[jackfoxy]

A former Oakland PD officer shared with me insight into how police intelligence worked back in the day. And I'm sure this still goes on.

It was back in the time of the SLA terrorism and Patty Hearst kidnapping. One of the brothers in East Oakland casually mentioned to a cop "What are all these hippies doing in our neighborhood?" (It turns out they were having a strategy meeting.) This got reported up the chain of command and OPD intelligence set up traffic stops all around the neighborhood perimeter. That was it. They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them, with special interest in anyone White.

When the sh!t hit the fan and the FBI got involved (soon thereafter) the OPD chief told the FBI they knew exactly who was involved. The FBI was dismissive and wasted valuable time. When the FBI hit a blank wall in regards to identifying SLA members they finally swallowed their pride and asked the OPD for the list. That's how the SLA membership was identified.

[echelon_musk]

Anyone unfamiliar with the Patty Hearst kidnapping may want to read the excellent book Days of Rage [0]. I started reading it after it was recommended by another user on this forum a long time ago.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_Rage:_America%27s_Radi...

[TheBlight]

Is it possible this story served as a parallel construction -- like when you don't want to expose your actual sources and methods?

[jackfoxy]

No. There was no reason for this ex-cop to tell me the story 5 years ago about something that happened 45 years earlier. And he didn't make a career as a cop, so he wasn't protecting anyone.

[doktrin]

> It was back in the time of the SLA terrorism and Patty Hearst kidnapping. One of the brothers in East Oakland casually mentioned to a cop "What are all these hippies doing in our neighborhood?" (It turns out they were having a strategy meeting.)

The SLA only had one black member, who at the time was an escaped convict. Why would a half-dozen white hippies, and one black fugitive, leave their safehouse to hold a strategy meeting in East Oakland?

[refurb]

Because they are under the (mostly correct assumption) that poorer neighborhoods (which are often, but not exclusively, minority neighborhoods) have lower police presence.

And also that radical hippies tend not to have a lot of money, so it's not unusual for them to live in low income neighborhoods (i.e. some members likely lived there anyways).

[doktrin]

This is an infamous and reasonably well documented small group of people. You don’t need to speculate about their socioeconomic status because we know who they were and can count them on two hands.

TL;DR none of what you said remotely applies. They were middle-upper-class with access to resources and lived in Berkeley before moving to a notorious Concord safehouse in August ‘73, about 3 months before anything in this story takes place.

[jackfoxy]

They had not kidnapped Patty at that point. The only thing the SLA was taking credit for at that time was the Marcus Foster murder. They probably thought they had a safe house in east Oakland, which is why all the hippies (as described by the bystander) went there for the meeting.

[doktrin]

> The only thing the SLA was taking credit for at that time was the Marcus Foster murder.

The only thing? That murder was a huge deal, and what got the FBI involved. We're talking about the assassination of Oakland's first black school superintendent. By self described marxist/lenninist/maoist terrorists and using cyanide laced bullets. The headlines write themselves.

Now is there not only a fugitive in the group, but they're all fresh off making national news for political violence? Violence that wildly alienated the black community? At which point they choose to leave their actual safehouse to go to a "we think its safe" house in said community for a brief meeting? Did they forget their fake IDs? OPD is looking for (literal) leftist terrorists and don't find a single excuse to detain 6 hippies and a black man?

I don't doubt you're sharing this in good faith, but If I'm gonna keep it a buck, none of this passes the smell test for me. That said, I guess it would track in a way. The whole SLA affair has a stranger than fiction vibe to it from start to finish.

[spacebacon]

See parallel construction comment above.

[wolverine876]

A bit of a self-satisfied, everyone-else-is-a-fool, told-you-so story for the teller. IME, those are signals that the story reveals the teller, the culture of the teller, but not facts.

Of course, I don't know. I think the hard thing in these situations is that we humans tend to trust personal stories like this one - it's rude not to. My comment is rude, in a sense, transgressing in this social interaction. But the accurate, truthful course is to treat the facts as [edit:] nothing - not as maybe true, etc., but as if they were never said.

[tharmas]

It's a slippery slope. Mussolini defeated the Mafia in southern Italy. However, his gov't did it in a brutal manner. Lots of innocent people rounded up too.

"The hand of Vengeance found the bed To which the Purple Tyrant fled; The iron hand crush'd the Tyrant's head And became a Tyrant in his stead." --The Grey Monk, William Blake

[pyuser583]

Mussolini is insanely popular in Sicily, which is alarming because not only was he a Fascist, but a Northern Italian.

