I started this post late Tuesday night, after I returned home from the Occupy OC "village" in Irvine. (Technically, it's "Occupy Orange County"; I and some others have gotten into the bad habit of calling it "Occupy Irvine.") The City Council had unexpectedly granted us the right to stay on a portion of the lawn in front of the City Center complex (which houses the City Council, city agencies, and Irvine Police Department) a few hours earlier, and I like others was flush with the thrill of accomplishment. I wrote a little, and in the morning I heard about what had happened in Oakland. It seemed grotesque to talk about our triumph in the wake of that tragedy, so I put off completing my writing. (Besides, as I'll note below, I and others have had a lot of things to do.)
I think that today is a good day to take it up, as people are starting to notice that there is one overnight occupation in California besides Los Angeles that is legal, peaceful, and yet remains effective. It is, of all possible places, in Orange County. This morning it will pass its 300th consecutive hour in on the corner of Alton Parkway and Harvard Avenue. We expect that our permit will be renewed in another week and a half; we expect that we will become one of the most effective and stable proponents of the Occupy movement.
This is startling. Longtime residents of Irvine have written to say that they cannot believe that we're there. If we're not "in the belly of the beast" of the 1% here in wealthy coastal OC, we're at least in the beast's finely chiseled abs. Nevertheless: we're here, we're tolerated despite being assertive and boisterous, and we've done it entirely without violence or even resorting to civil disobedience.
Most of you may be asking: "How?" Many of you may be asking: "Why?" This is my attempt to explain this alternative strain of the Occupy movement that we have been tending in this most symbolically Republican of counties.
Here's a hint: the Irvine City Council has three Democrats and two conservative Republicans. Want to guess what the votes were to (1) place our item belatedly on the Council's agenda and (2) approve our presence on the lawn?
The first vote was 5-0. The second?
Also 5-0. Read on. (I know that this one is long; pretend it's a magazine article.)
I should say, as we in the Occupy movement are always supposed to say, that I do not speak for the movement or just for my part of it. These are just my impressions.
I should also declare my interest here: what I describe below is a strategic plan and set of tactics with which I am closely identified among the Irvine Occupiers, although the group has, by and large (and not without continuing reservations) bought into it. Am I taking credit for the success? No. That's not false humility either: I could not have made this happen with all of my will without brave stances taken by both the demonstrators and the city. If there's one message to glean from this diary, it's that this is a path that other Occupations and cities can choose to take.
"The Irvine Method"
I and others presented the idea behind what I'll call "the Irvine Method" on the evening of Oct. 15 -- the day of the large international expansion of the Occupy protest. Demonstrators who fully expected and were willing to accept a violent confrontation with the police agreed to "give peace a chance," despite being openly scornful about the prospects for success. All of us expected the sort of arrests that have been seen in Long Beach, in San Diego, in Sacramento, and elsewhere. We almost got them; until the last half-hour of the Council meeting, I would have bet good money on it happening.
Anticipating violence
I have been blogging for the past month primarily at the oldest political blog in Orange County, called Orange Juice, which was founded by a libertarian Latino from Santa Ana (he had been a Republican, then switched, and now he's an anti-union Democrat) and then sold for a $1 to a more traditional left-libertarian who happens to have many friends across the aisle -- a middle-aged musician named Vern Nelson. It's thus the strange sort of blog with mostly (but far from all) liberal authors and a mostly (but not overwhelmingly) conservative readership/commentariat. I mention that because much of my memories of this situation will rely on my writings in Orange Juice, where I write under the name of a local activist attorney (which may or may not actually belong to me.)
Here's an excerpt from what I wrote there late on Oct. 14, the day before the Occupation began, in which among other things I address what violence towards protesters would likely mean for the movement:
Will those who stay in Civic Center Park past the 10 p.m. Saturday park closure face legal consequences?
That is the question, isn’t it? That’s what I keep getting asked, by people for whom the answer may matter and by people for whom it does not. I’m a member of the Civic Liaison and Legal committees for Occupy Irvine, and I’ve been dealing directly with the Irvine Police, so I’m in as good a position to provide information as anyone.
I’ll start with the conclusion: I don’t know. I’m not even sure that the Irvine Police yet know.
...
My bias is towards non-violence on the part of protesters and forbearance on the part of the city and its police. If one boils the message of Occupy Wall Street down to one sentence, it is this: “Things are so far out of whack that we can no longer afford business-as-usual.” That’s why this is an occupation. Rallies are easily ignored; they are avoided and shrugged off by those in power. The Irvine Police Sergeant to whom I have been talking seems quite proud of the city’s record in facilitating protest rallies and keeping participants orderly and safe. An occupation is something different: it is a statement to the authorities that the participants are not going to obey the law, that an emergency exists that must take precedence over such ordinances as park closing times. The objectives are to get attention and to garner popular support. And those are what can make a worse result — arrests, police violence, protester violence — likely.
My goal over the past few days has been to make such a worse result less likely. From what I can tell, I’ve failed. That doesn’t mean that a worse result is likely, but only that it isn’t foreclosed.
