The Community Calls for a Ceasefire
The public demands a ceasefire resolution, Moderates undermine the action, and the Sideshow Ordinance continues to cause drama
City Council Meeting
I’m sorry y’all, there’s no fancy titles this time around. It’s been a busy week and I had to recover from participating in the call for a Ceasefire Resolution. More fun titles next week, hopefully.
Public Comment on Ceasefire Resolution
The public commenters showed up en masse to call on the Hayward City Council to issue a resolution in support of a ceasefire in Gaza. Including Council responses, the comments took up about half of the four hour meeting on Tuesday.
There were so many people who wanted to give public comment that Mayor Mark Salinas limited the time of each public comment from the usual three minutes down to a meager one minute. He also made clear that he didn’t want the public comments to take up too much time and initially wanted to limit public comment to one hour, while also stating that everyone would get a chance to speak. Thankfully, he didn’t hold to that time limit.
The speeches were powerful, including multiple parents, educators, business owners, community organizers, Palestinian residents, and even children. One 9-year-old child read a hand-written statement from their notebook highlighting the over 6,000 children who have been killed by the Israeli bombing, her sibling, a mere 7 years old, stated “I am little, but I’m not afraid to stand up for what’s right.” On the other end of the spectrum, a Palestinian man in his 70’s, born months after the Nakba, spoke in measured tones about how Palestinians have no problem with Jewish people and alleged that “70 percent of Jewish people support a ceasefire”, but instead “we are against Zionism,” the Jewish nationalist movement that seeks to establish a Jewish ethnostate in the historical Jewish holy land, modern day Palestine.
Many called for a Special Meeting of the Hayward City Council to be called in order to draft a resolution before the end of the calendar year. There has been pushback by individual members of Council in email responses, especially Councilmember Dan Goldstein, referring to Council Resolution 77-029 Policy Regarding City Council Expressions on State, Federal, and International Issues. The “77” at the beginning is because it was passed in 1977, almost 50 years ago. It states, in essence, that the Council has a policy of not making official statements on anything that they don’t have jurisdiction over.
This policy has even been disregarded in the past. The most explicit way was Resolution 85-251 which directed the City to divest from apartheid South Africa. It was unanimously approved by the council of then-Mayor Alex Giuliani, whose name graces the plaza in front of the old City Hall on Mission Blvd.
Along with the dozens of people who gave public comment in support of a ceasefire resolution, former Hayward Councilmember and noted fence-sitter Sara Lamnin pushed for a different approach:
Rather than respond to this crisis as The City, I ask that you as individuals on the dais work with me and other leaders in the community to… collectively craft implementable policy asks that we can work with our federal legislators to pass.
While this may seem reasonable at first, it’s important to understand how long this will take. Collectively holding meetings and working with community leaders serves only to push the item off into the indeterminate future1. It also fails to recognize the real power that local governments, as elected entities representing hundreds of thousands of people, have to move federally elected officials. Cities have the opportunity to apply pressure from the bottom-up if they are brave enough to do so, in the same way that residents and citizens apply pressure to them.
And if Lamnin had merely made her statement and left, it wouldn’t have been worth reporting on. However, in a direct show of how former and current elected officials have outsized influence on each other, multiple members of City Council mentioned working with Sara Lamnin2 and Eden Interfaith Council, completely ignoring the dozens of community organizers and members of the public who were in the room. Lamnin has a history of trying to play both sides in an effort to not rock the boat, with rumor having it that her reason for standing against a ceasefire resolution is because it sews division. There is no reason to believe that her plan will result in anything other than drawing the discussion out until people lose interest.
Councilmember George Syrop attempted to explain that Councilmembers could make motions to add items to future meetings in response to public comment3, but the Mayor was not having it: “Councilmember Syrop knows that after public comment, then after the meeting, then we talk about this and there is a process to be followed.” And although the current Councilmember Handbook hasn’t been updated on the website yet, the last one states that public comment items may be referred to staff.
When allowed to speak, Councilmember Syrop indicated that he had talked with the City Attorney prior to the meeting and found out that it was allowable to move to add an item to a future agenda. Unfortunately, the City Attorney did not have Syrop’s back in that moment:
The Council Handbook and the Brown Act allow members of the Council to respond briefly to public comments. But the Handbook has a procedure for asking the Council to take action. Council cannot take action after receiving public comment.
It’s likely that he’s referring to the Referral process, which states “To introduce a brand-new policy or to recommend new or substantial changes, the Council referral process is the most direct mechanism to accomplish this.” But it could also fall under a Public Hearing which covers “obtain[ing] testimony or comment on specific legislative decisions or policy matters.” It feels like there are other ways to handle it, and that the Attorney just sided with the Mayor on this one.