By “popular”, I mean tour guides will sing his praises to American tourists. Jewish, American tourists.

[wolverine876]

Fascism is popular everywhere right now, so it's not dependant on the location (Sicily in this case). The question is, how did it become popular in so many places simultaneously?

[pyuser583]

This was in the 1990s.

Historical Fascism is unpopular.

It’s made a come back in Italy and India.

But the modern, far-right neofascists admire Israel more than the Third Reich.

The resurgence of the far-right began in the early 2000s when Jörg Haider‘s Freedom Party took power in Austria and Jean-Marie le Pen made the run-off in France.

It got much more powerful during the financial crisis of 2008 and the migration crisis caused by the Arab Spring in the mid 2010s.

It’s not a mystery why people are pissed off and looking for non-mainstream candidates.

A big mystery is why the far-left has vanished.

The Occupy Protests fizzled out, Jeffrey Corbyn imploded the Labour Party, and Jacobin put up a paywall.

[wolverine876]

> This was in the 1990s.

Interesting!

> It’s not a mystery why people are pissed off and looking for non-mainstream candidates.

Why are they? Generally, economies are doing well, there is peace - at least, they were until the fascists started disrupting it.

> It’s made a come back in Italy and India.

Hungary, Poland, US, Russia, Brazil, El Salvador, ... where does it end?

> A big mystery is why the far-left has vanished.

Agreed, and even the moderately left.

[tharmas]

He was popular in Sicily during the time of his reign as well because his regime nullified the Mafia.

[pyuser583]

What the tour guide said was it’s because “he created jobs in Sicily” and “treated Sicily like it was a part of Italy.”

[wolverine876]

It always turns out badly and the dictator is always corrupt. If they aren't corrupt, why wouldn't they hold elections and allow freedom and dissent?

We don't need to, and don't have time to, and absolutely should not sacrifice the victims to, relearning the lessons of democracy.

[seabass-labrax]

It's only 'corrupt' though, if there was any expectation that the resources of the state were to be controlled by anyone but the ultimate leader. Therefore, the view of whether a given absolute leader is corrupt or not depends more on the society's expectations of them than it depends on their actions. A monarch in an absolute monarchy can never be considered corrupt, even if widely seen as wicked.

[wolverine876]

Even if that's true, how is it meaningful? Who cares what you call it, it's corruption.

[seabass-labrax]

The semantics are not very meaningful; I will concede that :) My point was simply that the concept of democracy isn't necessarily an obvious one. Perhaps in early 20th-century Italy, where there was still a technically supreme monarchy, and the tradition of democratic elections itself was only a few generations old, putting trust in one man alone (Mussolini) might have seemed reasonable or even ideal.

[NotSammyHagar]

Also, the mafia came back, maybe not in his time.

[tharmas]

That was due to the Allied Military post-WW2 occupation of Italy. There are a couple of books on that very subject. These Mafioso presented themselves as anti-fascist and anti-communist to help their appointment into positions of power.

[mk89]

Which is ironically the same way as they got "used" by Garibaldi to "unify" Italy in 1860-1861.

Only a fool can actually believe to defeat mafia with plain violence.

[mistrial9]

lots of Mafia in the USA placed in positions of authority in labor unions -- see Teamsters. Some US political thinking was to use these harsh, often effective people as a "lesser evil" versus genuine communist-labor organizers. Due to many abuses of workers (see History of Slave or Indentured Labor) there were many communist labor organizers, for real.

[jowea]

Now we wait to see if Bukele is doing it again.

[antoniojtorres]

Why don’t you ask for a source?

[ceejayoz]

What would the identity of the "former Oakland PD officer" do to establish the veracity of the claim?

[rocqua]

I presume you mean the Symbionese Liberation Army when you say SLA?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army

[Scoundreller]

Probably. But Service Level Agreement Terrorism has a nice ring to it.

[stronglikedan]

They gave some context by specifying "SLA terrorism" up front, so it's a safe presumption.

[supportengineer]

I feel pretty terrified when I receive an SLA breach alert

[pjc50]

> They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them

Ah, the famous American freedom. Papers please.

(in practice, it's practically impossible to stop law enforcement doing this kind of thing at least some of the time, no matter what country you're in or how unconstitutional it is. There will always be groups with little enough political power that they have no redress)

[ysofunny]

sorry, but the proper american phrase is "license and registration"

[brnt]

Drivers license and car registration, right?

