019). In turn,
law enforcement agencies replicate these framings via cultivated public
information officers, divisions, and strategies to influence public perception
in mainstream news media, all of which aligns with the “cop-aganda” of
the thin blue line sedimented into common sense through news coverage
that overrepresents violent crimes allegedly committed by people of color,
as well as ostensive reality television shows and fictional series and films
(Doyle 2003, Fishman & Cavender 1998, Kramer 2007, Mann & Zatz
1998, Mawby 2012, Schrader 2019).
Should an extrajudicial police murder rise to the level of an investigation,
law enforcement unions created a litany of “super due process” protections
that are unavailable to any other public servant.These protections are ensured
by collective bargaining agreements with municipal or state governments,
as well as by pieces of state legislation known as law enforcement officers’
bills of rights (LEOBoRs) (Bies 2017; Keenan & Walker 2005; Levine
2016, 2018; Rushin 2016, 2018). Law enforcement officers can rely upon
legal defense funds collectively raised, often by state-wide federations of
their unions, to afford expensive lawyers (Bies 2017, Lee & Bulwa 2009).
Furthermore, district attorneys’ structural dependency upon law enforce-
ment agencies disincentivizes said attorneys from practicing their appointed

duties of investigation and prosecution against the very agencies and of-
ficers they normally rely upon for their own careers (Levine 2015, Matier
& Ross 2009a). And should a law enforcement officer manage to face the
administrative consequences of being terminated for misconduct, many
enjoy a right to arbitration secured via collective bargaining, which can,
and has, resulted in the rehiring of terminated officers with the possibility
of backpay (Bies 2017, Bulwa 2010c, Rushin 2016).
Thus, when cops kill, a whole litany of discursive strategies and juridical
structures insulate them from accountability. Nonetheless, a few handheld
cameras and cellular phones wielded by revelers forced the first fissures in
this contrived carapace of police impunity.
Revelers Break the Cultural Production of Police Impunity
Revelers, Renegade Sousveillance, and Impromptu Citizen Journalism
Karina Vargas, a young woman who rode the same train as Grant and filmed
that night’s fateful events, described the train as full of people enjoying them-
selves on their commute home from New Year’s Eve festivities (G. 2009).
The tone would change abruptly. After a report of a physical confrontation
on the train, the train’s operator, Ms. Keecha Williams, stopped the train
at the Fruitvale station. BART officer Pirone arrived first on the platform,
soon joined by six other BART officers including Mehserle. While law
enforcement purportedly keeps peace and imposes order, an independent
investigation by the law firm Meyers Nave concluded that “from the moment
BART PD officers congregated at the scene, there was confusion, chaos, and
pandemonium on the platform for some thirteen (13) minutes” (Colwell &
Williams 2009, 2).
The same report noted that commuters described Pirone as “the crazy
cop” (Colwell & Williams 2009, 2), which is fitting given that the former
Marine witnessed no confrontation but nonetheless proceeded to yell, curse,
point his taser (per self-admission, strictly for intimidation), accost and shove
Grant, pull Grant’s friend to the ground by his locks, assault Grant, yell
an anti-Black and misogynistic epithet at Grant (which he admitted), and,
in placing his knee on Grant’s neck, pin Grant’s arm beneath the weight
of both their bodies while Mehserle ostensibly attempted to arrest Grant.
Once Pirone took his knee off Grant’s neck, Grant could and finally did
present his arms to comply with Mehserle’s arrest attempt, only to be shot
by Mehserle in the back (Colwell & Williams 2009, 70–80). In interviews,
Pirone subsequently concocted physical assaults upon himself by Grant that

never occurred; among these fabrications, he had the audacity to claim that
he felt “like I’m fighting for my life at this point” (Colwell & Williams 2009,
72). The report recommended his termination, given that “Pirone was, in
large part, responsible for setting the events in motion that created a chaotic
tense situation on the platform, setting the stage, even if inadvertent, for
the shooting of Oscar Grant” (2009, 79).
Pirone’s rampage provoked resistance amongst people on the train. Upon
witnessing police brutality, commuting revelers—such as Katrina Vargas,
Margarita Carazo, Tommy Cross, Daniel Lieu, Jamal Dewar, and oth-
ers—performed an unplanned, collective act of renegade sousveillance that
produced damning, impromptu footage of the police violence that resulted
in the extrajudicial police murder of Grant (Antony & Thomas 2010; Brown
2009a; Head 2010, 1, 78; Jayadev 2009; Joyce 2010, 60; Praxis Project 2010;
Soep 2012). Some people, after Mehserle shot Grant, reportedly started to
throw objects at police, suggesting a rebellion almost manifested.4
Officers attempted to sequester the fugitive footage on revelers’ handheld
cameras and cellular phones. They seized some cell phones (Harris et al.
2009) and unsuccessfully attempted to intimidate and confiscate a camera
from Karina Vargas just before the BART train departed at the behest of
BART police (Blanchard 2009, Jue 2009). A BART lieutenant did inciden-
tally confiscate footage of Grant’s killing from Tommy Cross, then a San
Francisco State University student, who felt intimidated into delivering a
memory card containing footage of BART police killing Grant (Blanchard
2009, Bulwa 2009a,d, Preuitt & Hernandez 2009). And yet, renderings of the
state as omnipotent are illusive: BART police failed to contain the fugitive
activity and knowledge of revelers on the train that night.
Self-Excusatory Police Narratives and Information Management
One witness on the remainder of the BART train ride described people as
upset, with some “eventually crying” (Colwell & Williams 2009, 32). Indeed,
they carried a toxic, explosive load—both emotionally and digitally—one that
would disrupt the framing tactics and information management strategies
that law enforcement agencies use to preserve their legitimacy and exonerate
themselves when cops harm, maim, and/or kill people. Such police framing
tactics include projecting pathology upon their victims while imputing pro-
fessional diligence upon themselves, using euphemisms to frame undeniable
facts, and selectively managing what information is shared or excluded.
BART police and public relations officials attempted to frame the ex-
trajudicial police murder of Oscar Grant in a self-excusatory manner at a
January 2 press conference featuring BART public relations spokesperson
Jim Allison and Police Commander Travis Gibson.The speakers represented
commuters, Grant’s friends, and Grant himself as capricious. For instance,
Allison represented the crowd of commuters on the train and platform as
“volatile and chaotic” (yet the independent investigation noted that the
crowd only became excited in response to Pirone’s aggressive behavior).
They also claimed that two groups of men yelled at each other and contin-
ued to scuffle on the platform in the presence of multiple officers (no other
group of men stood on the platform but BART police and Grant’s friends,
who only verbally, never physically, responded to police violence), and they
purported that Grant required restraint (Grant never physically confronted
an officer and instead pleaded that he not be tased, told Pirone he was the
father of a 4-year-old girl, actively separated his friends from police, and
calmed his friends in the face of police antagonisms) (Thanawala 2009,
Tucker et al. 2009b).
As BART’s narrative projected pathology upon Grant, his friends, and
fellow commuters, it also contradicted the empirical reality of Pirone’s vagaries
by imputing professionalism upon BART officers, who were represented as
practicing due diligence according to protocol, as they allegedly “isolate[d]
the young men as they fought” and attempted to “control the situation”
(Tucker et al. 2009b). Moreover, BART framed Mehserle’s fatal shooting of
Grant in euphemistic terms that broke basic grammatical rules of subject-
verb-object: in the passive voice, BART claimed that “during the process”
of “separating the arguing parties,” “the officer’s gun discharged” and “a gun
went off.” This framing presents the object, Mehserle’s firearm, as possessing
its own agency independent of the violence worker that carried it (Gonzales
2009a, Thanawala 2009, Tucker et al. 2009b). BART also suggested that the
gun fired “accidentally” (Thanawala 2009). BART’s treatment of Mr. Cross’s
sequestered footage also indicates how it selectively managed information:
BART never admitted they had this footage, nor did they willingly release
this footage. BART only submitted Cross’s video footage to the Alameda
County District Attorney’s office after it was subpoenaed in April of 2009
(Blanchard 2009, Tucker 2009).
Local corporate news media also circulated and amplified these euphemis-
tic framings of BART PD’s killing of Grant via Twitter and their respective
websites. For instance, a local television station (KTVU) reported that BART
was investigating an “officer-involved shooting.”5 That afternoon, the San
Jose Mercury News reported that the then-unnamed person died after being
shot by BART police during an “altercation.”6 Other regional news sources
and blog sites tweeted about this BART police killing as well.7
Ideological Strays and Popular Counternarratives
Stuart Hall describes hegemonizing as hard work, an essential task that elites
must undertake during ordinary times, especially “when lived experiences
conflict with legitimizing ideologies”; he even compares it to dogcatching:
“the ideological dogcatchers have to be sent out every morning to round up
the ideological strays, only to be confronted by a new group of loose mutts
the next day” (Hall cited in Lipsitz 1988, 147). BART tried to manage and
frame information about Mehserle’s extrajudicial police murder of Grant, yet
the citizen-journalist footage released by revelers-turned-citizen-journalists
disrupted the self-exculpatory framings and information management
strategies that law enforcement officers, their unions, their public relations
departments, and their legal defenses typically contrive in order to exculpate
themselves when they harm, maim, and/or murder people.
As mainstream corporate media circulated and amplified BART’s fram-
ing of Grant’s killing, people expressed skepticism before the release of any
footage. On IndyBay, someone shared initial corporate media reporting of
Grant’s killing, and a subsequent comment revealed popular skepticism of
the dominant narrative: “The gun ‘went off ’?!? … WTF! That is the nasti-
est euphemism for killing somebody since ‘collateral damage.’”8 By Friday,
January 2, revelers turned protestors and citizen-journalists released foot-
age on local media that confirmed this merited skepticism (Matier & Ross
2009a). That same day, “[d]ozens of potential witnesses … flooded BART’s
investigation hotlines” (Tucker 2009). By Sunday, January 4, revelers turned
citizen-journalists released more videos via local, mainstream television
media and social media (Maher 2009a, Simerman 2009).
By January 7, three different videos with different angles of BART officer
Johannes Mehserle fatally shooting a clearly defenseless and prone Oscar
Grant were available on news and social media (Id 2018, Stannard & Bulwa
2009). That same day, the video on KTVU (the local Fox television station),
was “downloaded more than 450,000 times,” which was “tantamount to two
months’ worth of downloads in a few days” (Collina & Chea 2009, Stannard
& Bulwa 2009). Subsequently, BART police chief Gary Gee and BART
spokesperson Linton Johnson attempted to discredit the videos (Bulwa
2009b, Simerman 2009, Stannard & Bulwa 2009). Yet the videos blindsided
BART officials: the San Francisco Chronicle described “BART lawyers and
brass” as in “scramble mode ever since” (Matier & Ross 2009a).
Roland Barthes (1981) theorized the term punctum in Camera Lucida
to refer to a particular detail, a wound, in an image that punctures the su-
perficies of an image, drawing us to a depth hidden but nonetheless present.
The punctum draws one to an interior depth that is otherwise mystified or
obscured by the superficies of the studium—the otherwise commonsensical,
normative readings of an image. In the case of Oscar Grant, perhaps the
punctum is the sudden and audible pop of Mehserle shooting Grant in the
back and the sudden, brief moment of silence, or perhaps it is the moment
when Mehserle looks up quizzically. The punctum is nevertheless there,
rupturing the ideological carapace of that state apparatus, allowing one to
peer clearly past the thin, translucent veneer of “to serve and protect” and
the thin blue line, only to see the brutal machinations at the production of
death. Through these videos, people could literally see for themselves, and
through BART’s framing, a clearly inexcusable instance of extrajudicial
police murder (Baldassari & DeBolt 2018a, Fulbright 2009, Jayadev 2009,
Lynch 2018, Pipkins 2019).
People subsequently developed a counternarrative that disrupted BART’s
initial framing, a counternarrative ranging from affective reactions to the
citizen-journalist footage, reframings of Grant’s killing as a police murder, and
expressions of solidarity with Grant and his loved ones to incipient popular
and political analyses of policing, all of which translated into efforts to or-
ganize collective action. Karina Vargas’s video and testimony are particularly
illustrative and proved crucial to the development of this counternarrative.
In KTVU’s full interview of her, and contrary to BART’s framing of Grant
as hostile, Vargas’s footage and her recounting showed Grant attempting to
calm his friends, raising his hands to cooperate with BART cops, and being
shot despite not resisting and lying flat on his stomach with multiple officers
on top of him (GioSifaTaufa 2009). Notably, she referred to Grant and his
friends as boys, running contrary to the adultification of Black children and
youth in dominant narratives justifying violence against them (Gilmore &
Bettis 2021). She subsequently condemned BART cops as unprofessional
for shooting a cooperative person within seconds, and released the footage
so the public could learn what BART police did to Grant and his friends.
This earned her and fellow citizen-journalists popular appreciation given
what their footage exposed (Antony & Thomas 2010).9
These videos confirmed a healthy skepticism of dominant framings, and
led to the development of a counternarrative archived on social media and
independent internet media. Most immediately, the videos evoked self-