Other councilmembers then chimed in with their comments. Councilmember Ray Bonilla Jr. asked staff to “come back with options for how it is we could stand in support,” whatever staff decides that should be. Councilmember Angela Andrews expressed interest in “what Councilmember Bonilla brought to the table4,” and she praised Lamnin for her “courage” and for “bringing forward something here tonight… that we could all look at5.” Councilmember Julie Roche expressed her “appreciation for the conversation” and that she will “continue to listen” but ended with “we’ll see what happens going forward” which is hardly a strong statement of action. To his credit, Councilmember Dan Goldstein overtly mentioned that he supports a ceasefire6 and apologized for some of his condescending comments to members of the public via email a month ago.
In the end, the bulk of Council seemed open to Educating Themselves, Listening, and not actually doing anything else. The only surprise was Councilmember Francisco Zermeno who seemed to express support for a divestment strategy: “If we can look into divesting, that’s something else that’s positive.” He also pushed for a potential action on a number of other humanitarian conflicts around the globe, including Ukraine and Sudan.
Mayor Salinas, when his time came to comment, fell back on procedure to make sure that nothing of substance happened at the meeting: “All I’m doing up here is holding a line all of us have agreed upon to hold.” This stands in sharp contrast to Councilmember Syrop’s claim that Council should be “protecting children over protecting precedent.” Mayor Salinas stressed that the public should allow Council to follow their process, clearly disregarding the pleas of children from his City to act with speed as more Palestinian children are being killed every day.
Mayor Salinas even went insofar as to compare Councilmember Syrop’s attempt to move for an item to be added to a future agenda to behavior of former Councilmember and current State Senator Aisha Wahab. Wahab entered into Council with a much more active mindset and, despite any other criticisms, did bring in positive motion that seemed to be lacking from Council beforehand. The Mayor’s insinuation that Wahab had backed Council into a corner, is pure nonsense as it takes two people to even get a motion to the floor. This instead seems like an accusation that then-Councilmember Wahab, and by extension current Councilmember Syrop, made the rest of Council uncomfortable and look bad in public by asking for things that are popular and outside the status quo.
The behavior of Council brings to mind a favored quote from Martin Luther King Jr. in one of his letters from the Birmingham Jail:
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to 'order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice
The Rest of the Meeting
After taking a short break, the meeting was reconvened.
HEART Pilot Program Update
I’ve written a little bit about the HEART program before, and it can be summed up pretty well what it does in this graphic:
A big criticism of this otherwise very well-thought-out plan is the fact that HMET (which always has an HPD officer present) is the only part of this program that responds to acute mental health crises that aren’t a physical medical need. It should be noted that law enforcement has a long history, even within Hayward, of killing people who are in the midst of mental health crises. The City and HPD insist that the officers for HMET receive special training, and I have no doubt that they do, but I nevertheless believe that it would be more impactful and more safe for everyone involved if police were not involved at all7.
Even in this presentation it was mentioned that MIHU will only support the HMET “after the scene has been secured by HMET or HPD.” So cops first, once again. Also, they pulled the mental health clinician from MIHU, so instead of providing point-of-need mental health services, it’s basically another ambulance that focuses specifically on the unhoused populations.
And beyond that, it became clear during the discussion that the HEART program only gets people to the services, it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll get in. A lot of these services have limited hours, long waitlists, or limiting intake requirements and HEART doesn’t have any affect on that at all.
Again, this is a huge deal and should be celebrated, but there’s room for improvement considering the primary goal was always to remove police from interactions with our unhoused neighbors and those experiencing acute mental health crises. And a specially trained police officer is still, last I checked, a police officer. Video also showed that the officer in HMET continues to wear a full HPD uniform. Even one of the HPD officers assigned to HMET openly admitted that the first reaction of unhoused people upon seeing a uniformed police officer is fear in their promotional video.
There were also some challenges with the program that they’ll hopefully be able to address, but the one that the City can directly address is the fact that there is no long-term funding available for the program. Right now it’s funded through some of the 30 Cop Jobs that can’t be filled (and which council approved over $100k to try to eliminate) and grants, so staff is going to try to identify funding in the future. Thankfully, the City Manager is at least supportive of trying to find long-term funding for the program.
Councilmember Andrews asked what it would take to have a bed for all of the 270 unhoused residents8 that are allegedly in the City. And even Acting Police Chief Matthews recognizes that the main issue is money on that front. Andrews then pushed the onus onto the County to provide beds for the referrals9. Fire Chief Contreras explained that having the partnership with the Red Roof Inn for emergency housing was very important and suggested that having a $30,000 budget for purchasing at-need hotel stays could fill a similar gap in the near-term. Councilmember Andrews supported that idea.
