Read this Texas horror story of what happened to Scott Henson, a white grandpa, and his African-American granddaughter, Ty, at the hands of the police. It's sad and disheartening and makes me wonder what would happen in Texas to a gay couple with a child of a different race, which is quite common in California.
How hard would it have been to perform a safety check without running up on me like I'm John Dillinger and scaring the crap out of a five year old? I didn't resist or struggle, but they felt obliged to handcuff me and snatch the kid up for interrogation away from any adult family member. Nine police cars plus the deputy constable all showing up to investigate the heinous crime of "babysitting while white."
Moreover, there was no apology to be had at the end of this charade, to me or to Ty. They interrogated the child but no one tried to comfort her beyond handing her a flashlight to play with. And when it was over, not one of those officers, the supervisor included, thought to take a moment to try to explain to the child what had happened, why they'd behaved that way toward her family, or why they'd treated her grandpa like a criminal. They just opened up the door to the squad car as the cuffs were coming off me and Ty came running back and lept into my arms with such force it almost knocked me down.
I love taco trucks. I particularly love the one by the San Francisco Hall of Justice. So it's uncool to rob the taco truck. Any taco truck. These guys below got what they had coming.
Imagine my blog and my pro site (www.davidwilton.com) offline forever. I know. You're completely underwhelmed by the thought. Still, what if all lowly personal or professional single person websites and blogs that linked to another website with potentially infringed copyrighted material were simply subject to shut down without notice, a hearing, an opportunity to confront accusers and rebut the accusations?
The US Senate is considering legislation that would do just that. The legislation is called the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), and would put every website that writes about or links to other material in legal jeopardy.
As the always entertaining blog, Boing Boing, says today on their site, "This would unmake the Web, just as proposed in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). We don't want that world. If you don't want it either, visit AmericanCensorship.org for instructions on contacting your Senator. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has more information on this and other issues central to your freedom online."
Note: I would have done a fancy "offline" splash page in place of this post, but the platform and registrar I use require a lot of work to do it and then put it back. Sorry. :(
This is some powerful stuff. This Occupy thing may have some legs. Still, never underestimate the viciousness of a cornered system to cause pain in retaliation.
They say the Occupy movement is a diverse grouping of protesters unlike anything we've seen for a long time. My initial exposure to those who have camped out in city parks and sidewalks was about a month ago when I went down to the Occupy SF encampment at Justin Herman Plaza. That initial exposure had me doubting that much was going to come of it.
While the presence of the long term homeless is actually more the point of the movement than a reason to doubt it, my sense was that the small group of genuinely aggrieved members of the fast slipping middle class was far outnumbered by the permanently addicted and mentally unstable. Tonight I saw something different.
(Above and Below.) I had heard that the state building on Golden Gate was going to be "occupied" by students from Bay Area universities. So I went down there to have a look. I was amazed at the massive police presence for what was supposed to be students from some pretty elite universities. In fact, that was what it was. Students from UC Berkeley, UC Davis, SFSU, City College of San Francisco, and UC Santa Cruz took the mic to express their demands (affordable or free tuition, stops in cuts to education, etc.) bourne of rising tuition and fees and the sagging fortunes of their parents who are trying to help them. It lasted about an hour. Then everybody calmly left the area to catch busses back to their schools. Even the cops could see there was "nothing to see here" and began leaving before it was over.
(Below.) Of course, once you're out there and witnessing the fervor of the Occupy state of mind, it's hard not to keep going. So I did. My next stop was the occupation of Bank of America. I had heard earlier that a sizable number of student occupiers had streamed into a Bank of America downtown and set up a tent, the by-now symbol of the Occupy movement. When I got there, the cops were everywhere and formed a line around the entrance to the bank. Easily a hundred cops were there removing a group of 20-something young people one by one. The overtime for those cops has got to be bad news for the city. And it frankly seems a bit like overkill. But as they say, "Officer safety, officer safety!"
(Below.) The next stop was the encampment at Justin Herman Plaza, where the scary freely mingles with the beaten down. During this visit, there was also some San Francisco public defender thrown in. Jeff Adachi and his lieutenant Matt Gonzalez showed up and said a few words before standing back and listening to the rest of the General Assembly discussion on the mayor's demands (no camping on the grass, no expansion of the camps, no permanent or semi-permanent structures, attention to sanitation and the like).