described negative affective reactions from those who watched them, as
people shared feeling everything from sadness to outrage.10 In turn, some
rejected the euphemistic terms of BART’s framing and proceeded to de-
scribe the BART police killing of Grant as everything from a travesty to a
state-sanctioned public execution.11 People explained that the BART police
killing of Grant was particularly egregious because Grant was unarmed,
cooperative, facedown on the ground with multiple officers on top of him,
and ultimately shot in the back.12 People expressed sympathy with Grant’s
family given the sudden, violent, and public loss of their loved one, with
plenty of others tweeting his name and/or stating “rest in peace.”13 As many
recognized that this kind of state violence could easily target their loved
ones, they proceeded to state the emblematic phrases “I am Oscar Grant”
and “We are all Oscar Grant.”14
In turn, people formed an incipient political analysis that critiqued and
condemned police. Many questioned the actions of BART police, from the
decision to pull people off the train to Mehserle’s ostensive intention to use
a taser, let alone a firearm, in that situation.15 Others dismissed claims sug-
gesting that Grant posed a threat to officers and rejected the suggestion that
Mehserle accidentally confused his taser for a firearm.16 Given the conflict
of interest between managing their public legitimacy and conducting their
own investigation into a killing committed by their own violence workers,
and given BART’s failure to provide recorded security footage after they
attempted to confiscate cameras, one person even advised others not to
report information directly to BART.17
This emergent, collective political analysis contextualized the police
murder of Grant within a broader pattern of national police and racialized
state violence. People compared the BART police killing of Grant to that
of Sean Bell, while others compared Grant’s killing to the Oakland police
killing of Andrew Moppin, a Native young man and father (also killed on
New Year’s Eve 2007), as well as the Oakland Riders case.18 Public tweets
indicated that people viewed this, lamentably, as the first police killing of the
year with more to follow, which punctured any seductions of a post-racial
United States with the election of Barack Obama.19
This emergent, collective counternarrative also built international link-
ages, as people drew parallels to and inspiration from protests and rebellions
against police violence and neoliberal austerity in Greece following the
police murder of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos. Moreover, people
expressed linkages and solidarities with Palestine, as Israel, a nuclear military

power, waged an aggressive military offensive (Operation Cast Lead) against
a captive, starving refugee population in Gaza.20 On account of this broader
spectrum of racialized state violence, people expressed condemnations of
BART and, indeed, all policing.21
People subsequently expressed a sense of urgency in pursuing “justice
for Oscar Grant.”22 Deservedly so, many expressed doubts that the criminal
punishment system would hold Mehserle and other BART police to account,
especially as the days accrued and people learned that BART police had
not yet interviewed Mehserle.23 Thus, people called for mass mobilizations
and direct actions as forms of popular coercion to deter future instances
of police violence and to end police impunity, with many, on IndyBay in
particular, pointing to the protests and rebellions in Greece at the time.24
By January 5, the Coalition Against Police Executions (CAPE) orga-
nized a demonstration against the BART police killing of Grant and all it
represented: scheduled for 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, January
7, people gathered at the Fruitvale BART station where BART police had
accosted, assaulted, and killed Grant.25 Groups from the nonprofit Commu-
nity Justice Network for Youth to the African socialist organization Uhuru
Solidarity in Oakland shared press releases or blog posts stating they would
join the demonstration.26 In the coming days, multiple people shared word
of the demonstration and encouraged others to attend, all while artists and
activists produced and distributed material resources from art to bullhorns.27
Motivating Mass Mobilizations and Rebellions
Grant’s murder drew parallels to Jerrold Hall’s extrajudicial murder by BART
police. Both Hall and Grant were unarmed, young Black men shot in the
back by BART officers. However, Hall’s 1992 extrajudicial police murder
by Fred Crabtree at the Hayward BART station did not catalyze compa-
rable mobilizations. Seasoned activists, like Andrea Pritchett of Berkeley
Copwatch, partially credit the intense mobilizations that transpired during
the Oscar Grant moment to the citizen-journalist footage that circulated
beyond the control of the police (Brown 2009c, Jayadev 2009, Richman
2009a, Rutten 2009). This renegade footage created righteous indignation
that facilitated the articulation of a social constellation of struggle that au-
thored the Oscar Grant moment (Brown 2009c; Fulbright 2009; Johnson
2008, 157; Johnson 2013; Richman 2009a,c).
People manifested this righteous indignation in direct actions, scaffolded
by a litany of experienced community organizers across various traditions
of struggle, to protest, even rebel against, the extrajudicial police killing of

Grant and the apparent impunity being conferred upon Mehserle. This took
the form of memorials to commemorate Grant (Kurhi 2009, Lee 2009a,
Maher 2009a, May 2009, Myrow 2018, Tucker et al. 2009a), protests at
BART headquarters (Cook 2009, McLaughlin et al. 2009, Myrow 2018),
a sit-in of Black clergy, officials, and supporters at the Alameda County
District Attorney’s office (Woodall & Rayburn 2009), a major rally at
Fruitvale BART organized largely by nonprofit workers in a Coalition
Against Police Executions (CAPE) (Id 2009a, Maldari & Allison 2009), a
march on International Boulevard, and a rebellion in downtown Oakland
(Bulwa & Lee 2009c, Lee & Bulwa 2009, May 2009). The actions contin-
ued with a takeover of a BART Board of Directors meeting (Gordon &
Rubenstein 2009), a protest at Oakland City Hall (Harris 2009), a march
from San Francisco’s Civic Center to a rally at the Embarcadero (Bulwa et
al. 2009), a high-school walkout (Richman 2009d), another major CAPE
rally and march between Oakland’s City Hall and the Alameda County
Court (Bulwa 2009b, Collina & Chea 2009, Egelko 2009, Lee & Kuruvila
2009, Mercury News 2009, NBC Bay Area 2009), and another rebellion
(Heredia et al. 2009). There was also a high school rally in solidarity with
Gaza and Grant (Metinko 2009b), a rally at West Oakland BART orga-
nized by Uhuru House (Burress 2009), a student protest in Berkeley rep-
resenting local middle schools, high schools, and universities (San Francisco
Chronicle 2009b), a face-off with police outside of Mehserle’s bail hearing
that ended with police shedding the blood of protestors (Rosynsky 2009,
Warren-White 2009), and another takeover of a BART Board of Directors
meeting (Gordon 2009b). This all occurred within the first month, and is
a testament of the righteous indignation that drove people to the streets as
well as the network of experienced activists—across traditions, not without
contradictions therein—who organized this litany of actions. More would
transpire across time and space.
The impromptu citizen journalism produced and released by commuters
and revelers substantiated popular skepticism expressed toward BART’s
initial framing. Moreover, these videos motivated a collectively authored
counternarrative that disrupted the narrative framing and information
management strategies that law enforcement agencies normally use to justify
their violence and exonerate themselves from accountability. In other words,
these revelers broke the cultural production of police impunity.
Without the footage, Grant’s friends (detained in handcuffs for hours
at BART headquarters after witnessing their friend’s fatal shooting) likely
would have been the ones who faced charges, not police. According to John
Burris, Grant’s family lawyer, “it would have been only the words of the
police officers” and, thus, BART police could have shaped the narrative,
scapegoating Grant’s friends while exonerating themselves (Gafni 2019).
Indeed, Wanda Johnson, Grant’s mother, stated that “had it not been for
the video footage, I believe in my heart it would have been a totally different
outcome” (Baldassari & DeBolt 2018b).
While playing a key role in the Oscar Grant moment, the videos and the
counternarratives produced by popular communities in and of themselves
did not produce modicums of justice. Unfortunately, the strongest moral
argumentation supported by the most erudite evidence does not advance
the demands and visions of aggrieved communities. Indeed, apparently
incontrovertible video footage of egregious police violence failed to hold
the LAPD officers who beat Rodney King to account within the criminal
punishment system: their defense lawyers argued that the same footage
proved King was the source, not target, of violence (Butler 1993). Instead,
the ability of historically expropriated, exploited, excluded, and negatively
racialized peoples to seize the regimes of accumulation that serve, and are
doggedly defended, by elites ultimately forces said elites into capitulating
to demands from below. In this regard, the January 7 protest, march, and
rebellion threatened the capitalist state’s vulnerable and recently initiated
project of gentrifying downtown Oakland, and, in turn, forced elites to re-
act by breaking the juridical production of police impunity and submitting
Mehserle to the criminal punishment system he worked for.
Rebellion Breaks the Juridical Production of Police Impunity
Popular Frustration, Rebellion, and Elite Fear of the Future
As criminal sanctions for Mehserle appeared to be increasingly fleeting, he

remained in the so-called free world without any charges or arrest warrant
for a full seven days after clearly shooting a defenseless Grant. Mehserle’s
resignation from BART police exacerbated popular concerns about efforts
to hold him to account via the criminal punishment system, concerns further
compounded by Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff ’s apparent
recalcitrance to do so.
BART Officer Mehserle Resigns
Mehserle’s attorney reportedly made it difficult for BART’s internal af-

fairs investigators to schedule an appointment with him, and, finally, after
rescheduling and finger-pointing between BART and Mehserle’s attorney,

both sides agreed to partake in the BART police internal affairs investiga-
tion, which was scheduled approximately at the same time as Grant’s funeral
services on January 7 (Bulwa & Lee 2009a,b,c; Collina & Chea 2009; Lee
2009a; Lee & Bulwa 2009; Richman & Maher 2009; Woodall & Rayburn
2009). Indicative of the super due process protections secured by law enforce-
ment unions through collective bargaining agreements and state legislation
(i.e., LEOBoRs), Mehserle’s scheduled internal affairs investigation was a
relatively low stakes affair. The scheduled interview was part of an internal,
administrative investigation, and any information collected therein could
not be used against him in a criminal prosecution due to a 1967 Supreme
Court decision, Garrity v. New Jersey (Richman 2009a, Richman & Maher
2009, Woodall & Rayburn 2009). Yet the BART Police Officer Associa-
tion’s president, Jesse Sekhon, and Mehserle’s lawyer, Christopher Miller
(afforded to him by a statewide fund for law enforcement officers accused
of misconduct), arrived to this scheduled meeting instead, and presented
BART with a letter from Mehserle stating his resignation, effective im-
mediately and without explanation (Burt et al. 2009). Mehserle thus left
BART with no coercive option (i.e., firing) to compel him to participate in
this interview, and, now a private citizen, Mehserle could invoke his Fifth
Amendment right against self-incrimination (something law enforcement
officers coerce or convince people into forgoing) (Klein 2017, Levine 2016,
Rayburn & Maher 2009a, Richman 2009d, Woodall & Rayburn 2009).
District Attorney Orloff’s Recalcitrance
Later that day, and before the January 7 rally, clergy as well as elected and
appointed officials from Oakland’s Black community forced Alameda
County District Attorney Tom Orloff to meet by organizing a demon-
stration outside his office (Lee & Bulwa 2009, Richman & Maher 2009,
Woodall & Rayburn 2009). Orloff stalled, and then eventually capitulated
to a meeting in which Minister Christopher Muhammad of the Nation of
Islam reportedly stated, “[w]hat is left to investigate? The whole world has
seen this … [w]e can discuss his mindset later. But right now, he should be
detained and held on charges” (Woodall & Rayburn 2009). Orloff ’s response
indicated an apparent recalcitrance toward holding Mehserle to account via
the criminal punishment system.
Orloff effectively displaced responsibility for the investigation onto BART
police, confirmed only that an investigation existed but provided no details,
refused to predict how long said investigation would take, and, perhaps most
disconcerting, was paraphrased as stating that it was “far too early to know
whether the case will enter the criminal arena” (Maher 2009b, Matier &
Ross 2009a, Woodall & Rayburn 2009). In fact, Orloff would come to file
charges against three protestors who demanded Mehserle’s arrest and rebelled
well before he ever took such action against Mehserle (Harris 2009). This,
coupled with Mehserle’s resignation earlier that day, compounded public
frustrations with the criminal punishment system.
The January 7 Rebellion: Popular Coercion
Following the January 7 CAPE rally at Fruitvale station, a group of people
went beyond the coordinated spaces of a rally organized largely by nonprofit
workers, marched down International Boulevard, and rebelled in downtown
Oakland that night. They overwhelmed police forces from Oakland, BART,
as well as the Housing Authority (May 2009), as they shut down streets,
public transit stations, and various small and large businesses (Bay City
News Service 2009, Bulwa & Lee 2009c, Lee & Bulwa 2009, May 2009).
No one was harmed as hardly any looting occurred, and the rebellion re-
sulted in damages amounting to an estimated $150,000 in objects—from
trash bins, private vehicles, the windows of 50 businesses, and, spectacularly,
an Oakland police cruiser that was summarily stomped out in the fashion
of the sydeshow (Allen-Taylor 2003, Bulwa & Lee 2009c, Hill & Harris
2009, Lee & Bulwa 2009, May 2009, Zazaboi 2006). All of this impacted
the capitalist state’s revanchist project of an urban growth machine, as the
rebellion occurred in downtown Oakland during a very early, and thus vulner-
able, stage of gentrification ( Jonas & Wilson 1999; Rayburn 2008, 2009a,b;
San Francisco Chronicle 2009a; Smith 1996). Moreover, the rebellions drew
attention across the country, from mainstream cable news (Wolf Blitzer on
CNN) to fringe media (Alex Jones on Prison Planet), to international news
outlets from France to Japan, and even support from people across global
civil society, including Greece.28
Elected officials and other public figures condemned the January 7
rebellion. Yet the more honest ones publicly acknowledged that popular
frustration over Orloff ’s apparent recalcitrance conditioned the rebellion,
from Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums, BART Director Bob Franklin, California
Attorney General and former Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown to California
Assemblyman Sandré Swanson, civil liberties groups, the mainstream media,
and respected local artists like Mistah FAB (Brown 2009b, Bulwa 2009c,
Bulwa & Lee 2009c, Egelko 2009, Fulbright 2009).
Appointed and elected government officials—from the mayor to the

chief of police on to the deputy director of the Community and Economic
Development Agency, as well as the director of the Oakland Metropolitan
Chamber of Commerce and the Bay Area Council (a business sponsored
advocacy organization)—all publicly expressed concerns regarding rebellion.
They expressed fears that the January 7 rebellion would deter future shop-
pers or that people would rebel again in Oakland at another rally planned
for January 14 (May 2009, Metinko 2009a, Metinko et al. 2009, Rayburn
2009a, Rayburn & Maher 2009a). The intense mobilizations and rebellions
in the aftermath of Mehserle’s extrajudicial, fatal shooting of Grant left
elites concerned with another rebellion, a spontaneous modality of popular
coercion over the state that could further antagonize the vulnerable project
of gentrification in downtown Oakland.
The January 8 Reckoning
The January 7 rebellion forced all levels of government agencies to imme-

diately react and intervene by providing the appearance of local oversight
along with an expedited investigation to prevent further popular militancy.
Mayor of Oakland Ron Dellums remained silent until he reacted to the
January 7 rebellion by attempting to calm people in the streets that night
( Judis 2018, May 2009, Woodall et al. 2009a), only to announce, at a press
conference on January 8, that the Oakland Police Department would join
the investigation of Mehserle (Bay Area Rapid Transit 2009a,b, Bulwa &
Lee 2009c, Collina & Chea 2009, Hill et al. 2009, Hill & Harris 2009).
While Alameda County District Attorney Orloff refused to investigate
Mehserle on January 7, he publicly reversed course the very next morning at
the same, aforementioned press conference, by publicly promising to com-
plete his investigation within two weeks (Hill & Harris 2009; Lee 2009b;
Lee & Bulwa 2009; Richman 2009a, c). California Attorney General Jerry
Brown appointed a high-ranking deputy to monitor the local investigation
into Mehserle, provide daily, direct reports, and encourage prompt action by
Orloff (Bulwa 2009c; Dunlap 2009; Egelko 2009; Gordon & Rubenstein
2009; Richman 2009a,c). The FBI declared that it was monitoring the
case (Bulwa 2009c). Finally, the US Department of Justice’s Community
Relations Service (CRS) started monitoring protests in San Francisco by
January 12, and met with local law enforcement and community leaders
to mediate “community racial tension” prior to the January 14 rally turned
rebellion (Mercury News 2009, NBC Bay Area 2009).
Riots Work: Breaking Police Impunity to Prevent Another Rebellion