As an attorney, I want to keep people out of trouble. My personal advice, as an attorney, for everyone whose personal interests I would try to support would be: “don’t break the law.” That may sound pathetic in a world where many of us believe that law-breaking among elites is both rife and unpunished, due partly to the deterrent effect of high-powered legal counsel, but that’s pretty much my job. Because I don’t want to convince anyone to occupy or not to occupy — I’m not your advisor and it’s not my place — I limit myself to setting forward the facts that I know.
One fact is this: what is good for the individual is not good for the movement. What is good for the movement is often what is bad for a few — or not so few — individuals.
Sometimes, what is bad for the individual can also be bad for the movement. If someone spits on a cop, brings a weapon, craps on the lawn, destroys property, etc., a “spirited” police response will be bad for both the individual and the movement. That is why police usually characterize protesters as having done something to warrant a “robust” — tired of those scare quotes yet? — police response, usually by something conveniently not on camera.
If cops break their own policies to pepper spray, beat on, park a motorcycle on the foot of (as happened today in New York), or otherwise manhandle sympathetic demonstrators, the city loses. We’ve seen that again and again this month. Good for the movement. Bad for you if it’s your eyes, your head, your foot. But that’s what you risk.
The main thing that may stay the hands of police is looking bad. That’s not good for Irvine, not good for UCI, not good for the businesses here, not good for the government (and, in the event of a successful lawsuit, expensive as well.) So the main thing for demonstrators to keep in mind is this: don’t give police a reason to impose violence on demonstrators without looking bad. I hope that they won’t do it at all. But if they do it, I want them to eventually come to regret it.
This is, so far as I can tell, the Standard Model for overnight Occupation protests. By now I think that I can present it as a recipe:
(1) Assert the right to occupy, even if in violation of local ordinances.
(2) Hope that the host city lets it happen.
(3) If they, do, great -- hope that it will be allowed indefinitely.
(4) If they don't (sooner or later), resist non-violently and continue to assert these rights.
(5) Accept the prospect of non-violent arrests -- ideally limited to those who volunteer for it.
(6) Hope that the prospect of such arrests will lead the broader public to rally to the cause.
(7) Recognize the possibility of an police overreaction -- anything from pepper spray to being led into a trap on the Brooklyn Bridge to whacking people with batons to something worse, such as the life-threatening injury sustained by Scott Olson.
(8) If something like that happens, expect the broader public to rally to the cause.
It's not pretty, but it can work. It can also fail -- step (6), for example, is iffy.
I had attended the final organizational meeting of Occupy Orange County - Irvine on Oct. 13. There was then a lot of conflict between the Irvine faction of Occupy OC and one based in the County seat (and main urban center) of Santa Ana about where "the" Occupation of Orange County would take place. (Santa Ana's was to begin one week later, on Oct. 22, and was also intended to be 24/7.) I had begun negotiating with a Sgt. on the Irvine police on behalf of the Irvine Occupation; with the Mayor out of town, I had also called the City Manager, which (unbeknownst to me) was exactly what I had to do to make all hell break loose. By the evening of the 13th, I'm told that I had a devoted readership in both the Police and City Administration wings of the City Center.
When I wrote that, less than ten hours before the occupation began, I fully expected that the protesters would not vacate the lawn the following evening and would be cited for a misdemeanor -- or worse. If the Irvine P.D. chose to be kind, they would just be called into court to pay a ticket. If they also ordered the protesters to leave, and they didn't, there would be arrests, likely confiscation of property -- and possibly blood.
The City and the Civic Center
Here I need to pause for a moment to tell you a bit about the City of Irvine generally and the lawn in front of the City Center in particular. The land comprising most of the city of Irvine, probably best known as the home of UCI, the city's University of California campus, was initially owned by "The Irvine Company," still it's overwhelmingly dominant owner and landlord. (The El Toro Marine Corps Air Station was later annexed into the city as the planned "Great Park.") It is a planned city; all construction in Irvine is to fit within the Master Plan. (A member of the city government, in the happier moments of this story that will not come along for pages and pages, joked to me that the city would require that all of our tents be beige-colored, like the buildings.)
If this seems stultifying, it's no more so than living in a building with a highly exacting and persnickety landlord. Irvine attracts a highly educated and cultured and gloriously multicultural population (much of it Korean and Persian, but that's nowhere near all of it), both from UCI and from its high-tech corporate influx. It has come to be known as "the place to be" in Orange County for the technology and semiconductor sectors, for corporate offices generally, and -- judging from the corporate names emblazoned in lights at the top of its substantial (but not too ostentatious) clusters of skyscrapers -- the financial services center as well.
In 2008, CNNMoney.com chose Irvine as the fourth best place to live in the United States; in September, 2011, Businessweek listed it as the 5th best city in the US. In June 2010, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that Irvine had the lowest violent crime rate among cities in the United States with populations of more than 100,000, and in August 2008 the Census Bureau ranked Irvine as having the seventh highest median income among cities in the United States with populations of more than 65,000. (See the Wikipedia article if you want footnotes for this.)
Do you begin to see the problem?
Irvine was not disposed to absorb scruffy and unruly protesters. Planning is part of Irvine's DNA; we were not part of the plan. The response of the city to want to eject us was as automatic as a cough or a sneeze.
