From a Sacramento Quaker newsgroup --
Walter Lasseigne Parenteau
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“Friends,
I don't normally take to these emails to share, but I feel deeply moved to do so tonight.
I was a long-time attender of [the San Francisco Quaker Meeting], but my wife (who is a member) and I now live in Sacramento. Like you in San Francisco, we are also under a mandatory curfew and are under the surveillance of the guns of the national guard. Two hours ago, five armored humvees with gun mounts drove passed our bedroom window.
An hour ago I noticed flashing lights outside. I hadn't heard any commotion whatsoever. Looking out my open window I saw a man being arrested. He was surrounded by several officers who had arrived in: 2 cruisers, a covered pickup, an unmarked SUV, and a SWAT wagon. The man was on the phone, presumably with someone he lived with--maybe a spouse, a significant other, or a roommate.
I could overhear him telling the person on the phone that he was being arrested. He said that he was only a block away from home. He said that he'd told the officers that, but that they had said that it didn't matter, as they were operating under "maximum enforcement" of the curfew. He then proceeded to tell them what jail he was being taken to. The police then put him in a car and all of the vehicles drove away.
Let me tell you what this made clear to me.
If our elected officials were somehow able to be so certain, without any doubt whatsoever, that it was in fact in the public good for every citizen to stay at home, so certain in fact that they were going to back that up with the force of the law, then it would logically follow that their first priority would be to take people home. If the police saw you out after the curfew, they would stop you, issue you a warning, and then take you home. If you were stopped again, perhaps they would issue you a misdemeanor citation, and then take you home again. At every turn, the point of enforcement would be to keep you safe at home.
If you wonder how an overtaxed police force would manage taking all of these people home, then ask yourself how that same force manages to take those same people to jail. This is not academic; I just watched the police arrest my neighbor and take him to jail, which is much further away than home was for him.
But this lays bare the fact that keeping people safe at home is not the point of the curfew. It reveals that the point of the curfew it is to intimidate. A curfew does not make illegal activity illegal; those laws are already on the books. A curfew criminalizes legal activity. It formalizes the same broad net of suspicion that the police regularly see their fellow citizens through--especially when it comes to black men--that people are in the streets protesting this very moment.
What I saw tonight reveals that the goal of a curfew is not to keep people safe at home, but to create an intimidating show of unchecked police force and to criminalize legal behavior. That, in my view, is fundamentally immoral.
One thought has been coming to me these past few days: A peace kept with a weapon is not peace. This curfew has revealed to me that our country's police powers have absolutely no tools at their disposal beyond intimidation. Intimidation is the only tool that they have. If it were in any way otherwise, then they would have driven my neighbor home. This is deeply sad and troubling.
I now find myself considering what actions I might take against that immorality. Tonight I used social media to convey this message to my mayor and to our governor. Tomorrow, I'm not sure what I will do. I suspect that this moment is calling for me to use my privilege as a young, educated, white man to resist this immorality so that others who are less privileged than me are not subject to it.
I humbly ask this community to hold everyone effected by these curfews in the light. I also ask you to help me, as imperfectly as you can given the medium of email, to help me consider further actions. I also ask you to help me see this curfew in a different light if I am in need of eldering.
I also wonder, if my assessment of these curfews is correct, and if you share my sense, if one course of action might be for us all to allow ourselves to violate this unjust law and to allow ourselves to be arrested, collectively, as Quakers.
But it is late, and I have to sleep, and I eagerly await your reflections on this subject.
Much love in these hard times,
- Devin”