If I was a terrorist on US soil, I'm gonna be bussing.

[wolverine876]

Intracity buses have cameras. Intercity buses require ID.

[irrational]

No they don’t. I’ve often put my kids on intercity (really interstate) buses to go visit their grandparents. I’ve never had to show ID and they don’t have ID.

[wolverine876]

Did you show it when you bought the tickets? Which bus line?

I remember news stories about it, and thinking that people could no longer travel anonymously.

[interactivecode]

Why? Do interstates also have border check points?

[wolverine876]

Bus companies require them, afaik.

[dublinben]

Real criminals ride bicycles.

[jethro_tell]

And don't carry ids or phones.

[jkaplowitz]

That only covers the driver, not everyone in the vehicle.

[ysofunny]

doesn't matter, they'll be friends on facebook, or have otherwise interacted with each other online

[some_random]

While it is practically impossible in cases like this, there's still a huge difference between the US where police will at best begrudgingly acknowledge your rights and most other countries in the world where you do not have rights to begin with.

[olliej]

On the other hand in the US police routinely kill unarmed people, which seems like it’s much worse for personal freedom. Do you have freedom to consider your rights when doing so gets you self-defenced to death for not cooperating?

[some_random]

Quick question, without looking it up what order of magnitude of unarmed people do you think the US police kill each year? 10s? 100s? 1,000s? 10,000s?

Per WaPo's police shooting database[1], there were 51 last year (going up to 71 if you include unknown, 173 including unknown and undetermined). Filter down to people who were not fleeing or having a mental health crisis and you get 8 (26 including unknown and undetermined). While that still represents a problem in the use of force by cops, to say nothing of the idea that carrying a weapon (which is legal in much of the US) means that your death at the hands of the police is acceptable, killings of unarmed people seem far from routine. I don't think you have any reason to believe you will be killed by the police for not giving them your ID.

[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

[Ozark]

Your link says 1141 killed by police right at the top and a quick search lead to https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... which says 1160 last year. This is just the number killed not the number shot.

[some_random]

I was talking about unarmed people because we're specifically talking about people being shot just for not complying with orders they're not legally required to comply to. I didn't think about the possibility of people being shot and surviving, mainly because cops typically magdump people which seems to be reflected in the stats since the number only goes up by 19. In any case, I don't think the distinction is substantial to this discussion.

Edit: I'm not seeing 1141 anywhere, where did you get that number?

[defrost]

> Filter down to people who were not fleeing or having a mental health crisis

Why on earth should US police get a free pass on shooting people fleeing or having a mental health crisis?

Such things warrent an investigation with a real possibility of penalties and|or charges in Commonwealth countries.

Are you stating that it's OK to shoot people that run | are paranoid?

[some_random]

I filtered those out because we're specifically talking about people being shot just for not complying with orders they're not legally required to comply to.

[doktrin]

I didn't read the parents comment as trying to make a point of nationalistic pride, but to frame the US in the broader international context. There are a lot of countries in the world. The majority of which rank below the US on measurements of corruption, and many on police violence.

https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/global/202...

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2022

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-ki...

[refurb]

This is such a lazy reply. Even 10 seconds Googling would tell you Americans don't need to provide ID to the police (unlike other countries) unless you are operating a motor vehicle.

[yywwbbn]

> unlike other countries

Unlike many other countries. I live in Europe and certainly don’t need provide an ID without a cause or even carry one with myself

[doktrin]

> “I live in Europe”

You don’t say.

[pjc50]

Comment I was replying to said: "This got reported up the chain of command and OPD intelligence set up traffic stops all around the neighborhood perimeter. That was it. They just asked for ID of everyone leaving the neighborhood and recorded them"

So are you saying that didn't happen?

[refurb]

Police are allowed to stop traffic and get drivers IDs. It think that's true in every country?

[moffkalast]

Glory to Arstotzka.

[LAC-Tech]

Dirty hippies. Thank god those domestic terrorists were apprehended before they could murder again.

[dang]

Please don't do this here.

You may not owe dirty hippy terrorists better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.

[retox]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbionese_Liberation_Army

>During its existence from 1973 to 1975, the group murdered at least two people, committed armed bank robberies, attempted bombings and other violent crimes, including the kidnapping in 1974 of newspaper heiress Patty Hearst.