Irvine was "the place to be" for us too, though, for another reason. Yes, it had its own "financial district" -- although the city officials with whom I spoke had no idea what protesters meant by the term and couldn't figure out what a "march to the financial district" would mean -- but it also has wealthy neighbors. The "Gold Coast," Newport Beach and its neighbors, is not far south of Irvine; this is one place where wealthy people move to get away from the problems of the world. It's not literally "gated," but it might as well be. If we want to speak to the 1%, this was where we could find them. Our encampment would be our base for that activity.
That encampment would be on a portion of the lawn closest to the intersection of Alton Parkway and Harvard Avenue. (Yes, there is also a "Yale," a "Berkeley," etc.) This is an area large enough for hundreds of people to gather, for dozens of tents to be pitched -- and is still less than a quarter of the luxurious, grassy lawn in front of the City Center complex. (This part of the lawn, unbeknownst to us, was due to be re-seeded just after we moved in; it was at that moment mostly dying crabgrass -- a lucky accident for us.) The beautiful Irvine Civic Center, which houses the City Council, city administration, and Irvine Police Department, looms beyond. The area is surrounded by luscious vegetation and eight-foot wide sidewalks.
Eight-foot wide sidewalks: that becomes important in this story.
"To the sidewalks!"
I write from my own perspective because it's what I know best. It's not the most significant perspective and certainly not the one that risked the most. And, as will be evident, I missed a lot of the most important stuff. But it's an unusual perspective, and one that allows a vantage point to see how the Irvine Method developed from an improvisation to an elaborated plan.
I had "come into the game" late, a few days before the protest -- not suspecting or prepared that it would take over my next few weeks. I was not doing the hard work of actually planning the protests, like our Logistics Committee Facilitator (that's like a Chair, but not a Chair) D'Marie Mulattieri. I had joined the Civic Liaison and Legal Committees. My responsibility for the first was just to talk to the police. So, on the Thursday before the planned Saturday rally, I began to talk to the Sergeant who would normally be in charge of "Special Events." These events are reviewed at even greater length in this post on Orange Juice.
"Sarge" was what the police force would want in that position: intelligent and reasonable, but firm and mostly unyielding. We recognized that we were on a collision course, following the Standard Model's recipe; I told him that, while I would convey whatever he said to the protesters, I had no real ability to "pull the emergency brake" even if he convinced me that it was the right move; as a newcomer to the movement, my persuasive influence was limited. The protest, including an overnight occupation, was going to happen, like it or not.
From my notes of that conversation:
Sarge told me that OOC-I has already been told not to camp overnight, which is the only action being contemplated that would spur needing a permit. (During the day, we're just people in a park, using it for its intended purposes.) The city would facilitate OOC-I’s lawful actions regarding protest, in whatever manner possible, but that city and state laws will have to be obeyed. They hope and expect that everyone will obey the law. If that does not happen, that would create a fluid situation in which they will decide on appropriate actions to take. He noted that plenty of protests occur in Irvine while obeying all the laws, which is what the Irvine Police Department requests and expects. We briefly discussed the common rationales for unlawful civil disobedience agreed that the respective positions taken by I.P.D. and OCC-I creates the potential for conflict. He says that they I.P.D. “cross that bridge when they come to it” and that no particular level of response to violation of these laws has as yet been authorized. He says that the decision to not to issue a facilities use permit and not to allow overnight camping was made by higher levels of City management. City management would not issue a permit, now or on Monday, as it stands.
Irvine was being courteous, frank -- and unyielding.
The Sarge identified the ordinances that the city would rely on for its arrests if we did not disperse as told. I began to read them on Thursday night. By Friday morning, I thought that I had at least a contingency plan for what could happen if things started to go bad. I didn't know if the protesters would go for it, though, so it was not one I was prepared to share.
There was a case to be made for the right of the protesters to occupy the lawn in front of City Center Park overnight even over the city's objection, but it was the sort of case that one hopes comes before the right judge on the right day -- and it would take a long time to litigate. Here's the gist of it: whatever else Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots like Occupy Orange County are about, they are intrinsically a protest about people losing their homes due to the machinations and chicanery of the financial services industry. (Do you want an upper-middle-class horror story? Go read Calculated Risk and other blogs about the how the housing bubble affected Irvine.) By being on the lawn in a city like Irvine, we are like time-travelers from the year, oh, 2018 or so, by which time the number of displaced refugees in the country will have grown so great that people may well have no choice but to squat on public lands in large numbers. Bringing that reality home to people know is therefore intrinsic to our free speech.
It is not absurd to argue that we had a case here; it is absurd to argue that winning that case in court, over the concerted opposition of the City of Irvine and the Irvine Company, would be easy, certain, or quick. "The case" would instead likely be tried in the court of public opinion, where the greater measure of our suffering might lead to greater public support, etc. What those of us who didn't want a confrontation hoped for was what the protesters in Los Angeles had achieved: permission to stay. Permission to stay -- while revocable, as Los Angeles's Occupy protesters are now facing -- was an appealing solution, but word was filtering down to us through back channels that it would only be likely to come if our numbers increased became too big to ignore.
On reading the statutes, it seemed like there was a much better case to be made for our being able to sleep on the sidewalks on the perimeter of the lawn during the hours that the park would be closed, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. After we appeared to reach an impasse in negotiations on Friday, I suggested to people that we might be able to sleep single-file in sleeping bags on the perimeter on the wide sidewalks without "blocking" them for passers-by, which is what the relevant ordinance prohibited. This, I told people, would among other things make for a striking video. The other demonstrators were interested, if not convinced.