Despite clear footage, Mehserle faced no charges nor a warrant a full seven
days after fatally shooting Grant. His January 7 resignation from BART’s
police force exacerbated popular frustrations (Bulwa & Lee 2009b), which
were further compounded by Orloff ’s apparent recalcitrance the same day
(Maher 2009b, Matier & Ross 2009a, Woodall & Rayburn 2009). Follow-
ing that day’s CAPE rally at Fruitvale BART, hundreds of people rebelled,
striking an early, vulnerable project of gentrification in downtown Oakland.
The next morning, at a BART Board of Directors meeting commandeered
by activists, one person asked, “What does it take to have a white cop ar-
rested?” (Maher & Cuff 2009).
The rebellion, and the fear of another one, forced local officials to respond
to popular demands for the arrest of Mehserle. By January 8, Orloff reversed
his recalcitrance by promising to conclude his investigation within two weeks.
Orloff beat his self-imposed deadline. By the morning of January 14, Orloff
concluded his investigation, issued a no-bail warrant for Mehserle’s arrest,
and arranged for his extradition from Nevada (where Mehserle fled due to
alleged death threats), only to hold him under arrest at Alameda County’s
Santa Rita County Jail (Bulwa et al. 2009b, Drummond 2009, Gonzales
2009b, Metinko 2009a, Metinko et al. 2009).
At a press conference, Orloff announced the criminal punishment system’s
coerced cannibalization of a rank and file violence worker, and explained the
murder charges he filed against Mehserle in a manner that suggests how
officers otherwise exonerate themselves: by resigning and remaining silent,
Mehserle provided no self-exonerating statements (claims to fear for his
life and/or perceiving Grant as reaching for a firearm, forgeries nonetheless
fabricated shortly after).This left Orloff with only multiple citizen-journalist
videos showing Mehserle committing “an unlawful, intentional killing of
one individual by another” (Bulwa et al. 2009c).
Indicative of the role of rebellions in this struggle, local commentators
characterized Orloff ’s charges against Mehserle as “a sudden about face”
(Drummond 2009). They openly suspected that the timing of Mehserle’s
arrest was connected to another scheduled rally, and that Orloff acted to
prevent another rebellion. Although Orloff dismissed these claims as cyni-
cal (Metinko 2009a, Metinko et al. 2009), this characterization of Orloff ’s
swift reversal following the January 7 rebellion merits serious consideration.
Local elites, for instance, publicly stated that they hoped Mehserle’s ar-
rest before a planned January 14 rally would placate popular frustration and
prevent another rebellion. Mayor Dellums hoped the arrest would “bring
down the temperature,” and stated that “we can now be relieved that the
wheels of justice have moved forward”(Metinko 2009a, Metinko et al. 2009).
Oakland police chief Tucker also hoped that the arrest would prevent the
anticipated crowd of 1,000 from rebelling: “we’re hoping that people act
civilly and they take this recent action as a sign [Orloff ] was committed to
doing a job and moving forward with a complete, thorough and unbiased
investigation” (Rayburn & Maher 2009a,b). Denise Geare, employed by the
California attorney general and working in Oakland, “hop[ed] Mehserle’s
arrest would prevent a repeat of past vandalism” (Heredia et al. 2009).
Despite these hopes and the efforts to use nonprofits to prevent another
rebellion, one indeed transpired that night (Advance the Struggle 2009,
6–13; Bring the Ruckus 2009; Burt et al. 2009; Heredia et al. 2009; Lee &
Kuruvila 2009; Raider Nation Collective 2010a, 23–24, 2010b; Richman
2009e; Unfinished Acts: January Rebellions 2009, 28; Woodall et al. 2009b).
Recall the rhetorical question: “[w]hat does it take to have a white cop
arrested?” It appears that an actual rebellion, and the fear of another one,
facilitated the arrest of Mehserle. Perhaps this is why, after mid-January,
some person(s) wheat pasted monochrome posters around Oakland featur-
ing an image of Mehserle’s mugshot behind bars, surrounded by the words
“Riots Work” (Id 2009b, 2018).
The Historic Incarceration of a Law Enforcement Officer for an On-Duty
Killing
Ultimately, the criminal punishment system charged Mehserle with second-
degree murder, found him guilty of involuntary manslaughter, sentenced
him to two years in prison, and released him on unsupervised parole after
serving 11 months (Baldassari & DeBolt 2018a). A critical comparison
between Mehserle and former professional athlete Michael Vick reveals
that Vick spent more time (23 months) in federal prison for dogfighting
than Mehserle did for killing Grant (Leonard et al. 2010). Moreover, prin-
cipled abolitionists interrogated the logic of incarcerating law enforcement
officers as a means of ending the killing of people by police and the broader
prison industrial complex (Herzing 2010, Herzing & Ontiveros 2010).
Notwithstanding these warranted abolitionist critiques of Mehserle’s sen-
tence, that he was investigated, charged, arrested, and incarcerated at all was
significant given the impunity afforded law enforcement officers. Indeed,
Grant’s uncle, activist Cephus “Uncle Bobby X” Johnson, stated that while
they “don’t count [Mehserle’s incarceration] as a victory,” they “do count it

as historical” (Baldassari & DeBolt 2018a).
Others also noted the historic nature of this arrest and incarceration.
The corporate media described the arrest and detention of Mehserle as a
“rare filing against a police officer” (Gonzales 2009b). None of the lawyers
involved in the prosecution or defense (in their nearly 20 years of work
experience) could recall an officer being charged for a fatal, on-duty shoot-
ing in Alameda County (Matier & Ross 2009a). Orloff shared that in his
14 years as district attorney, he had never charged an officer for an on-duty
murder (Bulwa et al. 2009c). No law enforcement officials or experts con-
tacted by the San Francisco Chronicle in January 2009 could “recall the last
time a California police officer was charged with murder after an on-duty
incident,” even though an estimated 100 to 200 people were killed each year
by police in California—above the national average (Bulwa et al. 2009c,
Rosenhall 2019). A spokesperson for the California Commission on Peace
Officer Standards and Training (POST), the California state agency tasked
with setting minimum selection and training standards for California law
enforcement, described the murder charges against Mehserle as “so rare, [that]
there’s not a lot to study” (Bulwa et al. 2009c). One editorialist stated that
“no California cop ha[d] been criminally charged with murder for an on-
duty shooting for the last 50 years” and that “[m]ost scholars and historians
weighing in on this suspect that none ever has been” (Rutten 2009). Gary
Delagnes, then president of the San Francisco Police Officer Association,
exclaimed “Jesus Christ!” when learning that Orloff charged Mehserle with
murder (Eskenazi 2009a,b).
The pattern of police impunity, unfortunately, continued well after
Mehserle’s incarceration, which signaled the importance of popular mo-
bilizations during the Oscar Grant moment in breaking police impunity.
In the 10 years since Grant’s murder, law enforcement officers in the nine
counties that comprise the Bay Area killed 234 people—the majority of
them (60 percent) Black or Latino (who in turn constitute approximately
30 percent of the Bay Area’s population) (Edwards-Tiekert & Brooks 2019,
Morris 2019). A law enforcement officer in the Bay Area would not be
criminally charged for an extrajudicial police murder until September of
2020, when, amidst the George Floyd Uprisings of 2020 (another moment
of intense, national mobilizations), the Alameda County District Attorney
filed involuntary manslaughter charges against a San Leandro police officer
for fatally shooting Steven Taylor during a mental health crisis at a local
Walmart (Paybarah 2020). Mehserle remains the only local law enforce-
ment officer held accountable (through the criminal justice system’s own
ostensible means) for an on-duty murder committed in that period within
the Bay Area. This historic feat is credited to the revelers who produced
and shared citizen-journalist footage, the people who mobilized en masse,
the activists who organized various actions, and, indeed the rebellions—all
of which forced elites to concede the historic arrest and incarceration of a
law enforcement officer.
Producing Public Transparency and Accountability
Popular mobilizations secured at least one more significant feat: they produced
a modicum of public transparency and accountability over local police by 1)
forcing two investigations of BART police, which provided detailed accounts
of police violence the night Mehserle fatally killed Grant (contradicting
initial press releases that projected professionalism onto BART officers and
pathology upon Grant, his friends, and his fellow commuters); 2) reveal-
ing how BART police systematically enabled police violence through lax
investigations (contradicting BART press releases imputing professionalism
upon the agency); and 3) forcing modest reforms that made considerable
changes to BART police.
The investigations’ reports, in particular, produced very rare instances of
public transparency into the illicit behavior of officers and the operation of
an agency that was otherwise whitewashed through internal investigations
that, if they occurred, were never accessible to the public.The findings of these
particular reports, at the very least, validate the public’s general skepticism
of public statements issued by police agencies after their violence workers
harmed and/or killed people. These reports also provide insights as to why
law enforcement agencies generally resist ceding investigations of their
officers and agencies over to the public, if only because such investigations
can publicly demonstrate their dereliction. These reports also produced an
instance of public accountability via reforms over policing, an institution
that is typically antidemocratic and intransigent before popular demands
for transformation. And in ultimately failing to prevent future instances of
BART police violence and killings, these reforms are exposed as limited,
suggesting that the most effective strategy to reduce police violence is to
reduce police contact with the public, all while expanding life-affirming
strategies (American Public Health Association 2018, Vitale 2017).
An Irredeemable Crisis of Legitimacy and the Outsourcing of an Internal

Affairs Investigation
Normally, BART’s internal affairs division would have conducted a personnel

investigation of Mehserle—a common practice in law enforcement despite
the conflict of interest perhaps best encapsulated by Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s
insight on lynching: “those who commit the murders write the reports”
(Bulwa 2009e, Gordon 2009a, Wells-Barnett 1893). However, the citizen-
journalist footage and the mass mobilizations and rebellions disrupted the
mechanisms that allow law enforcement agencies to exonerate officers who
harm, maim, and kill people through internal investigations that are never
seen by the public.
BART faced an irredeemable crisis of legitimacy, with mobilizations
taking place at BART headquarters, police stations, and board meetings.
BART subsequently conceded that the public had “no faith that the BART
Police Department can police itself,” which raised questions about whether
any law enforcement agency could overcome the conflict of interest between
public legitimacy and the ability to investigate its own violence workers
(Bulwa 2009d, Woodall 2009). BART took measures to restore its credibility;
per BART board members, they acted to “give the public confidence” and
“restor[e] trust in BART as a public agency” (Allen 2009, Kellery & Murray
2009). This included hiring a crisis communications strategist (Gordon &
Rubenstein 2009) and the use of a series of redemptive scripts (expressed
through a series of press releases) that represented BART police as exceeding
law enforcement standards in screening, hiring, and training officers, operating
like a self-cleaning institution through ostensibly thorough investigations,
and having a board of directors that ostensibly produced accountability.
These scripts erased the role of popular mobilizations in forcing BART’s
hand, all while BART’s public relations strategy attempted to get in front
of a march and ineffectively represent themselves as leading a parade.
As a result, BART hired two third-party organizations to investigate
BART police—Meyers Nave and the National Organization of Black
Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE). Meyers Nave’s investigation
would replace the internal affairs investigation and examine the activity of
BART police officers just prior to and after Mehserle fatally shot Grant.
NOBLE would assess BART police in its entirety. Both reports produced
a rare modicum of public transparency and accountability over a local law
enforcement agency through subsequent reports and reforms.
The Meyers Nave Report: A Police Fracas on the Fruitvale Station Platform
BART hired Meyers Nave to conduct what would otherwise have been
BART’s internal investigation of their own officers’ behavior on the platform
when Mehserle fatally shot Grant (Woodall 2009). Meyers Nave issued two
reports, one publicly released in the summer of 2009, and another extensive
report withheld from the public due to privacy protections exclusive to law
enforcement officers. The private report was most revealing, but was not
publicly released until 10 years after Grant’s murder as a result of California
Senate Bill 1421, a transparency law passed because of the advocacy of activists
and families who lost loved ones to police violence. The law undermines the
strictest police privacy laws in the nation by making law enforcement officers’
disciplinary records publicly available for sustained complaints, along with
all use of force records in cases of death, great bodily injury, sexual assault,
and job related dishonesty (BART 2009a,b; Gafni 2019; Matier & Ross
2009b). These reports, thanks to California Senate Bill 1421, produced a
one-off instance of public transparency. The private report proved unique
when compared to the otherwise self-exonerating internal investigations that
were never seen by the public, in that the report detailed egregious activity
by BART police, which all became public via California Senate Bill 1421.
The Meyers Nave reports described BART officers as “seriously deficient”
that night. This contradicted BART’s January 2 press conference, which
deliberately and inaccurately projected pathologies upon Grant, his friends,
and other commuters by describing them as hostile and unruly, all while
portraying BART officers as diligent professionals following procedure. Per
the report, BART officers created a “fracas” (Colwell & Williams 2009, 2)
and did not have a clear sense of the situation they entered: they failed to
communicate with each other, aggressively broke protocol for engaging large
crowds, worked independently of one other, failed to interview witnesses
after Mehserle fatally shot Grant, and detained Grant’s friends in handcuffs
for hours only to release them without arrest. The report also noted that
Officer Noel Flores incidentally trained his taser on “the buttocks of Officer
Knudtson,” which, had he been bumped and fired this so-called less lethal
weapon, “could have caused devastating consequences” (Colwell & Williams
2009, 71). The report stated that “no one appeared to be in charge,” which
was perhaps best evidenced by Pirone, who antagonized Grant, Grant’s
circle of friends, and commuters on the train leading up to Mehserle’s fatal,
extrajudicial shooting of Grant (Colwell & Williams 2009, 86).
Bankrupting the bad apple thesis as an explanation of police violence, the

