Oakland organizations band together to teach self-reliance as an alternative to police dependence

By Dejon Gill

Community members joined the Stop Urban Shield Coalition at a Sept. 8 rally, during which they listened to speakers and were led in a prayer ceremony by an Aztec group in Downtown Oakland.

The crowd demonstrated their opposition to Urban Shield’s training event, which was hosted by the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office from Sept. 7 to 11. The Stop Urban Shield Coalition organizers avoided calling the event a protest, instead characterizing it as a “direct action.”

According to their website, Urban Shield is a “comprehensive, full-scale regional exercise” that focuses on training first responders. However, opponents of Urban Shield worry that the group perpetuates a para-military police force, and doesn’t focus on EMTs and firefighters.

“Within the last few years, protests against police violence have been met with a highly militarized response — tear gas, armored cars in the streets, and sound cannons,” Stop Urban Shield Coalition member Nathaniel Moore said. “These are the things that Urban Shield are training police for, not terrorism response.”

Critics of Urban Shield allege that its training programs are racially biased. Mary Noble, editor of “Showing Up for Racial Justice, Bay Area,” published an article on Medium in which she gives her account of having “bluffed” her way into the 2016 Urban Shield training in Pleasanton.

According to Noble, the training weekend included a weapons trade show in Pleasanton, and a 48-hour SWAT training exercise set across various Bay Area venues.

Describing the training exercises, which included police roleplaying a Boko Haram-style kidnapping, Noble wrote of the mannequins used to represent the terrorists: “I was upset, but not surprised, to see that the terrorist mannequins were all brown people,” while all of the victims in the training exercises were white.”

Tash Nguyen, a member of the Alameda County Urban Shield Task Force, which was charged by the Board of Supervisors to look into reforming Urban Shield concluded that “Urban Shield is not reformable because it is a SWAT training, and SWAT was founded on racism. SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics Team, so by definition you can’t demilitarize a SWAT team.”

Nguyen believes that the funds for Urban Shield, which come from a grant through Homeland Security, should be refused.

“We should be looking for funds elsewhere to focus on figuring out how to provide permanent affordable housing,” she said.

“We need to supply our communities with emergency preparedness kits, building education around emergency preparedness, even teaching our community members how to do de-escalation if there is a terrorist incident, which is incredibly rare.”

Dejon Gill is a Tower Staff Writer. Email him at dejonjgill(at)gmail.com.