The rally and march on Saturday the 15th, which had been well-publicized, went beautifully. The police estimated that between 600-700 marched to the "financial district"; demonstrators estimated it as over 1000. Given that many people stayed for only part of the day, overall attendance was probably over 1200. This is quite good for this part of Orange County, which tends not to be an activist hotbed.
My wife and I would be attending a long-planned 50th birthday party for one of her close friends on Saturday evening, starting at 7:00, so I did not plan to be in attendance that night. At around 6, I contacted the Sergeant and explained that, under my reading of the code, our sleeping single-file on the sidewalk in bags would not violate Irvine's ordinances. This could then get us through the weekend, at which point the Council might be available to consider our requests. Sarge would not make any promises that the Irvine P.D. would go along with this, but he did agree that that seemed like a "gray area" of the law to him and that the police would be unlikely to arrest people if the law did not seem clear.
It wasn't a promise, but that was good enough for me. The General Assembly had not yet convened, but plenty of people were around. I told them that I had spoken to the city and that while it wasn't assured that we could sleep on the sidewalk, it did not seem likely to me that the City would enforce that provision that night. So, if we broke camp and moved to the sidewalk, I was optimistic that things would be OK -- it didn't seem to make sense for the city to force the issue at this early date when their legal case seemed questionable. And then my wife and I drove the 40 miles to our party.
We left the party at 10:45. On the way home, I asked my wife if she minded if we detoured to Irvine so I could see what was going on. I thought that it was possible that we'd see sleeping bags stretched out across the sidewalk -- which would be great. I thought it was possible that we'd see that the camp had been left standing, that the city was bluffing. I thought it was possible that there would have been arrests and that protesters would be on the sidewalk protesting. Or, worst, everyone could be gone.
We got back to Irvine at maybe 11:30. None of the above. The camp was gone. A dozen or so protesters were milling around on the sidewalk, looking dejected. No sleeping bags were on the ground. The story came out that the police had told them to break camp, and then after they broke camp told them that they would also not be allowed to sleep on the sidewalk. If people wanted to be there overnight, they would have to stand up and keep moving. So people shoved their gear into cars and drove the cars to safety while others maintained our presence on the corner until they returned. The protesters had decided to comply for now.
This seemed to me like a personal betrayal. I had stressed that we would be operating in good faith and felt that the city had not reciprocated. I called the Police Department and spoke to the Lieutenant in charge, who told me that they were interpreting the "sidewalk blocking provision" such that the "right-of-way" on a sidewalk was the same as the right-of-way on a street. Just as you could not park your car in one of the traffic lanes (four lanes in each direction) on Alton Parkway, you could not block any portion of the eight-foot-wide sidewalks.
I started to flip out. I noted that one could not stand in a lane on Alton Parkway either, that there was no obstruction of people passing on the sidewalk especially given that there was no pedestrian traffic from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., and various other arguments that I no longer remember. Again, Irvine didn't yield.
OK then. We organized car trips to the bathroom at a 24 hour Korean restaurant down the road. I told people that I had to drop off my wife at home in North OC, about 30 minutes away, but that I would be back in an hour or so with provisions: coffee, food, whatever -- just hold out. We woke up one of our daughters to make a cooker-full of rice. People asked for various condiments; my wife took their orders.
It turns out that I didn't get back to Irvine until 4:00 a.m, coffee, rice, and various sweatshirts and sweaters in hand. In the meantime, I had written and e-mailed a screed to the Sergeant who had been our point of contact. (I won't include the whole "sternly worded letter" here, but later on Sunday I published in on Orange Juice, where again it got wide readership within City government.)
When I got back, I read it to the demonstrators, huddled together under the streetlight, and we spent the next couple of hours talking. I pointed out that while this wasn't a Manhattan-police-brutality type atrocity, the bad faith (in my opinion) was still a mistake by the City that made us look better if we took it in stride -- much like an actual arrest. This was our chance to demonstrate our own good faith even under provocation.
At 6 a.m. it was still dark. I had been up since 5:30 the previous morning. I made it about 18 inched from the sidewalk onto the dewy lawn, spread out two of the sweaters I had brought to keep my dry, did a face-plant, and slept for the next two hours or so, where I am told I was an object of light entertainment. (One of our demonstrators, a talented violinist named Raven, told me when I woke up that she had covered me with a blanket, but that she didn't know where it had come from. That was all right. I was already grinning at the sight of the reconstructed camp around me.
That night and our response to it was critical. A seed had been planted: we could put up with whatever they threw at us. We could follow the rules and wait them out. Our basic rule, our bottom line, was that we as a group were not leaving that corner, period. Someone would be on the sidewalk all night, complying with the city's rules, but refusing to budge. That began the Irvine Method -- an occupation that was not quite an occupation, but that we believed would lead to as firmly rooted an occupation as any.