investigation revealed that the use of force was systematically and informally
enabled, a critique made from the perspective of law enforcement logics
rather than, for instance, abolitionism.The report revealed that BART police
lacked basic training in how and when to use force. Furthermore, consider
that what is not measured is unmanaged and thus enabled. Meyers Nave
found that officers could wait until the end of their shift to report their use
of force, when potential witnesses were unavailable. Moreover, BART officers
were obliged to report use of force when an instance crossed the arbitrary
threshold of significant force, a threshold the offending officer could decide
for themselves, or when use of force resulted “in apparent physical injury to
the person against whom the force is directed” (Colwell & Williams 2009,
77). Yet, officers had no enforced obligations and few incentives to do so.
Finally, supervising officers had no clear mandated course of action should
an officer willingly report their own use of force. Thus, when Mehserle
hospitalized Kenneth Carruthers six weeks before he shot Oscar Grant,
Mehserle’s supervisors never took any investigative or disciplinary action
against Mehserle even though, as the Meyers Nave reports stated, they had
“ample warnings of an impending problem” (Colwell & Williams 2009, 94;
Egelko 2011; Rubenstein 2009). Had they done so, Mehserle might have
never worked the night he killed Grant.
Given such broad license in the use of force, the Meyers Nave reports
held that BART police use of force reporting and personnel complaint in-
vestigations operated not to hinder police violence but to enable it. To wit:
“The few complaints examined clearly exposed a system where a community
member could be injured, reasonably or unreasonably, yet it appears no
supervisory intervention was taken and no analysis was done to determine
how to prevent such recurrences” (Colwell & Williams 2009, 92). While law
enforcement officers and agencies typically exonerate themselves by making
the “criminal look like he’s the victim and [by] mak[ing] the victim look
like he’s the criminal” (Malcolm X 1965, 93), this third-party investigation,
albeit forced, exceptional, and made possible only by California Senate Bill
1421, exposed BART police’s malfeasance.
The NOBLE Report: A Dysfunctional Department
BART also hired the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement

Executives (NOBLE) to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of BART po-
lice, including the training manual, the hiring of officers, and police facilities
(Doyle 2009b). Contrary to BART’s press releases, which highlighted police

professionalism, the 300-page public report shared disconcerting findings
illustrating the department’s malfeasance and systematic enabling of police
violence (Bulwa 2009f ). The report characterized officer morale as low and
the department’s culture as dysfunctional (Lee 2013). NOBLE found that
BART police administrators provided no strategic direction, left sections
of their manual unedited since the 1970s, trained officers inadequately,
developed poor relationships between officers and the public, and enabled
police violence through a lack of oversight and, ironically, a lack of enforce-
ment (Bulwa 2009f,g, Lee 2013). The report described BART facilities as
“embarrassing” and “disgusting” (Bulwa 2009f ). NOBLE’s investigation,
conducted in 2009, found a sign reading “parts needed to fix shower” in the
women’s locker room—and the sign was dated August 2005 (Matier & Ross
2009c). And yet, that was not the most disconcerting pattern.
Paralleling the Meyers Nave report, NOBLE’s report also found that
BART’s police department systematically enabled police violence. Officers
received oral and written reminders, counseling sessions, and/or short, paid
leaves after using force. Moreover, the department only investigated 13 cases
in 2008, which NOBLE deemed “unusually low”(Bulwa 2009f,g, Lee 2013).
Thus, NOBLE described the BART police department’s internal investiga-
tion and accountability processes as “positive discipline” that systematically
enabled police violence.
Perhaps this is most evident in the last half of Mehserle’s brief, two-year
career as a law enforcement officer, which he spent entirely with BART.
While the San Francisco Chronicle featured a front-page article with a
headline describing Mehserle as a “gentle giant” (Doyle 2009a), his trial
judge prevented four known use of force complaints against Mehserle from
consideration in court proceedings. Moreover, the Meyers Nave investigation
also revealed that six civilian complaints had been filed against Mehserle in
2008. Thus, when Mehserle fatally shot Grant, he had already earned more
use of force complaints than any other officer on the platform that morning,
and “more than most other BART officers in that year” (Baldassari 2019,
Fernandez 2019). And yet, he still worked regularly.The Meyers Nave report,
in its condemnation of Pirone, noted that “reporting policies and protocols
by BART police laid the framework for this kind of policing,” suggesting
that, beyond the bankrupt bad apples thesis, BART officers knew they could
wage violent vagaries upon the public without being held to account, and
thus were informally and systematically permitted to continue doing so
(Colwell & Williams 2009, 89).
BART Police Reforms and the Limits Thereof
The Oscar Grant moment produced a modicum of public accountability

that illustrates the futility of police reform and the need to decrease the
footprint of policing by expanding appropriate responses to various social
issues in order to reduce police violence. Around the time of Grant’s murder,
BART police operated an approximately $50 million budget, employed
200 sworn officers, and operated in 26 cities across four counties (Gackle
2011). Yet there were few mechanisms of public transparency or account-
ability (Redmond 2009). The mobilizations of the Oscar Grant moment
are credited with the creation of BART’s Office of the Independent Police
Auditor and the BART Police Citizen Review Board composed of people
nominally acting as civilians (some hold military and/or law enforcement
career experience) (Baldassari 2019, Fernandez 2019).
These reforms implemented a stricter use of force reporting and reviewing
process whereby officers must report any use of force (of any degree) to their
supervisors, which, in turn, triggers a chain of review by nominally civilian
investigators. Should an officer cross a threshold of either complaints and/
or disciplinary issues, said officer is subject to investigation by the inde-
pendent auditor and said investigators then decide if the officer should be
reassigned, retrained, or faced with a higher degree of accountability. These
reforms are part of a broader suite of changes: purges of BART officers and
officials through terminations and sudden retirements, new administrative
hires and rearrangements, updates to missions, policies, and trainings, as
well as tasers and body camera equipment, and cultural shifts from police
as warriors to police as guardians coupled with a commitment to Obama’s
Twenty-First Century Policing guidelines (Baldassari 2019; Bender 2009,
2014; Bulwa 2009f,g; Hopper 2011; Lee 2013; Maher 2011; Oakland Tri-
bune 2010; O’Brien 2014).
To be fair, these changes can be viewed as good faith efforts to prevent
another crisis due to an extrajudicial police murder. And yet, these efforts
indicate the limits of these reforms, as BART police still harmed and killed
people, even one of their own officers. In November of 2009, Michael
Joseph Gibson of San Leandro was bloodied by a BART police officer at
the West Oakland Station in November of 2009; in July of 2011, BART
police fatally shot Charlie Blair Hill, a homeless man, at the Civic Center
Station; in January of 2014 a fellow BART officer fatally shot BART Sgt.
Tom Smith Jr., a well-regarded officer committed to reforming BART
police after the Oscar Grant moment, while entering a suspect’s apartment
in Dublin; and in January of 2018, BART police shot and killed Sahleem
Tindle just outside the West Oakland station (Cabanatuan 2020, Mara 2009,
O’Brien 2014). I take these incidents as confirmation of an essential claim
of abolitionist demands to divest from policing and invest in communities:
the problem of police violence is beyond the most well intended and even
best designed reforms.
The limits of police reform notwithstanding, the broader claim proposed
here remains worth considering. Law enforcement officers and agencies can
and do exonerate themselves by imputing professionalism upon themselves
and pathologies upon the people they harm, maim, and kill through their
ability to investigate, frame, and selectively release information about their
own violence. Yet, citizen journalism, mass mobilization, and rebellion
hindered BART’s ability to convincingly do so. These mobilizations forced
one-off public investigations that would not have occurred if left to the
volition of BART police alone and that exposed their systemic malfeasance.
Furthermore, these investigations led to reforms that expose the limits of
police reform, and indicate the need for systemic transformations to end
police violence.
“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain”
On June 8, 2019, Wanda Johnson stood before a crowd at Oakland’s Fruitvale

Station, where, some 10 years before, Mehserle had extrajudicially and fatally
shot her son, Oscar Grant (Allday 2018, Christophi 2019, Savidge 2019,
Waxmann 2019). An ordained pastor, Ms. Johnson interpreted scripture to
honor her son and the struggle mounted in his name and to commemorate
the mural, “Long Live Oscar Grant,” created by local artist Refa One and
the renaming of an adjacent street to Oscar Grant III Way. While she lost
her son on January 1, 2009, Oscar’s death birthed an intense period of
struggle in the coming months and years. With hindsight, she shared her
assessment: “Oscar did not die in vain.”
Historically expropriated, exploited, excluded, and negatively racialized
peoples necessarily developed an uncanny alchemic ability to convert cata-
clysmic experiences into catalysts for world building analysis and activity,
to transform abundant, toxic elements into precious, nurturing resources.
Working-class people of color in Oakland and beyond wielded these al-
chemic capacities during the Oscar Grant moment. Revelers documented
and distributed footage of police violence, which broke BART police’s
ability to successfully manage the information and framing of Mehserle’s
extrajudicial, fatal shooting of Grant, and motivated mass mobilizations
channeled by a network of experienced and effective community organizers

into a sustained series of actions. These mass mobilizations, with actual and
potential rebellions threatening the gentrification of downtown Oakland in
particular, forced public officials and agencies at all levels to react, resulting
in the historic arrest and incarceration of a law enforcement officer for an
on-duty murder. Furthermore, people in struggle forced BART to conduct
public investigations and institute reforms of its police force. In sum, people
broke the cultural and juridical production of police impunity while forcing
public transparency and accountability upon BART police, in large part due
to the first critical month of activism within a multi-year struggle.
David Id’s (2018) 10-year retrospective on the Oscar Grant moment
perhaps best described the essential role of activism in this moment:
Accountability and reform did not come because the “system worked”
of its own volition. It was not a benevolent interest in equal justice for
all that compelled the Alameda County District Attorney’s office to
prosecute Johannes Mehserle. It wasn’t a sense of humility that led
district attorney Tom Orloff, BART police chief Gary Gee, or BART
general manager Dorothy Dugger to resign. It wasn’t a culture of
accountability at BART that caused officers Marysol Domenici and
Tony Pirone to be fired.
It was clear and unequivocal demands from the people, issued mili-
tantly via street rebellions and, just as forcefully, in never-ending public
meetings. The powers that be were dragged kicking and screaming
every step of the way.
And yet these accomplishments still leave us with more to be done.

The historic arrest and incarceration of Mehserle, along with the ensuing
investigations and reforms, impacted the BART police alone, with limited,
if any, impact upon the multiple law enforcement agencies in the Bay Area
and beyond. BART officers, and others throughout the Bay Area, still took
multiple lives, indicating that more work is to be done to address all man-
ners of police violence. Law enforcement violence is conditioned by public
policy that reduces public spending on life-affirming resources and expands
punitive institutions that introduce armed strangers socialized and materially
equipped to apply a spectrum of violence against historically expropriated,
exploited, excluded, and negatively racialized peoples.
Most immediately, we can reduce police violence by decreasing police
contact with the public through community-based strategies to address so-
cial issues rooted in racial capitalism’s organized abandonment and violence
(American Public Health Association 2018, Goodman 2020, Vitale 2017).

