Summer 2011 in Santa Cruz County

May 25: After a year of violent graffiti, bullying, and teachers turning a blind eye, the Santa Cruz School District finally suspended a clique of White Pride skinheads at Soquel High School. The clique first started its campaign of intimidation by yelling racist slurs during Cinco de Mayo in 2009. They were suspended for all attending the school photo shoot wearing bandanas and white shirts.

July 29/30: About 50 vehicles on the west side of Santa Cruz were vandalized with swastikas and/or slashed tires, seemingly at random. The vandalism occurred on and around Almar Street, between the hours of 11pm and 1am.

August 26: A 50-year-old white man was beaten bloody by two women and five men at approximately 2:40 p.m. on a Friday at a shopping center on Bay Avenue in Capitola. The assailants yelled “White Power” as they beat the man.

The following descriptions were obtained for four of the five male suspects: the men have short hair, shaved close to their heads, and one had a dog wearing a “camo shirt.”

The first male suspect is described as approximately 20 years old, weighing 180 pounds, with tattoos on his right arm.

The second man is the same age and weight, with a “wrestler-type body” and a brown shirt with “Cage Fighter” printed on it.

The third male suspect is described as 20-22 years old, 180 pounds and wearing a green shirt.

The fourth is approximately 18-20 years old, weighing 160 pounds and wearing a brown shirt and jeans. The victim said the fourth suspect had longer hair than the others, though it was still short. He was also described as being “very tan,” Thompson said.

No information is available at this time on the fifth man or the two women, even though the two women were arrested by Capitola police. The media evidently did not care to publish those two women’s names and mugshots, even though they routinely do this to other arrestees.

San Francisco: 2 racists convicted of assault but acquitted of hate crime charges

Not 831, but seeing this made me want to start up the blog again.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Two men have been convicted of assault in an attack on two Hispanic men in San Francisco. A jury found 39-year-old Robert Allen and 29-year-old Justin Meskan guilty of felony assault with intent to cause great bodily injury and battery.

The men were also charged with hate crimes in the attack on 21-year-old Alex Cauich and his cousin, Jose Omar Cauich, but jurors did not convict them on those counts. The jury reached its decision on Oct. 7.

Alex and Jose Cauich were assaulted outside a bar in the city’s Tenderloin neighborhood on Nov. 9. Witnesses reported hearing the assailants yelling “white power” during the attack.

A third defendant, 33-year-old Anthony Weston, pleaded guilty to assault and the hate crime allegation before the trial began.

(Anti-)Racist Graffiti

1. At the beach at the end of 17th Ave, on the seawall. A rather strange graffiti stating only “Black Cock” with a Celtic Cross (a symbol appropriated by the Klan and Nazis) as the letter “o.” Tagged over in spraypaint, “Whitey’s Got Insecurities.”

2. “Jews Now Rule the World,” “Israil [sic] rules the U.S.” and other asinine Anti-Semitic scrawls on the town-bound bus stop benches at Water/Poplar and Soquel/7th, at the out-bound bus stop at Soquel/Hagemann, and on the bench outside Safeway on Morrisey.

At many locations, the graffiti has been scratched off, blacked out, or crossed out. The graffiti at Water/Poplar was crossed out and replaced with, “Nazis Fuck Off” and an X’ed-out swastika.

Anti-ICE “Noise Demo” At SC County Jail

A group of people staged a “noise demonstration” at the Santa Cruz County Jail on Friday August 6. The demonstration was in opposition to the jail’s collaboration with ICE under the “Secure Communities” program. The demonstrators chanted, banged on drums, and blared hip-hop from a portable sound system in order to reach the prisoners inside. A reportback by participants can be found on Santa Cruz Indymedia.

What Is the “Secure Communities” Program?

The Santa Cruz County Jail is implementing the “Secure Communities” program on August 10. If you are booked into jail, your fingerprints are taken and forwarded to ICE. The fingerprints are crosschecked with immigration and FBI databases. ICE evaluates each fingerprint scan to see what enforcement action, if any, will be taken against you. Enforcement actions can include arrest by ICE, transfer to ICE custody and/or initiation of removal proceedings (AKA deportation).

Read more…

Kindergartener Nazis?

I was walking in downtown Santa Cruz, and spotted an “SS” lightning bolt tag on the wall of Toadal Fitness on Lincoln Street, next to the pay phone facing Cedar Street. While the purpose of this website is to consider local fascism seriously, this graffiti was pretty pathetic: it was done in yellow chalk.

As you can see, someone used black to X out the “SS,” and written “Kill Nazis” underneath. The wall has since been painted. It is a good practice to cross out racist and nazi graffiti, even if it is written in chalk. Crossing out racist graffiti allows passerby to see that there is that element out there, and also opposition to it, whereas merely covering it up makes the problem invisible.

Other places I’ve seen crossed out swastikas and SS lightning bolts are the bathroom of the Felton Safeway, and on metal railings near the Boardwalk. For those unfamiliar, “SS” refers to Nazi Germany’s Schutzstaffel, the paramilitary force that ran the concentration camps (among other functions), and is a common Neo-Nazi symbol.

Old News: Nazi Gets Beat Down in Santa Cruz

On January 21, 2010, a skinhead wrapped up in a Confederate flag walked into the Asti, a bar in downtown Santa Cruz, and began flashing Nazi salutes at everybody. According to someone who posted the story to the Santa Cruz Independent Media website, “it was obvious he had quite a good crowd enjoying his little demonstration. It took us a second to fully understand what was going on, until he went to one of the few black guys in the bar and started some shit, followed by getting his ass kicked outside of the bar.” The person who dished out the beat-down to the Nazi got away safely with the help of their friends (the Independent Media writer made sure of this fact, someone everyone should do whenever shit goes down).

Old News/Local Context: Nazi Firebombings in Monterey

Nathan Augustine, 35, walked into the Creative Visions tattoo parlor in Monterey in July of 2009 and asked for tattoos of a swastika and crosshairs over Obama’s face. The tattoo parlor refused, so on July 13 he threw a Molotov cocktail at them. Apparently he also arsoned the Lattitudes restaurant in Pacific Grove on July 15 after he was turned down on a job application.

At the tattoo parlor, police found Russian Standard vodka bottles converted into Molotov cocktails bearing a swastika and a symbol similar to the British Union Jack with added diagonal lines through it in red ink handwriting.

Between January and April 2009, a number of swastikas were painted around the city (along with the phrases “kill Obama” and “death to Obama”). Augustine was arrested in connection with the graffiti, and his house was searched. The police found numerous containers of lighter fluid, gloves similar to those found at one of the restaurant arson and the symbol similar to the Union Jack with the added diagonal lines.

A few editorial comments: We don’t care about Obama, but obviously this guy’s a fucking Nazi. This story definitely goes to show that local Nazis are certainly capable of attacking people they don’t like. We don’t know if the restaurant turned him down on his job application because they knew he was a Nazi, or just because they’re capitalists who can afford to pick and choose whose labor to exploit, so no comment on that for now. Finally, we don’t think that sending him to prison, where he’ll probably just join the Aryan Brotherhood, is that useful of a solution.