A week of negotiations -- and a deluge
I was also out there on Sunday night and I got a sense of what having an encampment meant. You know the phrase "we were now on the map"? That was literally true. People from other cities in the county came around on Sunday night, after hearing what had happened and that we were still in place, and we talked a lot. Our encampment -- or the sidewalks around it, at least -- had already become known as a place to go to meet like-minded people and talk about these issues. I and others had a nice long talk with a couple of homeless activists from Santa Ana on the corner across from Harvard Ave. that night, which was also when a local yoga instructor kindly came out to help people become relaxed and centered. We had become a nocturnal community center on the concrete. Sunday night passed without serious incident. One better-off organizer also had the brainstorm to rent a U-Haul truck, that would make our nightly breaking and daily reconstructing camp easier; I can't overstate how important this was in the next week, during which another person allowed his own truck to be used for this. It made staying conceivable.
I don't know whether the City was surprised that we made it through the weekend without inviting our arrest through civil disobedience, but we did, so now they had to deal with it. I had been advised by many that their strategy would be to see if we just withered away (as some occupations and many long-term daytime protests have done) on our own accord. Our task, then, was to show resolve. We civic liaisons had the task of getting the City to decide to follow the path of Los Angeles.
On Monday afternoon, prior to going to the county party's Executive Board meeting, I published an open letter to the Council's Democrats, addressing them as fellow Democrats. Several people thought that this was a mistake, that (despite it being my personal sentiment) it made the movement look partisan, which is something the Occupiers resist. Maybe so -- but if it was a mistake then that's all the more reason for me not to leave it out. The main point of this post is to offer an alternative path for people to follow, especially if they are in suburban or red-state occupations; it's best to include the missteps along with the steps.
As I recall, I wasn't at the first meeting with the City, which we had wanted to keep low key. (My having essentially threatened to sue them in the letter rendered me "not low key.") But we made enough progress and had enough good engagement with them that, sort of amazingly, the encampment had bought into the idea that we could take whatever punches they through at us, so long as we were in full compliance with the law. This was thus not yet civil disobedience -- although everyone knew that civil disobedience could begin at any time -- but was remaining perched on the edge of civil disobedience if it became necessary. Acts of civil disobedience had become our second option while cooperation without capitulation remained viable.
Most nights, I expect this fragile peace to break down. It didn't. Imagine that. Anyone could probably have forced it to break down; anyone could have elicited a stronger confrontation with the police. But it didn't happen. The activists who had been part of other occupations were surprised, unconvinced -- but willing to keep giving us time. That's where the Irvine Method grew and took root -- every night, the protesters decided to give it another chance; every night, the police chose to use a relatively light hand in controlling us.
We evolved a credo that we were there to be "good neighbors." We would be assertive about our issues and our right to take our message far and wide, but we were not there to provoke or distress the residents. We wanted to court them, to change the conversation, to bring them to our side. But while we would be friendly and respect "the Irvine ways," we would also be stubborn and tenacious. "We will not leave Orange County the way that we found it" was my slogan, which you'll notice is not on any bumper stickers.
The idea was that we, as the rare (if not sole) suburban occupation, had to try to fit within suburban sensibilities to spread our messages most effectively. This makes a lot of activists want to scream. I understand why. And yet it was arguably the way to engage our community, which was fully prepared to spit us out. By agreeing to follow the law, we made them think again about us and what we were trying to achieve. Lots of people at our encampment still don't like it -- but pretty much everyone gets it and honors it.
I think it was on Thursday the 20th when we had our first big formal meeting. The Assistant City Manager led the negotiations for the City and was unfailingly courteous and respectful -- but also unyielding. A Police Commander was there -- also all of the above. The City Attorney, from a prominent local law firm, was also present at this first meeting; he seemed a little more dubious and bemused, but he did his job. (We had a nice little discussion of statutory interpretation.) They had read my letter about blocking the sidewalk, so now announced that they would rely on another ordinance: "no camping." (I would later read this ordinance and found it even less plausible in its application than the first one. The City and I remain in disagreement on this one.) We stressed -- this came largely from the organizers of the rally, by the way -- that we were acting in good faith and expected that good faith to be reciprocated.
One other notable thing: we wanted to be put on the City Council Agenda for the next Tuesday, the 25th, if an earlier meeting could not be called. It was too late for that to happen, we were told; the agenda had already been prepared and under the Open Meeting Law could only be amended, either in advance or at the meeting itself, by a 2/3 vote. As Irvine has three Democratic (ranging from progressive to centrist) and two conservative Republican city council members, we would need four votes; this seemed really unlikely.
I had told people that we would be speaking to the City Council that Tuesday, during the public comment period if not otherwise. This continually got twisted into a pledge that the City Council would be voting that day on whether to let us stay either on the sidewalk or in the park. No, no, no -- I told everyone that I could -- there was no agreement that they do so and I had no expectation that they would do so. (I didn't see how they could get four votes to agendize it.) But the rumor persisted -- and it probably served its purpose for that first week. People told me that they would "give it until the City Council meeting." They did this with misgivings because they were concerned that our numbers would dwindle without our taking aggressive action, but they would do it out of good faith. "Good faith" became our rallying cry. Our rallying cry was sustaining us -- for now.
People had begun to bring chairs to sit overnight. (A number of people in the occupation are older, some disabled. Standing all night is a problem. Was there an "Americans with Disabilities Act" angle to our potential legal challenge? I still have a note on my desk telling me to start researching it. Maybe there would be attorney fee provisions available, which we could use to bring more and better lawyers into the mix. I wasn't looking forward to making Irvine spend its money on a lawsuit, but that was the legal weapon we had so there was no choice but to use it.)