Beyond that, our “path to peace” will be accomplished by “break[ing] with
neoliberalism in all of its political, economic, and social iterations” (Baker
2018, 47–48). Thus, a radical democratization of economy and governance,
sustainable in its relationship to nonhuman forms of life as well as the land,
air, and water, all accomplished through a living internationalist solidarity
and trickle-up social justice is imperative (Spade 2015). Thankfully, indig-
enous, queer, and feminist revolutionaries are building a clear path to the
world we all deserve, one where many worlds fit (The Red Nation 2020).
And nonetheless the production of these modest gains left networks of
community members and activists with deepened lessons, ties, and capacities
necessary to walk toward such a place. Through the Oscar Grant moment,
people forged new and deeper ties among activists and organizations, deep-
ened their analyses of nonprofits and policing, advanced the practices of
sousveillance and police abolitionism, all while inadvertently and necessarily
inaugurating this period of struggle against police and vigilante violence
defined by the martyrs in whose names we struggle—from Trayvon Martin
to Derrick Gaines, Yanira Serrano-Garcia, Chinedu Okobi, Errol Chang,
Roger Allen, and those, unfortunately, regrettably, yet to come.
This all unsettles how the Oscar Grant moment is archived in Western,
dominant archives by academic coroners and journalism’s prose of coun-
terinsurgency. This was not a moment when people proclaimed themselves
dead before the state but instead expressed righteous indignation against
one of racial capitalism’s vagaries and, in solidarity (across contradictions)
with others, they produced knowledge and history through struggle.This was
but an early scrimmage. People subsequently carried Grant’s name forward
into future moments of struggle, as evident in the renaming of Frank Ogawa
Plaza, site of the Occupy Oakland encampment, to Oscar Grant Plaza. As
the unnamed authors of Unfinished Acts (2012, 2) state,
This was not a solemn decision that emphasized a victimized city in
mourning. It was a proud and rebellious declaration that the plaza
had now been liberated in the spirit of those who participated in the
insurrections of 2009 and 2010.
The Oscar Grant moment should therefore be remembered as a moment

when, to quote C.L.R. James (1984, 78), people had elites “running for
their lives.”
NOTES
1. I learned this term by participating in workshops hosted by UniTierra Califas.
2. Robinson’s plenary talk is available for online viewing. See “Cedric J. Robinson—
Critical Ethnic Studies Conference 2013,” YouTube video, 10:53, posted by “Daniel Olmos,”
June 5, 2016, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKnf100jCFI.
3. See Indybay.org’s Justice for Oscar Grant Archive at https://www.indybay.org/news-
items/2009/07/12/18607212.php and the San Francisco Bay View’s
Oscar Grant Archives at https://sfbayview.com/tag/oscar-grant/.
4. See Dana Blanchard, “Killer Cop Preliminary Hearing Update from Week One,”
and GioSifaTaufa, “Oakland, Ca Fruitvale Bart Station Shooting: Full Video and Inter-
view with Karina Vargas,” Indybay.org, January 5, 2009, https://www.indybay.org/news-
items/2009/01/05/18558793.php.
5. KTVU (@KTVU), “BART Investigating Officer-Involved Shooting At Fruitvale
Station: A Person Was Transported to a Local Hospital .. Http://Tinyurl.Com/9w6l57,”
Twitter, January 1, 2009, 7:56 a.m., https://twitter.com/KTVU/status/1090057212.
6. Mercury News (@mercnews), “Man Dead after BART Cop Shoots Him during
Altercation at Oakland Station: OAKLAND_ A Man Has Died Following an o.. Http://
Tinyurl.Com/8y89ou,” Twitter, January 1, 2009, 1:43 p.m., https://twitter.com/mercnews/
status/1090513104.
7. See kcranews (@kcranews), “1 Hurt In Police Shooting At BART Station Http://
Tinyurl.Com/8kx794,” Twitter, January 1, 2009, 2:46 p.m., https://twitter.com/kcranews/
status/1090594623 and Bay Area News (@concord_blogger), “BART Investigating Officer-
Involved Shooting At Fruitvale Station Http://Tinyurl.Com/9w6l57,” Twitter, January 1,
2009, 7:59 a.m., https://twitter.com/concord_blogger/status/1090060848.
8. See comment by Gonna “Go off,” “The gun ‘went off ’?!?!” Indybay.org, January 3,
2009, at https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/01/18557752.php#18558122.
9. See also Jiz Lee, (@jizlee), “BTW: Oscar Grant’s Death by Bart Cop: Http://Www.
Indybay.Org/Newsitems/2009/01/05/18558793.Php *power to the People and the Tech*,”
Twitter, January 7, 2009, 3:52 p.m., https://twitter.com/jizlee/status/1103139959.
10. See Liz Henry (@lizhenry), “Watched the BART Cop Shooting Oscar Grant. Hor-
rible. There Isn’t Any Excuse and I’m Disgusted BART Would Try to Make One,” Twitter,
January 5, 2009, 2:29 p.m., https://twitter.com/lizhenry/status/1098118236 and STYALZ
FUEGO (@STYALZFUEGO), “Just Watched the Footage of Oscar Grant (RIP) Being
Shot Laying down, That Shit Made Me Feel Sick and Empty .. Wtf,” Twitter, January 8,
2009, 7:41 p.m., https://twitter.com/STYALZFUEGO/status/1103571976.
11. See Brian Crouch (@BrianCrouch), “What Happened to Oscar Grant Is a Travesty:
Http://Tinyurl.Com/8dl5zf,” Twitter, January 7, 2009, https://twitter.com/BrianCrouch/sta-
tus/1102590573 and ninoybrown (@ninoybrown), “Bay Area: Fruitvale BART @ 3pm to
7pm. Justice for Oscar Grant. Stand up against State Sanctioned Murder,” Twitter, January
7, 2009, 11:15 a.m., https://twitter.com/ninoybrown/status/1102548948.
12. See DLabrie (@DLabrie), “NEWEST VIDEO: Oscar Grant Murder by Cops
n Oakland. Shot While Face down despite Cooperating!! Http://Www.Ktvu.Com/
Video/18421041/Index.Html,” Twitter, January 6, 2009, 7:25 p.m., https://twitter.com/DLab-
rie/status/1101196680 and Wise_Diva (@wise_diva), “Ummm This Oscar Grant Tragedy
Is Sean Bell All over Again! How Is He a Threat When He Is Face down with Cops on
TOP OF HIM WTF?,” Twitter, January 6, 2009, 7:35 p.m., https://twitter.com/wise_diva/

status/1101059237.
13. See mikadee (@mikadee), “Thinking of Oscar Grant and His Family,” Twitter,
January 5, 2009, 7:32 p.m., https://twitter.com/mikadee/status/1098688102; Rasheed Shabazz
(@Rasheed_Shabazz), “RIP Oscar Grant. Murdered by BART Police Http://Tinyurl.
Com/9f3akn,” Twitter, January 4, 2009, 11:13 p.m., https://twitter.com/Rasheed_Shabazz/
status/1096659374; and Melissa (@Melissa126), “Oscar grant,” Twitter, January 7, 2009,
4:44 p.m., https://twitter.com/Melissa126/status/1103239850.
14. See DJ Black Bill Gates (@blackbillgates),“Oscar Grant Could Easily Be Your Brother,
Father, Cousin, or Friend,” Twitter, January 6, 2009, 11:23 a.m., https://twitter.com/blackbill-
gates/status/1100136818; COSMO BAKER (@CosmoBaker), “I AM OSCAR GRANT
III,” Twitter, January 6, 2009, 11:05 p.m., https://twitter.com/CosmoBaker/status/1099006314;
and Justin Warren (@j_sight), “Ok, Go: Http://Www.Jsight.Com/Blog : We’re All Oscar
Grant,” Twitter, January 8, 2009, 11:49 p.m., https://twitter.com/j_sight/status/1103927773.
15. See Ruth Abrams (@RuthieAA), “@jsmooth995 I Read about the Oscar Grant
Case Yesterday on RaceWire. Why Did They Even Pull People off the Train? It Makes No
Sense,” Twitter, January 7, 2009, 11:49 a.m., https://twitter.com/RuthieAA/status/1102623116
and RyThatGuy (@RyThatGuy), “Just Watched the Oscar Grant Shooting. Accident or Not
Why Must the Officer Pull out a Gun? A Life Is Lost for No Apparent Reason,” Twitter,
January 7, 2009, 2:28 p.m., https://twitter.com/RyThatGuy/status/1102969836.
16. Trackademicks (@trackademicks), “This Oscar Grant Situation Is Radio Raheem
2009 in Oakland. Accident My Ass,” Twitter, January 7, 2009, 11:12 a.m., https://twitter.
com/trackademicks/status/1102543256.
17. See Indybay web post from “reposted,”“Police Shoot And Kill Man Lying On Ground
In Handcuffs At Fruitvale BART,” Indybay.org, January 1, 2009, https://www.indybay.org/
newsitems/2009/01/01/18557752.php#18558122.
18. See Concerned Anarchist’s comment, “Wake the Fuck Up Bay Area,” Indybay.org,
January 5, 2009 at https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/05/18558783.php; and re-
posted, “Police Shoot And Kill Man Lying On Ground In Handcuffs At Fruitvale BART.”
See also Wise_Diva (@wise_diva), Twitter, January 6, 2009, 7:35 p.m
19. See fuseboxradio (@fuseboxradio), “As Long as There Are Oscar Grant’s, There Is
No ‘Post-Racial’America,” Twitter, January 7, 2009, 6:24 p.m., https://twitter.com/fuseboxradio/
status/1103423806 and Kai Chang (@kai_zuky), “Oscar Grant, First Unarmed Black Man
Killed by Cops of 2009, on New Years Day Http://Tinyurl.Com/8rovyl,” Twitter, January
6, 2009, 8:13 p.m., https://twitter.com/kai_zuky/status/1099735839.
20. See Wage BEAUTY (@wagebeauty), “‘Palestinians Are like the Black People of
the MIddle East, & Israel Is Pulling a S.F. Bart Police!’ Free Gaza & Google Oscar Grant,”
Twitter, January 7, 2009, 10:08 p.m., https://twitter.com/wagebeauty/status/1103809643.
21. See Henry T. Casey (@henrytcasey “It’s Been Said Once, They’re Making It so It
Will Be in the Lexicon Forever: Fuck The Police: Http://Tinyurl.Com/A78eav RIP Oscar
Grant,” Twitter, January 7, 2009, 6:40 p.m., https://twitter.com/henrytcasey/status/1103454602
and rocky rivera (@RockyRivera), “Fuck the (BART) Police. Justice for Oscar Grant!,” Twit-
ter, January 4, 2009, 10:59 p.m., https://twitter.com/RockyRivera/status/1096643628.
22. See Thembisa S. Mshaka (@officiallipgame), “@MCHammer: Sharpton Has Been
Notified. Time to Take This Story Globally-Murder by Police Stops with Oscar Grant!!!!!!
Holla at Barbara ...,” Twitter, January 5, 2009, 1:49 p.m., https://twitter.com/officiallipgame/
status/1098038495 and TheHeir, (@TheHeir209), “Today They Lay Oscar Grant III to Rest.
No Justice No Peace,” Twitter, January 7, 2009, 10:40 a.m., https://twitter.com/TheHeir209/
status/1102472976.
23. See Concerned Anarchist, “Wake the Fuck Up Bay Area;” reposted, “Police Shoot
And Kill Man Lying On Ground In Handcuffs At Fruitvale BART;” and DRJessieNYC
(@JessieNYC), “Racism & the Murder of Oscar Grant: Http://Tiny.Cc/IAa3Y in Which I
Predict the Shooter Walks, Completely Escapes Criminal Chrgs,” Twitter, January 7, 2009,
11:12 p.m., https://twitter.com/JessieNYC/status/1103887891.
24. See reposted, “Police Shoot And Kill Man Lying On Ground In Handcuffs At
Fruitvale BART;” GioSifaTaufa, “Oakland, Ca Fruitvale Bart Station Shooting: Full Video
and Interview with Karina Vargas,” Indybay.org., January 5, 2009; Concerned Anarchist,
“Wake the Fuck Up Bay Area,” Indybay.org, January 5, 2009; Oakland Police Cop Watch
Blog, “New Footage of Oakland Man Murdered by BART Cop,” Indybay.org, January 6,
2009, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/06/18559091.php; Anonymous, “Police
Shooting in Fruitvale Bart Station Early New Years Morning,” Indybay.org, January 1, 2009,
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/01/18557775.php; and Antony and Thomas
(2010, 1289–91).
25. CAPE—Coalition Against Police Executions (blog), “Who Is Oscar Grant III?,”
January 9, 2009, http://joincape.blogspot.com/2009/01/who-is-oscar-grant-iii.html.
26. See Uhuru Solidarity Oakland’s (2009) blog post, “Protest the BART Police Shoot-
ing of Oscar Grant III,” January 5, 2009, http://uhurusolidarityoakland.blogspot.com/2009/01/
protest-bart-police-shooting-of-oscar.html; and posts from Concerned Anarchist,“Wake the Fuck
Up Bay Area,”2009. See also post by David,“Bart Police Shooting: Protest At Fruitvale BART,”
Indybay.org, January 5, 2009, https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/01/05/18558825.php.
27. See favianna rodriguez (@favianna), “Is Working on a Poster about Oscar Grant and
Gaza,” Twitter, January 6, 2009, 9:21 p.m., https://twitter.com/favianna/status/1101237394;
Cara (@thecurvature), “Rally Today in Response to BART Police Murder of Oscar Grant.
Spread the Word! Http://Www.Indybay.Org/Newsitems/2009/01/05/18558825.Php,” Twit-
ter, January 7, 2009, 10:28 a.m., https://twitter.com/thecurvature/status/1102446281; Jessamyn
Delight (@jdelightyumyum), “Game Time! See You in the Streets! Fruitvale BART 3-7
Pm to Demand Justice in the Name of Oscar Grant and All Victims of Police Violence!,”
Twitter, January 7, 2009, 2:04 p.m., https://twitter.com/jdelightyumyum/status/1102917084;
and Paloma B. Concordia (@papalodown), “BAY AREA—Oscar Grant protest at Fruitvale
BART today 3-7pm, please retweet, do not let this be swept under the rug,” Twitter, January
7, 2009, 11:25 a.m., https://twitter.com/papalodown/status/1102571585?s=20.
28. See Richman (2009d); Amani Channel (@AmaniChannel), “Wolf Blitzer Is
about to Talk about the Riots out in Oakland Surrounding the Oscar Grant Shooting.
Where’s the Justice?,” Twitter, January 8, 2009, 2:26 p.m., https://twitter.com/AmaniChannel/
status/1105396119Anonymous; Asteris Masouras 正义 (@asteris),“Εγώ πάντως θα κατέβω
αύριο να διαδηλώσω ειρηνικά για το θάνατο του Τεμπονέρα, του Γρηγορόπουλου,
του Λεωνίδη αλλά & του Oscar Grant,” Twitter, January 8, 2009, 1:36 p.m., https://twitter.
com/asteris/status/11052869532009; trendsjp_full (@trendsjp_full), “Google 急上昇ワード
に [oscar grant video] がランクイン! (16位), http://tinyurl.com/7jemlt,” Twitter, January
8, 2009, 10:59 a.m., https://twitter.com/trendsjp_full/status/1104944605; TruthOrLies (@Tru-
thOrLies),“Alex Jones Tv, Milk from Clone Cows & Police Lie on The Oscar Grant Shooting,”
Twitter, January 7, 2009, 7:38 p.m., https://twitter.com/TruthOrLies/status/1103567134; and
Tuxboard (@tuxboard), “Sur Tuxboard.com: Oscar Grant tué par la police—Bavure Policière
(vidéo) http://tinyurl.com/7dg68u,” Twitter, January 8, 2009, 10:39 a.m., https://twitter.com/
tuxboard/status/1104906206.
REFERENCES
Advance the Struggle