When pressed on what happens if an active crisis occurs outside of normal HEART hours, Acting Police Chief Matthews explained that the response would be lead by the Police Department, bringing it back to the problematic crisis-as-criminality approach that prompted this program in the first place.
Councilmember Zermeno asked about the “happy unhoused,” summoning the mostly fictitious strawman of someone who is unhoused by choice. Even earlier in the presentation, both the PD and Fire Chief framed it as a trust issue. People may say that they’re okay to avoid, among other things, being arrested, a costly ambulance ride and emergency room visit, being sent to John George, or just generally being bothered when they don’t want to be.
Overall, Council was supportive of the whole thing (because how could you not be?). Councilmember Syrop thanked Staff for working with HayCoCoa during the initial implementation, since this was something that they pushed for really hard. Everyone on Council pushed for more coverage hours and more sustainable funding.
Sideshow Ordinance Part Deux
There were basically no changes made to the Sideshow Ordinance beyond clarifying some definitions to align it with California Vehicle Code. The Acting Chief outlined a few points that are worth mentioning:
This generally happens in industrial areas and large commercial parking lots. The events of July 4 were an extreme outlier event10.
Hayward apparently doesn’t have a program to do community service in lieu of a citation. HARD does, or at least used to, but not the City itself.
It doesn’t apply to private roads.
Since 2017 they’ve had 36 calls (six(6) per year) though “anecdotes” suggest it happens more frequently. Thankfully they’ve issued 366 citations to bystanders since 2012, though there was no mention of how much that actually helped.
Councilmember Zermeno finally got clarity on the difference between a single person doing donuts (reckless driving) and a sideshow, while Councilmember Roche got clarification that the Police will have a lot of discretion, as they usually do11, to enforce the ordinance on bystanders.
There was some drama, however, when it came to Council comments. Councilmember Syrop clarified his position that sideshows do not, in fact, belong in residential neighborhoods. However, he also maintained that “sideshows are a cultural practice that brings hundreds of tourists to Hayward” and could be safely practiced in a way that could boost the local economy. He then compared it to cannabis legalization and called for a shift in how sideshows are perceived and regulated. He also pushed for the staff to look into a community services program (in lieu of citations or jail time), since he was surprised the City doesn’t have one.
Then the Mayor took his turn and he gave an anecdote about how he had a conversation with the resident who was shot on July 4, while pointedly looking in Councilmember Syrop’s direction12. He then went on to say “if there was an ordinance that we can pass that really goes after something that is substantive in our neighborhood, this is it… When we make this vote, we can actually walk away and say we did something tonight.”13
It should be noted that criminalizing behavior does not, in fact, make it go away. Were that the case, everyone would drive the speed limit, there would be no murders, and there would be no guns in California. The conflation of “criminalization” with “prevention” is a problematic paradigm. It was already a crime to shoot someone.
There has been nothing but the word of the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department from one month’s anecdotal data from the unincorporated areas of Alameda County that this had any effect on sideshow activity. It remains to be seen whether this will continue to happen “essentially every weekend” and whether anyone notices any chance in the anecdotal evidence.
Not to mention that dozens of them showed up in person on a Tuesday night to tell Council directly exactly what they want: a ceasefire resolution.
Sara Lamnin, by the way, does represent the community as a Director on the HARD Board of Directors, which has its own issues with representation. But that’s another story.
California Government Code §54954.2(a)(3)
Which was, itself, ambiguous.
It is open to debate whether suggesting a nebulous plan as an white elected official or suggesting concrete action as a public member of a persecuted group requires more courage.
Though did not mention a ceasefire resolution.
It should also be noted that HMET is popular with City Staff because the County pays for it. This consideration pushed it into implementation first, keeps it listed as one of the first responses, and would have been the only option had there not been community pushback, spearheaded by HayCoCoa, to do more.
This is in reference to the Point-in-Time count from 2022, in which Hayward was the only municipality in the area which lowered the number of unhoused persons. However, it is far more likely that this is because there weren’t as many formerly-unhoused persons guiding the count as opposed to action on behalf of the City to reduce homelessness. It’s not as though truly radical action has been taken to warrant such a change.
If the County could have done this, they could have done at any time
It’s always poor practice to write laws around outlier occurrences, but that’s never stopped anyone before.
Definitely don’t look into what police have used their discretion for in the past.
It should be noted that the reason a sideshow viewer was able to shoot a member of our community was because they had a gun, not because they were viewing a sideshow.
He could have done something earlier in the night, but chose not to.