The Irvine Police used their allowable discretion to let people rest in chairs -- but they could not lie on the sidewalk and were not allowed to sleep. (Of course, it's hard for police to determine at every moment of the day if someone is sleeping, but their continual checks on overnight protesters still prevented most of it.) It became clear that the city's real concern was that it didn't want to give the appearance of our being allowed to camp. Irvine did not want to set what it would consider to be a "bad precedent." We understood their point -- and prepared, if necessary, to set a "bad precedent" that would stand up in court. If you want a review of laws used against the Occupy movements, along with Irvine's special twist, here it is.
By Friday night, the police evidently had become sick of our not dissolving into nothingness and going home. An order came out, though I didn't hear of it until the following day, for them to enforce the anti-camping ordinance strictly. Overnight protesters were first informed of this in the middle of the night, then again around 6 a.m., then it was confirmed later in the day -- but not passed on by the police to any of the civic liaisons, who still believed that the city would generally abstain from strong enforcement of that ordinance. So there was grumbling in the village. Protesters set up their tents the moment that it became legal, went to sleep, and at 9:00 a.m. the sprinklers came on.
"Bastards," was my thought. Well, if Irvine wants to be on the map, we'll put it on the map. I have a fair chance of getting readers on Daily Kos, I thought to myself. And around Saturday at noon, this diary on "The Soaking" made it to the Rec List and stayed there much of the day. It was based on reports from the field (or, rather, the lawn); the damage done will probably turn out to have been much less because people followed the precaution of letting their wet electronics dry out before turning them on again. (I don't actually know the revised total and perhaps never will, but from the descriptions I had received of what got soaked I think the initial estimate was reasonable -- as were concerns about the safety of "watering" an operating generator and live electrical cords.)
Eventually, the story came out that it was the fault of a contractor hired by the homeowners' association who hadn't realized that we were going to be there and such, and they fixed it as quickly as they could but there was some malfunction -- I won't bore you with details of the report. The City was very, very sorry -- and hurt that it could even be suspected of pulling exactly the sort of stunt that one would expect a wealthy landowner to do to get people off of its lawn.
I accept (without prejudice to our rights to determine otherwise upon discovery and investigation, and the lawyers reading this know exactly why I'm saying that) that this was an accident that, coming on top of the city's ramped-up enforcement, simply looked like it was part of a plan to get us off of the damned lawn already just before our second Saturday rally commenced. It did give us a chance to report on an "atrocity" where, thankfully, the damages were small; it gave Irvine a chance to see headlines that it did not want to see.
Demonstrators were pissed off, though, and the Tuesday City Council meeting -- for which I now held no hopes beyond the idea that staring one's adversary in the eyes may be good -- could not come soon enough.
Arrests in Orange County
Our rally and march that Saturday was smaller, about 200 people. First, the novelty was gone; second, we hadn't promoted the date as specifically as the 15th; third, people may have been concerned about the rumbling of conflict; and finally and most importantly, Santa Ana's occupation was underway.
Santa Ana is the County Seat, with federal and state courthouses other government buildings, and homelessness and poverty, and all of the other features that make the meter click from "suburban" to "urban." It has a history of protest, including violence, that Irvine does not; it has a domestic population with less to lose. One reason that I and others wanted to be in Irvine was that the wealthy parts of the counties could look at Santa Ana and dismiss it -- "oh, that's just happening in Santa Ana" -- as irrelevant to their lives. They would not be able to do so so easily with Irvine.
(On this and other relevant topics: here's a quirky little post of mine on choosing sites for political action in a place without an obvious "center" where everything should happen, called "Orange County as Iowa." By the way, Orange County is roughly the same population as Iowa. Los Angeles County? Michigan.)
From the beginning, of course, there was a schism. "Irvine was bourgeois, Irvine was inauthentic, Santa Ana is real." As the Irvine Method developed, the catcalls became louder: "Irvine was counterrevolutionary, Irvine was weak, Santa Ana is brave." Long Beach's protesters had been cleared from their site by police with riot gear on their third night of occupation, when they had been visited by always-attentive Los Angeles protesters; some were arrested. The lack of confrontation with police was taken for cowardice. It was galling.
Irvine's occupation, after some vigorous discussion, decided to support Santa Ana's march and rally. People spent the midday there, then came back for Irvine's march and rally in the late afternoon, then many went back to Santa Ana. Four young men in Santa Ana, one of them an Afghanistan vet, set up their tents and were arrested and booked when the park closed. (They were released at 4 a.m. and came back to the camp.) Others remained on the lawn all night -- and in the morning they received tickets for misdemeanors. We in Irvine could have done all that; many people thought that we should have done all that. I can't say that we were wrong; I can simply say that we were different. The notion that there would be two overnight sites in Orange County, one engaging in civil disobedience and one lawfully trying to gain permission from the city government to stay, had its appeal. Protesters from Orange County could choose whichever suited them.
That was my perspective anyway. Others disagreed, more and more vociferously. I passed their sentiments along to the city: "I cannot pretend that I can steer this ship."