2009 “Justice for Oscar Grant: A Lost Opportunity?” At https://
advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2009/07/15/justice-for-oscar-grant-a-
lost-opportunity/.
Allday, Erin
2018 “A Decade Later, Oscar Grant’s Mother Still Seeks Answers in His
Very Public Death.” San Francisco Chronicle, December 28.
Allen, Carole Ward
2009 “My Word: Carole Ward Allen—BART Focuses on Healing.” Oakland
Tribune, January 21.
Allen-Taylor, J. Douglas
2003 “Showing Their Side.” East Bay Express, March 12.
American Public Health Association
2018 “Addressing Law Enforcement Violence as a Public Health Issue,
November 13. At https://www.apha.org/policies-and-advocacy/public-
health-policy-statements/policy-database/2019/01/29/law-enforcement-
violence.
Antony, Mary Grace, and Ryan J. Thomas
2010 “‘This Is Citizen Journalism at Its Finest’: YouTube and the Public
Sphere in the Oscar Grant Shooting Incident.” New Media & Society
12(8): 1280–96.
Artz, Matthew
2012 “Oakland to Pay $4.6 Million in Strip Search Cases.” Oakland Tribune,
November 14.
Baker, Yousef K.
2018 “Three Fronts in the Neoliberal Global War.” In Education at War,
edited by Arshad Imtiaz Ali and Tracy Lachica Buenavista, 29–54. New
York: Fordham University Press.
Baldassari, Erin
2019 “Oscar Grant: BART’s Internal Investigation Reveals Cops’ Roles in
Fatal Shooting.” Mercury News, May 1.
Baldassari, Erin, and David DeBolt
2018a “Oscar Grant ‘Watershed’ Hits 10-Year Mark.” Marin Independent
Journal, December 31.
2018b “The Legacy of Oscar Grant—2009 Killing: Death at Fruitvale BART,
Captured on Video, Was First of Incidents That Spurred Black Lives
Matter Movement.” Mercury News, December 31.
Barthes, Roland
1981 Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.
Bay Area Rapid Transit

2009a “BART Press Release: Frequently Asked Questions about the
Investigation.” Oakland Tribune, January 14.
2009b “The Report: Review of BART Police Department Policies, Practices
and Procedures Following Oscar Grant Shooting.” Oakland Tribune,
August 19.
Bay City News Service
2009 “Protest of Oscar Grant’s Shooting Death Turns Unruly.” San Mateo
Daily Journal, January 8.
Bender, Kristin
2009 “Oscar Grant’s Family, BART Call for Peace on Anniversary of
Hayward Man’s Death.” Oakland Tribune, December 30.
2014 “Oakland: BART Settles Suit over Detainments Related to Oscar
Grant Shooting.” Oakland Tribune, May 20.
Beyers, Matt, and Janet Brown
2008 Life and Death from Unnatural Causes: Health and Social Inequality in
Alameda County. CAPE Unit of the Alameda County Public Health
Department.
Bies, Katherine J.
2017 “Let the Sunshine In: Illuminating the Powerful Role Police Unions
Play in Shielding Officer Misconduct.” Stanford Law & Policy Review
28(1): 109–49.
Blanchard, Dana
2009 “Killer Cop Preliminary Hearing Update from Week One.” Indybay.org,
May 22. At https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2009/05/22/18597048.php.
BondGraham, Darwin
2019 “Oakland’s Lost Year of Police Accountability.” East Bay Express,
January 9.
Bring the Ruckus
2009 “Bring the Struggle, Advance the Ruckus (Bring the Ruckus Response
to ‘Justice for Oscar Grant: A Lost Opportunity?’).” Advance the
Struggle: Bay Area Radical Perspectives (blog), July 27. At https://
advancethestruggle.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/bring-the-struggle-
advance-the-ruckus-bring-the-ruckus-response-to-justice-for-oscar-grant-
a-lost-opportunity/.
Brooks, Cat, and Eric K. Arnold
2017 “Movement in Motion.” Race, Poverty & the Environment 21(2): 16–21.
Brown, Aleia
2015 “On Race and Museums: Starting Conversations, Embracing Action.”
Museums & Social Issues 10(2): 109–12.
Brown, Todd R.
2009a “Fear of Police State Morphs into Society of Watchdogs.” San Jose
Examiner, January 7.
2009b “Another BART Shooting Video.” San Jose Examiner, January 11.
2009c “BART Has a History of Deadly Shootings.” San Jose Examiner,
January 11.
Bulwa, Demian
2009a “Student’s BART Shooting Footage May Be Key.” San Francisco
Chronicle, May 18.
2009b “BART Urges Patience over Video of Shooting.” San Francisco
Chronicle, January 5.
2009c “Officials Excoriated at Meeting on Killing.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 12.
2009d “Probe Was Troubled from the Beginning.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 30.
2009e “Law Firm Hired to Review Cops’ Actions.” San Francisco Chronicle,
February 12.
2009f “Review of Police Calls for Changes.” San Francisco Chronicle,
September 30.
2009g “Agency Promises Police Overhaul.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 2.
2010a “BART Fires Cop Who Helped Detain Oscar Grant.” San Francisco
Chronicle, March 28.
2010b “Mehserle Blurted Term of Shock, Witness Says.” San Francisco
Chronicle, June 15.
2010c “BART Told to Reinstate Officer.” San Francisco Chronicle, December
18.
Bulwa, Demian, and Henry K. Lee
2009a “BART Shooting Victim’s Family Files Claim.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 7.
2009b “Officer in BART Shooting Abruptly Resigns.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 8.
2009c “Victim’s Family Decries Violence.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 9.
Bulwa, Demian, Henry K. Lee, and Leslie Fulbright
2009a “BART Sends Case to D.A.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 13.
Bulwa, Demian, Leslie Fulbright, and Henry K. Lee
2009b “BART Officer Arrested on Murder Warrant in NY Day Shooting.”
San Francisco Chronicle, January 14.
Bulwa, Demian, and Rachel Swan
2018 “10 Years Since Oscar Grant’s Death: What Happened at Fruitvale
Station?” San Francisco Chronicle, December 28.
Bulwa, Demian, Wyatt Buchanan, and Matthew Yi
2009c “Behind Murder Charge against Ex-BART Officer.” San Francisco
Chronicle, February 4.
Burress, Charles
2009 “Peaceful March for Oscar Grant.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 20.
Burt, Cecily, Angela Woodall, Sean Maher, Steve Harmon, Kelly Rayburn, and Chris
Metinko
2009 “Lingering Oakland Protesters Become Violent, Smash Doors,
Windows.” Oakland Tribune, January 14.
Butler, Judith
1993 “Endangered/Endangering: Schematic Racism and White Paranoia.”
In Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, edited by Robert
Gooding-Williams, 15–22. London: Routledge.
Cabanatuan, Michael
2020 “BART Must Pay Millions to the Family of Slain Man.” San Francisco
Chronicle, March 13.
Carr, Jesse
2016 “The Lawlessness of Law: Lynching and Anti-Lynching in the
Contemporary USA.” Settler Colonial Studies 6(2): 153–63.
Carson, Lynda
2005 “Oakland Landlords Attack Eviction Protections: Tenant Activists
Fight a Lawsuit Aimed at Killing Oakland’s Just Cause Measure.”
Street Spirit: Justice News & Homeless Blues in the Bay Area, November.
At http://www.thestreetspirit.org/Nov2005/evictions.htm.
Causa Justa :: Just Cause
2013 “Housing, Health, and Habitability in Oakland: Executive Summary.”
Health and Habitability Report 2013. At https://cjjc.org/mediapress/health-
habitability-report-2013/.
Chimurenga, Thandisizwe
2014 No Doubt: The Murder(s) of Oscar Grant. CreateSpace Independent
Publishing Platform.
Christophi, Helen
2019 “Victim of Fatal Police Shooting Honored in Oakland.” Courthouse
News Service, June 8. At https://www.courthousenews.com/about-us/.
Cobb, William Jelani
2010 The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress. New
York: Walker & Company.
Collina, Terry, and Terence Chea
2009 “Fatal Police Shooting Sparks Violent Protests.” San Mateo Daily
Journal, January 9.
Colwell, Kimberly, and Jayne Williams
2009 “Final Report: BART Internal Investigation Re January 1, 2009
Fruitvale BART Station (Oscar Grant) Incident.” Oakland: Meyers
Nave. At https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5985412-CPRA-
NYE-2009-OSCAR-GRANT-IA09A002-Final-Report.html.
Communities for a Better Environment, Urban Habitat, and Public Advocates, Inc.
2006 “MTC, Where Are Our Buses?: Challenging the Bay Area’s Separate
and Unequal Transit System,” December 6. At http://libraryarchives.
metro.net/DPGTL/publications/2006_mtc_where_are_our_buses.pdf.
Cook, David “Davey D.”
2009 “Oscar Grant, Young Father and Peacemaker, Executed by BART
Police.” San Francisco Bay View, January 6.
Dean, Terrance
2016 “Fire This Time: James Baldwin, Futurity, and a Call and Response.”
Black Theology 14 (1): 69–83.
Doyle, Aaron
2003 Arresting Images: Crime and Policing in Front of the Television Camera.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Doyle, Jim
2009a “BART Cop Recalled as ‘Gentle Giant’ as a Kid.” San Francisco
2009b “Black Law Group to Conduct Review.” San Francisco Chronicle, April
24.
Drummond, Tammerlin
2009 “Tammerlin Drummond: Turn Down the Heat in Oakland.” Oakland
Dunlap, Kamika
2009 “Jerry Brown Appoints Prosecutor to Oversee BART Probe.” Oakland
East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy
2008 “Flatlined: Economic Pain in the East Bay—Income Disparities,
Poverty, and Low Quality Jobs.” 2008 Labor Day Census Data
Summary. Oakland: East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.
2012 “The State of Work in the East Bay and Oakland.” Oakland, CA: East
Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy.
Edwards, Frank, Michael H. Esposito, and Hedwig Lee
2018 “Risk of Police-Involved Death by Race/Ethnicity and Place, United
States, 2012–2018.” American Journal of Public Health 108 (9): 1241–48.
Edwards-Tiekert, Brian, and Cat Brooks
2019 “Sudan Military Crackdown Leaves over 100 Dead; Plus: 242
people have been shot and killed by Bay Area law enforcement since
2009.” UpFront. Berkeley: KPFA. At https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-
june-6-2019/.
Egelko, Bob
2009 “Brown Wants D.A. in BART Shooting Case to Act Swiftly.” San
Francisco Chronicle, January 11.
Egelko, Bob (cont.)
2011 “Johannes Mehserle, 4 Other BART Officers Cleared.” San Francisco
Chronicle, December 2.
Eskenazi, Joe
2009a “S.F. Police Union President: ‘I Would Bet My Kids’ Lives’ Oscar Grant
Shooting an Accident.” SF Weekly, January 14. At https://www.sfweekly.
com/news/s-f-police-union-president-i-would-bet-my-kids-lives-oscar-
grant-shooting-an-accident/.
2009b “Shoot First: Mehserle Likely Only Bay Area Cop Ever Charged with
Murder for On-Duty Killing.” SF Weekly, January 14. At https://www.
sfweekly.com/news/shoot-first-mehserle-likely-only-bay-area-cop-ever-
charged-with-murder-for-on-duty-killing/.
Fagan, Kevin, Henry K. Lee, and Janine DeFao
2000 “Oakland Reins In Its Rough ‘Riders.’” San Francisco Chronicle, October
2, 2000.
Fernandez, Lisa
2019 “Report Describes BART Police as ‘Seriously Deficient’ After Oscar
Grant Shooting.” KTVU.com, May 2. At https://www.ktvu.com/news/
report-describes-bart-police-as-seriously-deficient-after-oscar-grant-
shooting.
Ferrer, Christine Joy
2009 “The Art of Protest: The Oscar Grant Memorial Arts Project.” Race,
Poverty & the Environment 16(1): 40–43.
Fishman, Mark, and Gray Cavender, eds.
1998 Entertaining Crime: Television Reality Programs. New York: Aldine de
Gruyter.
Fulbright, Leslie
2009 “Many See Race as Central to BART Killing.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 11.
G., Laura
2009 “First Day of Testimony at Johannes Mehserle Hearing.” Oakland
Examiner, May 18.
Gackle, Paul
2011 “Critics, Officers Debate Need for BART Police Force.” San Francisco
Examiner, November 27.
Gafni, Matthias
2019 “BART Cop Seen as Lying in Death of Oscar Grant.” San Francisco
Chronicle, May 2.
Gilmore, Amir, and Pamela Bettis
2021 “Antiblackness and the Adultification of Black Children in a U.S.
Prison Nation.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, 1–32.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gonzales, Sandra
2009a “Quietly, Valley Rings in 2009.” San Jose Mercury News, January 2.
2009b “BART Officer Jailed, Charged with Unarmed Man’s Murder - March,
Peaceful at First, Turns Violent at End.” San Jose Mercury News, January 15.
Goodman, Amy
2020 “The Case for Prison Abolition: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on COVID-19,
Racial Capitalism and Decarceration.” Democracy Now!, May 5. At
https://www.democracynow.org/2020/5/5/ruth_wilson_gilmore_abolition_
coronavirus.
Gordon, Rachel
2009a “BART Seeks Framework for Police Oversight.” San Francisco Chronicle,
February 12.
2009b “Board Meeting Challenged by Storm of Protest.” San Francisco
Chronicle, February 13.
Gordon, Rachel, and Steve Rubenstein
2009 “BART Directors Listen, Then Apologize, Promise Reforms.” San
Francisco Chronicle, January 9.
Guha, Ranajit
1994 “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” In Culture/Power/History: A Reader
in Contemporary Social Theory, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley,
and Sherry B. Ortner, 336–71. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Haley, Amber D., Emily Zimmerman, Steven H. Woolf, and Benjamin F. Evans
2012 “Neighborhood-Level Determinants of Life Expectancy in Oakland,
CA.” Center on Human Needs, Virginia Commonwealth University,
September.
Harris, Harry
2009 “District Attorney Files Charges against 3 Protesters in Oakland.”
Oakland Tribune, January 9.
Harris, Harry, Eric Kurhi, and Chris Metinko
2009 “Many Questions Remain Unanswered in Fatal BART Shooting.”
Head, Tom
2010 It’s Your World, So Change It: Using the Power of the Internet to Create
Social Change. Indianapolis: Que Publishing.
Heredia, Chistopher
2008 “Oakland Police Force at Record 837 Officers.” San Francisco Chronicle,
November 15.
Heredia, Christopher, Carolyn Jones, and Leslie Fulbright
2009 “18 Arrested at Rally to Protest BART Killing.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 15.
Herzing, Rachel
2010 “Resisting the Violence of Policing: Oakland Responds to the Murder
of Oscar Grant, III.” The Abolitionist: A Critical Resistance Publication
11(1). At https://abolitionistpaper.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/
abolitionist-issue-11-winter-2010-english-and-spanish.pdf.
Herzing, Rachel, and Isaac Ontiveros
2010 “Responding to Police Killing: Questions and Challenges for
Abolitionists.” Criminal Justice Matters 82(1): 38–40.
Hill, Angela, and Harry Harris
2009 “Slain Man’s Mother Pleads for Peace.” San Jose Mercury News, January 9.
Hill, Angela, Harry Harris, and Kelly Rayburn
2009 “Grant’s Family Pleads for Peace.” Oakland Tribune, January 8.
Hopper, Allen
2011 “BART Must Collect Data on Police Racial Profiling.” Oakland
Tribune, March 15.
Id, Dave
2009a “Rally and Rage Over BART Police Murder of Oscar
Grant.” IndyBay.org, January 8. At https://www.indybay.org/
newsitems/2009/01/08/18559668.php.
2009b “Oscar Grant III Graffiti, Murals, Stickers, Stencils, and Wheatpaste,
Part 2.” Indybay.org, March 11. At https://www.indybay.org/
newsitems/2009/03/11/18576262.php.
2009c “Notes from the Citizens’ Police Review Board Meeting, Oakland,
2/5/09.” Indybay.org, February 6. At https://www.indybay.org/
newsitems/2009/02/06/18568540.php.
2018 “A Celebration of the Justice for Oscar Grant Protesters.”
Indybay.org, December 31. At https://www.indybay.org/
newsitems/2018/12/31/18820046.php.
James, C.L.R.
1984 The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo
Revolution. London: Allison & Busby.
Jayadev, Raj
2009 “Much Harder to ‘Spin’ Police Violence in Web 2.0 Era.” San Jose
Mercury News, January 12.
Johnson, Gaye Theresa
2008 “Constellations of Struggle: Luisa Moreno, Charlotta Bass, and the
Legacy for Ethnic Studies.” Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies 33(1):
155–72.
2013 Spaces of Conflict, Sounds of Solidarity: Music, Race, and Spatial
Entitlement in Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jonas, Andrew E. G., and David Wilson, eds.
1999 The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later.
Albany: State University of New York Press.
Jones-Brown, Delores
2009 “The Right to Life?: Policing, Race, and Criminal Injustice.” Human
Rights 36(2): 6–23.
Joyce, Mary
2010 Digital Activism Decoded: The New Mechanics of Change. New York:
International Debate Education Association.
Judis, John
2018 “‘Democratic Socialism Will Prevail’: An Interview with Ron Dellums
in 1976.” In These Times, July 30. At https://inthesetimes.com/article/ron-
dellums-death-democratic-socialist-dsa-antiwar-1976-interview.
Jue, Tim
2009 “Criticism Mounts as Home Videos Show BART Cop Shooting,
Killing Unarmed Rider.” California Beat, January 4.
Keenan, Kevin M., and Samuel Walker
2005 “An Impediment to Police Accountability? An Analysis of Statutory
Law Enforcement Officers’ Bills of Rights.” Boston University Public
Interest Law Journal 14(2): 185–244.
Kellery, Joel, and Gail Murray
2009 “Reader’s Forum: Joel Keller and Gail Murray, Everyone Is Entitled to
Due Process.” Oakland Tribune, January 16.
Kelley, Robin D.G.
2020 “Insecure: Policing Under Racial Capitalism.” Spectre 1(2): 12–37.
2017 “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism?” Boston
Review, January 12. At https://bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-
what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism.
2000 Foreword to Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition,
by Cedric Robinson, xi–xxvi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press.
Klein, Susan R.
2017 “Transparency and Truth during Custodial Interrogations and Beyond.”
Boston University Law Review 97(3): 993–1045.
Kramer, Alisa Sarah

