Update: Oakland cops respond to May Day records request
(Photo of livestreamer Jeff K. by Flickr user jsruby22)
Awhile back I asked the Oakland cops for emails sent or received May 1 by command staff that contain the terms “livestream,” “live stream,” “Ustream,” “pixplz” or “Justin Beck.”
Today they handed over the emails — all 5 of them, which was a lot fewer than I anticipated, and they didn’t even talk about me!
Email 1 - Email 2 - Email 3 - Email 4 - Email 5
What’s interesting to me about the emails is not that the cops were watching livestreams and reading Twitter to gather real-time intelligence on the May Day protests, since they’ve done this before. But I do wonder why they called for mutual aid so early that day — at 9:55 in the morning.
At that point, the marches and protests had just gotten underway and were so far peaceful. Twice on May Day I asked the cops’ chief of staff Chris Bolton why they had called for mutual aid at all, but I never got an answer.
A next step might be to request all of the updates throughout the day from OPD Operations.
-Justin
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