There's been talk of violence in the Occupy camps. While I was there, I saw a disagreement between camp members settled with what looked like a banishment. A group of young men stood in a close group and chanted, "Leave, leave, leave ..." at another young man who looked identical to the group until he turned and frog marched left the camp, staring at the ground. I don't know what the disagreement was about, but it reflected something said in the General Assembly tonight: Troublemakers were being handled by the camp itself in a peaceful and effective manner. This I saw with my own eyes.
For more photos and tweets from the scene, follow my twitter feed at @DavidWilton.
While I've been using (415) 669-4059 as my office number for some time now, my old number is still connected. However, that number, (415) 503-0783, will soon be disconnected. Thanks!
In the coming weeks, I'll be opening my office in Texas. I suppose this is a reopening because I practiced in Texas for several months after law school. Since I go back and forth between my home in California and Texas to see my parents and friends, I decided it made sense to practice there or at least be ready to practice there whenever opportunities come along -- and they do. It's pretty common that I get asked about legal issues while I'm visiting. Now I'll be able to actually help rather than start every conversation with the disclaimer, "I don't practice in Texas, but in California we do things like so ... maybe you should see a local attorney."
Stay tuned for local contact details. Meanwhile, feel free to call me or send an email using the contact details in the right sidebar.
A Texas law firm has wasted no time in going after cases of barratry just as the Texas legislature, in the words of The Edwards Law Firm, "just made it a lot more dicey to chase ambulances in Texas."
I leave town for two short weeks, and the sh*t finally hits the fan. The San Francisco Superior Court has announced that 40% of court staff, 11 of 12 court commissioners and 25 courtrooms are to be made redundant. The civil division will take the brunt of the losses, but it has already hit the criminal division. Criminal fIlings are way down. Anyone who has spent a morning down at the Hall of Justice recently will recall the sound of crickets.
So this begs the question: Is this a good thing?
UPDATE: Layoffs have been reduced to a mere 15% of staff and retention of some commissioners. Still bad, but not as ...
UPDATE: I received a conciliatory email today from Ms. Brooke Oliver, thanking me for removing the objectionable material, urging me to be more careful in the future and inviting me to participate in future Pride celebrations. She also withdrew the demand for $10,000 in damages.
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It's not often that the premiere gay pride event of the country turns to you and demands $10,000 because they don't like your opinion or your raw video. The pleasure was bestowed on me Tuesday after having posted a video of the aftermath of a shooting that occurred on Saturday evening about 6:15 PM a few meters northeast of the corner of 7th and Market Streets. In the video title, I put "Shooting, Civic Center, Pride Festival, June 25, 2011, 6:15 PM." In the title for the video page, I wrote "San Francisco / Civic Center Shooting at Pride 2011 - Sat 6-25-2011." I included no further commentary except a caption that read "7th and Market Streets" and a description beneath the video concerning the circumstances of how I learned of the incident and ended up in the vicinity of the injured victims. In what I wrote, my intention was to identify location, not lay blame.
The incident came to my attention while we were standing around UN Plaza where SF Pride assigned numerous exhibitors when 30-40 people came running up the plaza and deeper into the festival grounds. We all looked back towards Market. After a few minutes, I walked down to 7th and Market Street and observed what you see on the video. The distance was short. (Click map at right for a better view. You can also view the event's own map [pdf] for comparison.)
The video went mini-viral and had more than 3200 views by Tuesday afternoon, just 3 days after posting it. It was also embedded on the blog, bluoz, used on the local newsite SFAppeal.com and linked to by Californiabeat.org. KRON 4 also used snippets of it in a broadcast Saturday night with my permission. That's when SF Pride decided to deploy their robo-lawyers and send out a threatening letter, to wit:
Dear Mr. Wilton:
I am General Counsel for the San Francisco Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Celebration Committee, Inc. ("SF Pride"), the producer of San Francisco Pride and the owner of the trademark "SF Pride, among other valuable marks.
The YouTube video that you filmed and display at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOfz0zxDdNc falsely states that there was a "shooting at Pride 2011". The police and the media have all confirmed and made affirmative public statements that the shooting that happened on Saturday evening, June 25th WAS NOT AT SF PRIDE and was not connected the Pride Festival.