2007 “William H. Parker and the Thin Blue Line: Politics, Public Relations,
and Policing in Postwar Los Angeles.” PhD diss., American University.
Kurhi, Eric
2009 “Mourners Urged to Lift Up Family.” Contra Costa Times, January 8.
Lee, Henry K.
2009a “Tears and Fond Memories at Funeral for Victim.” San Francisco
2009b “3 Charged in Protest over BART Shooting.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 10.
2013 “Audit Praises Reforms after Grant Slaying.” San Francisco Chronicle,
December 6.
Lee, Henry K., and Demian Bulwa
2009 “Cop in Killing Quits—Protest Turns Violent.” San Francisco Chronicle,
January 8.
Lee, Henry K., and Matthai Kuruvila
2009 “Organizers Plan Peaceful Protest.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 14.
Leonard, Jack, Abby Sewell, and Maria L. La Ganga
2010 “Former BART Officer Johannes Mehserle Gets 2 Years in Oscar
Grant Killing.” Los Angeles Times, November 6.
Levine, Kate
2015 “Who Shouldn’t Prosecute the Police.” Iowa Law Review 101(4):
1447–96.
2016 “Police Suspects.” Columbia Law Review 116(5): 1197–258.
2018 “Discipline and Policing.” Duke Law Journal 68(5): 839–905.
Lipsitz, George
1988 “The Struggle for Hegemony.” Journal of American History 75(1):
146–50.
Lipsitz, George, and Russell Rodriguez
2012 “Turning Hegemony on Its Head: The Insurgent Knowledge of
Americo Paredes.” Journal of American Folklore 125(495): 111–25.
Loyd, Jenna M.
2012 “The Fire Next Time.” City 16(4): 431–38.
Lozano, Jessica R.
2010 “Soy MacDiva: Changing Perceptions of Chicana/Mexicana Sexuality
Through Corridos Hyphy.” In Chicana/o Environmental Justice Struggles
for a Post-Neoliberal Age. Seattle: National Association for Chicana and
Chicano Studies (NACCS) Annual Conference Proceedings.
Lynch, Caitlin G.
2018 “Don’t Let Them Kill You on Some Dirty Roadway: Survival,
Entitled Violence, and the Culture of Modern American Policing.”
Contemporary Justice Review 21(1): 33–43.
Maher, Sean
2009a “New Video Shows BART Officer Shooting Hayward Man in the
Back.” Oakland Tribune, January 4.
Maher, Sean (cont.)

2009b “BART Cameras Unclear in Fatal Shooting.” Oakland Tribune, January
5.
2011 “Oakland Police to Reinstate Officer Fired for Shooting Unarmed
Man.” Oakland Tribune, March 6.
Maher, Sean, and Denis Cuff
2009 “BART Board Gets an Earful over Officer-Involved Shooting.”
Malcolm X
1965 Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements. New York: Grove
Press.
Maldari, Philip, and Aimee Allison
2009 “The Protest over the BART Police Shooting.” The Morning Show.
Pacifica Radio, January 8. At https://kpfa.org/episode/47362/.
Mann, Coramae Richey, and Marjorie Sue Zatz
1998 Images of Color, Images of Crime: Readings. Los Angeles: Roxbury
Publishing.
Mara, Janis
2009 “Probe to Focus on Use of Force—Suspect Had Been Arrested,
Released in Daly City.” Contra Costa Times, November 24.
Matias, Cheryl E., Kara Mitchell Viesca, Dorothy F. Garrison-Wade, Madhavi Tandon,
and Rene Galindo
2014 “‘What Is Critical Whiteness Doing in OUR Nice Field like Critical
Race Theory?’ Applying CRT and CWS to Understand the White
Imaginations of White Teacher Candidates.” Equity & Excellence in
Education 47(3): 289–304.
Matier, Phillip, and Andrew Ross
2009a “Death Threats against BART Officer Taken Seriously.” San Francisco
2009b “‘No One Appeared ... in Charge.’” San Francisco Chronicle, August 19.
2009c “Parking Meter Plans Halted.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 5.
Mawby, Rob C.
2012 Policing Images: Policing, Communication and Legitimacy. London:
Routledge.
May, Patrick
2009 “BART Shooting Fallout Erupts.” San Jose Mercury News, January 8.
McLaughlin, Eliot C., Augie Martin, and Randi Kaye
2009 “Video of California Police Shooting Spurs Investigation.” CNN.
com, January 6. At http://edition.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/06/BART.
shooting/index.html.
McNair, Kimberly
2019 “Beyond Hashtags: Black Twitter and Building Solidarity across
Borders.” In #identity Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation,
edited by Abigail De Kosnik and Keith P. Feldman, 283–98. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Mercury News
2009 “BART Completes Prelim Probe of Fatal Shooting,” January 12.
Metinko, Chris
2009a “Former BART Officer Waives Extradition; Arraignment Today.”
2009b “Students from Oakland, Berkeley Protest BART Shooting.” Oakland
Metinko, Chris, Kelly Rayburn, and Steve Harmon
2009 “BART Officer Extradited to East Bay.” Contra Costa Times, January 15.
Monroe, Becky
2011 “America’s Peacemaker: Annual Report Fiscal Year 2010.” Washington,
DC: Community Relations Service, US Department of Justice.
At https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/crs/legacy/2011/05/09/
annualreport2010.pdf.
Morris, Scott
2019 “Since Oscar Grant, 242 People Shot and Killed by Police in Bay Area.”
Oakland Reporter (blog), May 15. At https://www.oaklandreporter.
org/2019/05/since-oscar-grant-242-people-shot-and-killed-by-police-in-
bay-area.html.
Myrow, Rachel
2018 “10 Years Later: Oscar Grant’s Legacy Continues to Inspire Artists
and Activists.” KQED.org, December 28. At https://www.kqed.org/
forum/2010101868925/10-years-later-oscar-grants-legacy-continues-to-
inspire-artists-and-activists.
NBC Bay Area
2009 “BART Completes Shooting Investigation,” January 11. At https://
www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/bart-holds-community-meeting-over-
deadly-shooting/1887977/.
Nguyen, Ly-Huoang, and Terry Marshall
2003 “Chronology of California School District Takeovers.” Data Center,
Youth Strategy Project. At http://www.datacenter.org/wp-content/
uploads/oaklandtakeover.pdf.
Norwood, Kimberly Jade
2014 “The Far-Reaching Shadow Cast by Ferguson.” Washington University
Journal of Law & Policy 46(1): 1–22.
Oakland Fund for Children and Youth
2012 “Appendix A: Oakland Youth Indicator Report.” In Oakland Kids First!:
2013–2016 Strategic Investment Plan. At https://www.ofcy.org/assets/
Strategic-Plan/OFCY-Strategic-Plan-FULL-VERSION-082014.pdf.
Oakland Tribune
2010 “BART to Redistribute Tasers to Police Force,” June 8, 2010.
O’Brien, Matt
2014 “Reforms Didn’t Prepare BART Police for Latest Tragedy.” Oakland
Ogletree, Charles J.
2010 The Presumption of Guilt: The Arrest of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Race,
Class, and Crime in America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Olmos, Daniel
2019 “Racialized Im/Migration and Autonomy of Migration Perspectives:
New Directions and Opportunities.” Sociology Compass 13(1): 1–14.
Osuna, Steven
2020 “Transnational Moral Panic: Neoliberalism and the Spectre of MS-13.”
Race & Class 61 (4): 3–28.
Owens, Marcus, and Christina Antiporda
2017 “Occupied Oakland, Past and Present.” City Unsilenced: Urban Resistance
and Public Space in the Age of Shrinking Democracy, edited by Jeffrey Hou
and Sabine Knierbein, 156–69. New York: Routledge.
Parks, Gregory, and Matthew W Hughey
2012 Twelve Angry Men: True Stories of Being a Black Man in America Today.
New York: New Press.
Paybarah, Azi
2020 “Officer Charged in Fatal Shooting of a Black Man in a California
Walmart.” New York Times, September 2.
Phillips, Alfred, Jr.
2011 Righteous Orientation: Self-Healing of Source-Ken World, Stimulation of
the Great-Global Source-Ken Family. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.
Pipkins, Martel A.
2019 “‘I Feared for My Life’: Law Enforcement’s Appeal to Murderous
Empathy.” Race and Justice 9(2): 180–96.
Praxis Project
2010 “Justice for Oscar Grant and the Struggle for Police Accountability.”
In Fair Game: A Strategy Guide for Racial Justice Communications in the
Obama Era, 42–46. Washington, DC: Praxis Project.
Preuitt, Lori, and Jodi Hernandez
2009 “Rarely Seen Video Played at Mehserle Hearing.” NBC Bay Area, May
19.
Raider Nation Collective
2010a Raider Nation: Volume 1, From the January Rebellions to Lovelle Mixon
and Beyond. Oakland: Raider Nation Collective.
2010b “Lessons Never Learned: Nonprofits and the State, Redux.” IndyBay.org,
June 30. At https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/06/30/18652347.php.
Rayburn, Kelly
2008 “Dellums Unhappy HBO Drama about Pimp Set in Oakland.” Oakland
Tribune, December 20.
2009a “Oakland Pledges Help to Damaged Businesses.” Oakland Tribune,
January 9.
2009b “City Wise: Anger Turns to Hope for Oakland Merchants.” Oakland
Rayburn, Kelly, and Sean Maher
2009a “Former BART Cop Arrested on Murder Charge in Nevada.” Oakland
2009b “Ex-BART Cop Arrested in Shooting Death—Authorities Hope
Move Calms Oakland Tensions, Prosecutors Expected to Discuss Case
Today.” San Jose Mercury News, January 14.
Redmond, Tim
2009 “Lethal Force: The BART Police Department Operates without
Oversight or Accountability—but with Plenty of Attack Dogs and
12-Gauge Shotguns.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, January 5.
Richman, Josh
2009a “BART Shooting Probe Could Have Many Layers.” Oakland Tribune,
January 8.
2009b “Lawmakers Propose Bill for BART Police Oversight.” Oakland
Tribune, January 8e.
2009c “BART Shooting Case Far from Open, Shut.” Contra Costa Times,
January 9.
2009d “Activists Plan More BART Shooting Protests.” Oakland Tribune,
January 12.
2009e “Activists Still Call for DA’s Ouster.” The Argus, January 15.
Richman, Josh, and Sean Maher
2009 “BART Police Shooter Quits Job, Skips Interview.” East Bay Times,
January 7.
Robinson, Cedric J.
2000 Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill,
NC: University of North Carolina Press.
2007 Forgeries of Memory and Meaning: Blacks and the Regimes of Race in
American Theater and Film before World War II. Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press.
2013 “What Is to Be Done? The Future of Critical Ethnic Studies.” Plenary
lecture at Critical Ethnic Studies Association Conference, University of
Illinois, Chicago, September 21.
Rodríguez, César “che”
2020 “‘The Whole Damn System Is Guilty’: Urban Violence, the Principal
Contradiction of Racial Capitalism, and the Production of Premature
Death in Oakland, California.” Critical Sociology 46(7/8): 1057–74.
Rosenhall, Laurel
2019 “California’s Attempt to Reduce Police Shootings, Explained.”
CalMatters.org, July 18.
Rosynsky, Paul T.
2009 “Oakland Mayor Calls for Calm after Bail Set for Ex-BART Cop.” San
Jose Mercury News, January 31.
Rubenstein, Steve
2009 “BART Passenger Accuses Ex-Officer of Violence in November
Incident.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 15.
Rushin, Stephen
2016 “Police Union Contracts.” Duke Law Journal 66(6): 1191–1266.
2018 “Police Disciplinary Appeals.” University of Pennsylvania Law Review
167(3): 545–610.
Rutten, Tim
2009 “Oakland Murder Mystery.” Los Angeles Times, January 17.
San Francisco Chronicle

