The latest incident between Santa Cruz police and the long-displaced band of drummers that once gathered weekly at Wednesday’s downtown farmers market has prompted a local attorney to suggest a new approach to resolving the old and tiresome conflict: talking it out.
The latest incident between Santa Cruz police and the long-displaced band of drummers that once gathered weekly at Wednesday’s downtown farmers market has prompted a local attorney to suggest a new approach to resolving the old and tiresome conflict: talking it out.
The day after police broke up a Jan. 5 drumming event on the San Lorenzo River levee, Jonathan Gettleman, a Santa Cruz attorney in poverty law, sent an email to members of local government, business owners, media and several of the drummers asking them to convene, talk through their disagreements about where and when the drummers can play and ultimately find resolution without calling upon police intervention. In his email Gettleman suggested a city council meeting “with a professional facilitator and with abundant opportunity for participation.”
In an interview with Santa Cruz Weekly, Gettleman questioned the fairness of a single irate citizen’s power to give the drummers the boot. “We have all these interesting street artists downtown, and the difference between them being there and them not being there is just a phone call to the police away. Is it fair that one person can make the choice to remove these people from town? I’m not sure it is.”
Last Wednesday’s incident occurred when several police officers, responding to a complaint, moved into a group of roughly 50 people—many beating drums—clustered along the levee bike path and ordered all to disperse. One person, a Berkeley man named James Mattson, resisted and was removed from the scene, given a citation and released, according to police department spokesman Zach Friend.
Jozseph Schultz, who owns India Joze restaurant on Front Street and has supported the drumming circle for about a decade, believes the continual crackdowns on the performers, coupled with the ever-stiffening ordinances against loitering and panhandling, amounts to “war on the poor.”
Gettleman, too, sees Wednesday’s conflict as another sign of intolerance and changing times. He worries that Santa Cruz could lose “that creative, funky element that we see downtown” and become “another Palo Alto or Los Gatos, just another gentrified, white-washed community.”
Friend says the city of Santa Cruz is facilitating no concerted effort to push performers and panhandlers from the city.
“We’d much rather be dealing with gang violence and violent crime,” he says, “and I assure you that if we never received complaints we wouldn’t even bother with this drum circle.”
Gettleman hopes frustrated business owners will take up his invitation to start a conversation with the drummers and other street performers. Four days after his call for dialog, though, Gettleman is still waiting for any takers to step up. He can be reached at [email protected].