Your YouTube posting falsely claims in the title and in the introductory splash page at 0:01-0:06. In fact, the shooting was NOT on the SF Pride festival grounds and was not related to SF Pride, or the Pride Festival, or any LGBT issue or concern.
You did not, for example, title your video "shooting in front of Apple iPad advertisement." Nothing in the video has any connection with SF Pride or the Pride festivities. You simply chose to sensationalize your posting by wrongly associating a violent tragedy with the safe and peaceful, SF Pride. Your advertising harms SF Pride by that false association. It harms SF Pride's ability to attract attendees and sponsors for future events by creating the false impression that the event and festival were the site of a violent shooting.
Your video constitutes false advertising from an attorney, trade libel, and constitutes tortious interference with SF Pride's prospective economic advantage by associated its safe event with this tragic and entirely unrelated incident.
According to YouTube, over 3,200 have viewed this outrageous misrepresentation already. Specifically:
SF Pride demands that you at once do the following or we will take all other necessary and appropriate legal action:
1. Take down the above referenced video.
2. Replace it with an affirmative public apology to SF Pride for wrongly associating it with violence, and clarifying that the shooting on Market Street had nothing to do with the SF Pride festival, and was blocks away from it;
3. Pay SF Pride $10,000 in damages and costs. Any delay will certainly see this amount increase.
Very Sincerely, Brooke Oliver Outside General Counsel, San Francisco Pride
Once I recovered from the shock and outrage of being told I had defamed an event that I have attended for years and even participated in, I was amused by this ham-fisted effort to tamp down any bad publicity from violence within the penumbra of an SF Pride event.
Then I went into mitigation mode and modified the video to exclude from the title the words "Pride Festival" and "at SF Pride 2011." However, concerned with the questionable practice of editing a video that so many had seen and the impugning of my integrity by SF Pride, I provided an explanation below the redacted video for why I did this.
The reality of the matter is SF Pride made an effort to squelch speech about a dangerous incident of great interest to the public that very likely involved people attending or leaving their event. They have denied the incident had anything to do with SF Pride because it was not within the confines of the festival. This contention is highly debatable as the incident occurred between the parade route and one route of ingress to the festival which runs through UN Plaza with no apparent barriers between what is technically outside and what is inside the festival grounds. I know because that's where I was both Saturday and Sunday.
In any event, naming the approximate location of the incident by reference to an event does not imply the event organizers are responsible. Moreover, the organizers apparently believe that the incident would have occurred and the attendees to their event who were injured would have caught a bullet whether they were attending the event or buying cigarettes at the corner store. However, the fact of the matter is the circumstances of the incident and my experiences that day and the following one do not bear out that contention.
I provide you below with a direct example of the thuggish behavior that has become a part of some SF Pride events. It is 11 seconds of raw unedited video of a gay man, dressed not unlike many at this event, being attacked and bashed by a group of young men on June 26, 2011, shortly after 6:00 PM. If you would like to see a version that provides context for what you see below, click here.
This behavior is not new or limited to this year's festival. Last year, a melee broke out between the police and a group of very young adults who came to the Pride festival to party. This incident was widely published in the media and can still be seen online today.
The month of June is full of Pride events throughout the city. Many have seen incidents of violence. Last year, the Pink Saturday event in the Castro played host to another shooting that resulted in one death and two injuries. The aftermath was caught on video and widely disseminated.
Many other videos like the one above can be found on YouTube.
The point is I'm just a person who hasn't defamed anyone or any group or organization. I can attest to how the Pride festivities have changed over the 9 years I have lived here and the 11 years since I first visited in December of 1999.
It is no secret that the Pride committee has suffered financial problems recently. It strikes me as self-serving and ultimately as foolish that the organizers would want to threaten people in order to preserve and protect the value of their name. It would seem more productive in this regard to instead try to assure the public that their event is safe and getting safer thanks to their efforts, whatever they may be, to rid the events of people that come to cause trouble.
The old office number, (415) 503-0783, will soon be disconnected. Please use the current contact number, (415) 669-4059, for calls and text messages. Thanks!