2009a “Fallout from the BART Shooting,” January 10, 2009.
2009b “Berkeley Students Stage Protest around BART Shooting.” January 24,
2009.
Savidge, Nico
2019 “‘Long Live Oscar Grant’: New Mural, Street Name Honor Man
Whose Death Rocked Oakland.” East Bay Times, June 9.
Schrader, Stuart
2019 Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed
American Policing. Oakland: University of California Press.
Sheppard, Barry
2015 “Letter from the US: Police Killings Spark New, Growing Movement.”
Green Left, January 18. At https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/letter-us-
police-killings-spark-new-growing-movement.
Simerman, John
2009 “BART Shooting Video Evokes Questions, Rage.” Contra Costa Times,
January 5.
Smith, Neil
1996 The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London:
Routledge.
Soep, Elisabeth
2012 “Resistance.” In Keywords in Youth Studies, edited by Nancy Lesko and
Susan Talburt, 126–30. New York: Routledge.
Spade, Dean
2015 Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the
Limits of Law. Durham: Duke University Press.
Spence, Lester K.
2011 Stare in the Darkness: The Limits of Hip-Hop and Black Politics.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Stannard, Matthew B., and Demian Bulwa
2009 “Deadly Force—on Camera.” San Francisco Chronicle, January 7.
Stephens, Jack
2009 “Racism and the Right to Due Process.” Race, Poverty & the
Environment 16(1): 44.
Taylor, Jack
2013 “‘We Are All Oscar Grant’: Police Brutality, Death, and the Work of
Mourning.” Transforming Anthropology 21(2): 187–97.
Thanawala, Sudhin
2009 “Man Fatally Shot by Oakland Police at BART Station.” San Mateo
Daily Journal, January 2.
The Red Nation
2020 “Communism Is the Horizon, Queer Indigenous Feminism Is the
Way.” Stolen Land: The Red Nation, September 21. At http://therednation.
org/communism-is-the-horizon-queer-indigenous-feminism-is-the-way/.
Tibbs, Donald F.
2009 “Who Killed Oscar Grant: A Legal-Eulogy of the Cultural Logic of
Black Hyper-Policing in the Post-Civil Rights Era.” Journal of Race,
Gender and Poverty 1(1): 1–34.
Tucker, Jill
2009 “No Cuffs on Man Shot by Officer, BART Maintains.” San Francisco
Tucker, Jill, Kelly Zito, and Heather Knight
2009a “Deadly BART Brawl—Officer Shoots Rider, 22.” San Francisco
2009b “New Year BART Brawl—Officer Shoots Rider, 22.” San Francisco
Unfinished Acts: January Rebellions, Oakland, California 2009
2012 Oakland. At https://unfinishedacts.noblogs.org/files/2015/12/
unfinished_2012_4web.pdf.
Vest, Jennifer Lisa
2013 “What Doesn’t Kill You: Existential Luck, Postracial Racism, and the
Subtle and Not So Subtle Ways the Academy Keeps Women of Color
Out.” Seattle Journal for Social Justice 12(2): 471–518.
Vitale, Alex S.
2017 The End of Policing. London: Verso.
Warren-White, Josh
2009 “No Bail for Killer Cops!” Indybay.org, January 30.
Waxmann, Laura
2019 “Fruitvale BART Station Mural Honors Oscar Grant 10 Years after
Shooting Death.” The San Francisco Examiner, June 8.
Wells-Barnett, Ida B.
1893 “Lynch Law in All Its Phases.” Voices of Democracy: The US Oratory
Project. At https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/wells-lynch-law-speech-text/.
Winston, Ali
2011 “Deadly Secrets: How California Law Shields Oakland Police
Violence.” Colorlines, August 17, 2011. At http://colorlines.com/
archives/2011/08/deadly_secrets_how_california_law_has_shielded_
oakland_police_violence.html.
Woodall, Angela
2009 “BART Hires Law Firm to Probe Grant Shooting.” Oakland Tribune,
February 11.
Woodall, Angela, and Kelly Rayburn
2009 “BART Shooting Sparks Protests, Violence, Sadness Amid a Storm.”
Contra Costa Times, January 8.
Woodall, Angela, Kelly Rayburn, and Martin G. Reynolds
2009a “Hundreds Gather on Oakland Streets to Protest BART Shooting.”
Woodall, Angela, Kristin Bender, Kelly Rayburn, and Cecily Burt
2009b “Fragile Grip on Peace Tested.” Contra Costa Times, January 15.
Woods, Clyde
2002 “Life After Death.” The Professional Geographer 54(1): 62–66.
Zazaboi, Yakpasua
2006 Sydewayz. Baywood Park, CA: Sydeshow World/Destroy
Entertainment.
160 ABSTRACTS
Violent Symbiosis:The History of CCJ’s Role in Legitimizing Racialized

Police Violence
Ryan Phillips, Brian Pitman & Stephen T. Young
The protests fueled by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor
during the summer of 2020 provided another catalyst for conversations about
racialized police killings in the United States. For at least the second time
in a decade, the nation’s attention shifted toward calls for police reforms.
However, any real conversation about resolving racialized police violence
must contextualize the role of Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ) in
legitimizing police and perpetuating harm. Through a historical analysis we
seek to demonstrate the symbiotic link between CCJ and police. By tracing
August Vollmer’s early role in the development of the field to the current
state of funding and research, we demonstrate that CCJ is inextricably linked
to racialized police violence.
“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain”: Revelous Citizen Journalism, Righteous/

Riotous Work, and the Gains of the Oscar Grant Moment in Oakland,
California
César “che” Rodríguez
This article examines the first month of the Oscar Grant moment in Oak-
land, California—January 2009—as the first episode in a broader pattern
of popular mobilizations within the United States during the past decade
against police violence. This moment disrupted the cultural and juridical
strategies that law enforcement officers and agencies who harm, maim, and
kill people use to produce impunity. Revelers turned citizen-journalists broke
the cultural production of police impunity, as they produced and shared
impromptu video footage that neutralized the information management
and narrative framing strategies that law enforcement officers and agen-
cies normally deploy to exonerate themselves. In turn, people resisted via
mass mobilizations, direct actions, and rebellions, which broke the juridical
production of police impunity, as government officials in local and federal
government reacted by conceding the historic arrest and incarceration of a
law enforcement officer for an on-duty murder. Furthermore, this intense
period of activism forced rare modicums of transparency and reforms of
the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police department. Ultimately, this
manuscript aims to intervene in journalistic and popular repudiations of
popular struggle, particularly rebellions, as well as despondent analytical
ABSTRACTS 161
tendencies within academia by illustrating how people in struggle broke

police impunity through a litany of actions, from impromptu citizen jour-
nalism, mass mobilization, and community organizing to open rebellion.
Unraveling the School Punitive Web: The School-to-Prison Pipeline in

the Context of the Gendered Shadow Carceral State
Andrea Román Alfaro & Jerry Flores
Education researchers and policymakers popularized the school-to-prison

pipeline metaphor to understand the connection between school failure and
youth incarceration in the United States. However, the metaphor has been
criticized for simplifying schools’ role in creating and enlarging the carceral
state. Based on Latina girls’ experiences attending a community day school
in California, this study shows how alternative education programs facili-
tate the annexation of schools within the criminal justice system, enclosing
Latina girls in a gendered web of punitive threads. Alternative education
and its programs are best understood as shadow carceral innovations that
expand the carceral state beyond prison walls.
Reproduced with permission of copyright owner.
Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

Oscar Did Not Die in Vain R

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Oscar Did Not Die in Vain R

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain” 85

“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain”: Revelous

César “che” Rodríguez*

Social Justice Vol. 48, No. 3 85

1, 2009 (at least) to November 5, 2010—when Mehserle was sentenced

Racial capitalism accounts for the conditions in Oakland’s flatlands,

Perhaps the most accurate historical accounts of the political mobilizations

pattern within the Western academy is disconcerting, given the reckoning

I found these texts by studying the material published by journalists,

An understanding of police impunity is essential to appreciating the gains

ment agencies disincentivizes said attorneys from practicing their appointed

Pirone subsequently concocted physical assaults upon himself by Grant that

independent internet media. Most immediately, the videos evoked self-

expressed linkages and solidarities with Palestine, as Israel, a nuclear military

of struggle, to protest, even rebel against, the extrajudicial police killing of

As criminal sanctions for Mehserle appeared to be increasingly fleeting, he

Mehserle’s attorney reportedly made it difficult for BART’s internal af-

rescheduling and finger-pointing between BART and Mehserle’s attorney,

Appointed and elected government officials—from the mayor to the

The January 7 rebellion forced all levels of government agencies to imme-

Riots Work: Breaking Police Impunity to Prevent Another Rebellion

they “don’t count [Mehserle’s incarceration] as a victory,” they “do count it

An Irredeemable Crisis of Legitimacy and the Outsourcing of an Internal

Normally, BART’s internal affairs division would have conducted a personnel

Bankrupting the bad apple thesis as an explanation of police violence, the

BART also hired the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement

(Doyle 2009b). Contrary to BART’s press releases, which highlighted police

BART Police Reforms and the Limits Thereof

The Oscar Grant moment produced a modicum of public accountability

On June 8, 2019, Wanda Johnson stood before a crowd at Oakland’s Fruitvale

channeled by a network of experienced and effective community organizers

And yet these accomplishments still leave us with more to be done.

(American Public Health Association 2018, Goodman 2020, Vitale 2017).

The Oscar Grant moment should therefore be remembered as a moment

TOP OF HIM WTF?,” Twitter, January 6, 2009, 7:35 p.m., https://twitter.com/wise_diva/

Advance the Struggle

Bay Area Rapid Transit

Kramer, Alisa Sarah

Maher, Sean (cont.)

San Francisco Chronicle

Violent Symbiosis:The History of CCJ’s Role in Legitimizing Racialized

“Oscar Did Not Die in Vain”: Revelous Citizen Journalism, Righteous/

tendencies within academia by illustrating how people in struggle broke

Unraveling the School Punitive Web: The School-to-Prison Pipeline in

Education researchers and policymakers popularized the school-to-prison

You might also like