On Monday night, Oct. 24, I went to the Democratic Party of Orange County's Central Committee. I proposed a motion asking for general support for the Occupy Wall Street movement, for support for asking the Irvine City Council to stay on the lawn and for support for our staying on the sidewalk in the interim. As with our Executive Committee the previous week, Democrats were glad to sign onto the first of these. But the sentiment was strong that we should not tell the City Council -- one with a rare Democratic majority, after all! -- what to do. The rest of the resolution was referred to our Resolutions Committee, where one way or the other it was sure to become moot before next month.
The crowd at the occupation was abuzz with plans for our speaking at the City Council the following evening, when people kept saying that the City would vote on our motion. Since the week before, I was getting advice from Democratic activists and other Irvine residents for dealing with the City Council: "don't push them, be polite, don't ask for too much." I didn't even go to the encampment that evening; stamping out rumors of great things to come would simply squash our enthusiasm. At this point, what would be would be.
The Meeting
I got to the meeting later than intended because I had wanted to publish this "state of play" piece before the meeting to get it into the record, just in case anything unexpected happened at the council (or, if things went badly, thereafter on the lawn.)
Public comment at Irvine City Council meetings usually starts at about 6:30 p.m.; we were told that it was best to arrive by 5:00 to queue up, first come, first served. Another group was there to protest the installation of "smart meters" in Irvine; a couple of others were there to argue that Irvine should have a civic celebration of Christmas. We had not fully packed the audience, but we had the auditorium mostly filled. After about 45 minutes, Irvine Mayor Sukhee Kang called upon us to speak.
What happened next was, depending on your inclinations, either magic, a miracle, or a highly unusual and unexpected series of events that does not require resort to supernatural explanations.
We had not coordinated our speeches. All I had said to a few people beforehand at a General Assembly was: "if you don't have anything else to say, just tell your own story." Most of us knew each other primarily from General Assemblies and hanging out on the sidewalks and the lawn. We knew that people in Irvine tend to be well-educated and accomplished, but nothing prepared us for this.
I have not been able to get the link to the recording of the City Council meeting to play, but others report that, at least on some other computers, they have. Our participation start somewhere around 2:10:00 or so (reports differ, and yes that's two hours) and the rest of the meeting goes on for another two hours or so, so unless you want a cheap alternative to a feature film I don't expect people to watch it right now in real time. Instead, just accept my summary for now: in two-minute slices (except for some time-hogs like me), over 40 residents of Irvine came up and spoke their hearts to the City Council, and it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen happen in municipal politics. Stories ranged from the serious and analytical to the light-hearted to the heart-breaking. People were almost unfailingly polite; whatever threats of stronger actions appeared were muted and veiled. As people got a sense of what we were collectively achieving, the atmosphere in the room became electric. It was 90 minutes or so of our speaking well-spent. We had the video record that we could send out to the residents of Irvine and explain ourselves and our movement.
(Update: By the way: the research help from jpmassar and others in this diary was very helpful and did make it into my speech!)
Mayor Kang read a sympathetic statement in response to us, noting (once again, though I was glad that now everyone else could hear it) that Irvine strongly values free speech and its only concern was setting "bad" precedents. "So that's how it will be," I thought. We may get some relief in the intensity of enforcement and then we'll come back in two weeks. Not a complete victory, but still a win. Enough to keep people dedicated to the Irvine Method for another couple of weeks, hopefully.
And then we veered off a cliff -- and sprouted wings and soared into the clouds.
I was watching the council members, at least the Democrats, closely through the early speeches. My sense at the outset was that, if we made a decent case, we could expect support from Larry Agran, a former socialist Democrat who ran for the Democratic nomination against Bill Clinton in 1992 (with about the level of support of Gary Johnson this year, which ain't peanuts; I think that I voted for him!) The next most liberal Democrat is Beth Krom, who ran for Congress against John Campbell in CA-48 last year; to my distant eyes, she seemed a bit irritated by the whole thing. Mayor Kang, who will run against Campbell for Congress in the reconfigured CD-45 next year (where Irvine is now in the south rather than the north of the district), was impassive and professional. The two Republicans, Steven Choi and newcomer Jeffrey Lalloway, seemed befuddled by us at best. But at least they were getting to see us, and we them.
Midway through those 40+ speeches, though, Krom's face in particular had changed. She seemed to be deeply affected by what she had heard and seen. Mayor Kang seemed to soften up. Even the Republicans seemed more relaxed. If they had expected the worst of us, they were getting the best.
And after Mayor Kang had finished addressing us, Beth Krom asked if a motion to place our matter on the agenda was in order. The City Attorney stated that, with two findings (both of which were appropriate to our situation), it was. This was extremely uncommon -- maybe even less common than that. Still in "fighting mode," I wondered if this was just a tactic to make the Republican councilmembers look bad by voting against us -- this then being a "safe vote" for the Democrats. But Krom obviously knows her colleagues better than I do; the Republicans agreed to take up the matter.
The crowd, as they say, went wild.
I was confident at that point that we would have at least two favorable votes on the substantive issue. Mayor Kang, still publicly uncommitted, could make three. Of course, we still didn't know what that substantive motion would be -- it could be to study the issue further, it could be to let us sleep on the sidewalks, we didn't know. But we knew that we had come further than we expected.
