On Monday morning, 24 hours after Santa Cruz County sheriffs dismantled Occupy Santa Cruz’s courthouse protest and 36 hours after Santa Cruz police evicted Occupy squatters from a vacant bank building downtown, a few diehard protesters turned out once again to their old spot on the courthouse steps.
“Nobody is going to bail,” said protester Jean Piraino, who said she thinks the General Assemblies will continue to meet and discuss the movement’s future. “I feel people are really committed and will work stuff out as it comes up. Movements learn a lot by their mistakes, and I think that’s what’s going to happen here.”
Protestor Desiree Foster said she wants to reclaim the property the police collected from the site early Sunday morning and set it back up. “That’s what I would do,” she says. “I don’t know about everyone else.”
While the two-month occupation at the county building—replete with a camp in San Lorenzo Park—seemed to have achieved a comparative measure of détente with authorities, dialoging over issues like sanitation, the takeover of a vacant bank building on Nov. 30 by a splinter group escalated tensions with police within a few short days.
Santa Cruz Police spokesperson Zach Friend says officers were relieved when about 30 protesters left the 75 River Street building Saturday night without any force, ending their four-day side occupation. “We’re really pleased it was a peaceful resolution,” says Friend.
Even some protesters agree. Piraino says that even though that she thinks Occupy is “kinda getting pushed around now,” the response from Santa Cruz’s law enforcement has been quite reasonable. “I think they’ve been very evenhanded and professional, especially compared to what’s happened to some of the Occupies in other places.” She adds, “We may not agree with everything that’s happened on their part, but I think a lot of people feel they’ve been restrained.”
Though so far there have been no arrests over the building occupation, protestors aren’t in the clear and may be arrested for trespassing or worse. “Really that was just step one,” Friend says. “A lot of damage was done.” Damage to the vacant bank building owned by Wells Fargo included graffiti as well as broken cameras, ceiling tiles and a ladder to the roof.
Friend says it wasn’t easy for police to negotiate with protesters as they tried convincing them to leave peacefully. He says the Occupiers—who he speculates entered either through the roof or by breaking a key out of a lock box—proved a difficult group to reach, much less negotiate with: the consensus model makes for sluggish decisionmaking and the group prides itself on its lack of a hierarchy. “It’s easy to get a hold of us,” says Friend of his department. “It’s also easy to know who to speak to.”
Friend says officers posted notices up on the building every day starting Thursday and talked with those who gathered outside the building. Mayor-elect Don Lane met with occupiers outside the building Saturday and explained they were hurting their cause. “It wasn’t a very complex argument,” says Lane, who has been meeting with Occupiers informally about twice a week outside the courthouse.
Asked whether the sheriffs’ Sunday morning dismantling of the courthouse camp was related to the police action the night before, sheriff spokesperson April Skalland says it was already in the works. “We had planned on doing this on the weekend early in the morning when there weren’t any county employees.
“There’s no lodging on county property,” she says. “That means no structures, and that’s why it was taken down.”
The county had to take three carloads of trash from courthouse steps to the dump and is keeping a close watch on the site to prevent an occupation from developing again. “We don’t want that to happen again because it will cost even more money,” says Skalland. “We don’t mind if people protest, but starting to build a structure and lodging is not allowed.”
The protesters’ camp in San Lorenzo Park remained untouched at press time, but on Dec. 5, authorities reportedly issued an eviction notice to the camp for Wednesday, Dec. 7 at 5pm.
Two Protests?
The weekend’s developments raise some questions about the relationship between the two occupations. Not surprisingly for a group without a clearly defined structure, the answer is murky.
Asked if the takeover of the bank building created something of a schism within Occupy Santa Cruz, one demonstrator at the courthouse said that the group was an autonomous group of Occupy Santa Cruz protestors, another insisted that the preferred term was “an autonomous group in solidarity with Occupy Santa Cruz,” and a third said that he did not think “in solidarity” was accurate because it implied that the Occupy Santa Cruz General Assembly supported the action when it did not.
The protestors were in agreement on one point—none of them blamed the occupation of 75 River Street for law enforcement’s crackdown on the courthouse demonstration, which included the removal of the group’s blue geodesic dome, fencing of the grass and implementation of a 7pm to 7am curfew. “That was the city, this is the county, they’re different,” said Chris Seerden on Monday. “They probably had this planned for a long time.” The other demonstrators murmured in agreement.
The geodesic “occudome” has been a point of tension with the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department since its construction in early November. Sheriff’s deputies called it an illegal shelter on county property. Protestors refused to remove the dome, insisting it was necessary to provide protestors with basic protection from the elements. There was also a symbolic significance as well.
“The dome binds individual pieces that by themselves are fragile, but in that configuration they support each other to form a single, sturdy structure,” explains protester Casey Livingood. “In this way the dome symbolizes what we desire to create.”
When contacted for comment about the occupation of 75 River Street and the removal of the geodesic dome from the courthouse steps, Andy Moskowitz, who performs media outreach for the protest, demurred, suggesting that the more pressing issue was the impending destruction of an empty lot that has been taken over and repurposed as a community garden at Pacific and Spruce streets in downtown Santa Cruz.
The parties behind the occupation of 75 River Street “wanted a community space and they didn’t want to dictate what happened in that community space,” says Livingood. “They went in there and set everything up and then opened it up to the community.” The problem was that when the building was occupied by the community, things didn’t go as planned.
There was a no vandalism rule and a no smoking rule, which some participants were not respecting, says Livingood, and then there was disagreement about what to do when the police arrived. “The idea was that [protestors] were going to be nonviolent when the police came, and some people wanted to be violent without the consent of the group, which puts the rest of the group in danger,” says Livingood.
“In hindsight, the advice I would give to those people would be: have specific plans for what you want to do with that space, rather than just opening it up and letting people do whatever the community wants,” Livingood says. “In a sense they did provide a lot of community needs—housing, food, toilets at night and during the day, people to talk to, people to sleep with, warmth.”
Samantha Larson, Jake Pierce and Tessa Stuart contributed to this report.