Larry Agran pulled some notes out of his pocket. (Had he always planned to present them? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think that what he did depended on what we did.) He had clearly done his research, into statutory interpretation as well as otherwise, and noted that the Council was empowered to make certain exceptions. He embraced the argument that our overnight presence on the ground was intrinsic to our free speech act; this (probably combined with our by-now ten-day track record of not disobeying the law, even if we thought it was wrong, while spending great time and effort taking down and reconstructing "the village") could justify such an exception. He moved to let us stay on the lawn, subject to our reaching a provisional agreement to do so at a conference between us and City representatives that would immediately follow the meeting. Krom seconded it.
They then went to the junior member of the Council, Jeff Lalloway. He asked us about our "silent applause" -- the raised arms with wiggling "spirit fingers" that has been borrowed by the Occupy movements and works WONDERFULLY at a City Council meeting -- and told us, smiling, that he didn't understand our movement, that he didn't know what we wanted, that he thought that we were odd (fair enough), and that he considered himself an activist himself. And then, he said the magic words: "If you want to sleep on our lawn, sleep on our lawn."
Pan. De. Monium.
The next two speak was Dr. Steven Choi. He was clearly more befuddled than us than even Lalloway, and he didn't seem to have made up his mind when he began speaking. He, like Kang, is Korean by birth, although judging from their accents he probably emigrated to the U.S. much later. He told us that when he was a young man, he had taken part in the protests against the corrupt and vicious (my adjectives there) South Korean military dictatorship, and so he felt that he could understand where we were coming from. So he too would come down on the side of allowing us to camp out on the lawn.
Now Krom was beaming; she gave a lovely and gracious speech of support. Mayor Kang, unsurprisingly, came down on our side as well. Someone, and I think it was him, had cited the good faith that we had shown, our efforts to build a good relationship with the police, and our desire to build good relationships with the community as reasons to give us this forum. That was exactly what the Irvine Method had been intended to achieve. It worked more overwhelmingly and quickly than we could have hoped.
I and five others went into a conference room to hammer out an agreement, one for which I got approval from the General Assembly on Thursday night and (with the Assistant City Manager, who worked with the City Attorney) nailed down the final specifics on Friday. I'm going to post that agreement -- which I realize looks highly legal and formal in a separate diary, to make finding it easier for Occupy movements across the country who may be interested in trying to replicate this approach.
The Aftermath
Lots of people around, particularly from other Occupations, are sneering at what we've done because it doesn't seem like the right way to do it. (People from Santa Ana, I'm happy to say, came by and congratulated us immediately. I don't know if they'll try our path -- it would be harder in a city with that many homeless people in it -- or stay to a more confrontational one, but at least we've offered them a model and a choice. With this post, I hope to offer the same to Occupy movements across the nation. Use of it what you wish; reject what you will. It's an alternative, it has worked, it has gotten the City come out behind us. (They think, and I think rightly so, that compared to other cities their working with us so well makes them look good.) And if we are as effective in spreading our message as we hope to be, as we plan to be, I think that we will have become as effective in the long term as pretty much any Occupy movement anywhere. And we'll have done it in Orange County.
There are some sacrifices. It has been suggested to us that our receiving support from the city probably depends to an extent on our overcoming Irvine's "homelessphobia." So we're keeping things tidy, sanitary, presentable to the suburban aesthetic. I used the human mic yesterday, when I smelled a whiff of what seemed like really impressive cannabis, to have the crowd say "Mic check! We do not smoke dope here. We do not want to endanger our occupation! We want people who are going to do that do to it somewhere else!" (Our agreement with the City includes "no matches in the park." The grass is dry.) Now, is this a compromise? Yes, it is. But is it a compromise of our values? Not really. Our values are something greater than demanding that our freak flags be allowed to fly.
The question we've had to ask ourselves is: what are we here in Irvine for?
Part of what we're here for is as a staging area to get into the Irvine financial district and make known our unhappiness about the lack of accountability of financial institutions and the lack of attention to the widening wealth gap. We're also well situated to take this message west, north, east and south -- to places that have never expected to see a protest rally and/or march taking place in their own parks.
We believe that we will not be dismissed the way that we would be if we just got arrested. We are going to meet coastal Orange County on its own terms -- and we're going to change it. We're going to look people in the eye -- explain, explain, explain -- and bring out the best in them.
That's how we think that you can best foster change in Orange County. Or, at least, that's the theory. Meet the people where they are. Tell them what they need to know. Show them that, if they are drowning and suffering financially in this brave new uncaring regime, they have company and support. Invite them to read new things, say new things, come out to the park and play with out (don't worry, we have plenty of them) hippies. (You would not mistake us for a Young Republican convention, especially when we march.)
We're going to invite the insular people of coastal OC to be part of the United States again, to make their mark not by trying to have the nicest things, but by being the best and most truly patriotic citizens, by honoring our nation's best ideals. We're going to sell our message in language they can understand and help them use their influence to make this county a better place.
And we did it without breaking a single law. We did it by gaining the respect and the trust of the City Council -- Republican and Democratic alike.
We're in Irvine, so we did it using the Irvine Method. If it works for you, wherever you are, you're more than welcome to do the same.