Police Said They Wouldn’t Be “Confrontational.” Then They Came in Riot Gear to Arrest Homeless Moms.

The showdown is the latest in a battle over Oakland’s housing crisis.

Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Before dawn on Tuesday, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office descended on a residential block in West Oakland with armored vehicles, guns drawn. The thirty-some officers—including a contingent in military-style fatigues and helmets—showed up not to respond to a riot or the apocalypse, but rather to enforce the eviction of a handful of mothers and their children, a group who has turned their occupation of a house into a (peaceful) protest movement under the banner Moms 4 Housing

As I reported last month, the moms started squatting in a vacant home on Magnolia Street in November and immediately made their presence known. They accused the owner, Wedgewood Property Management, of exacerbating the housing crisis rocking the Bay Area through its speculative real estate practices, and they asked the house-flipping company to turn the house back over to the community. The women’s message struck a chord with local residents fed up with skyrocketing rents and homelessness. (Oakland’s homeless population shot up by 47 percent in just two years.)

Hundreds of volunteers and community supporters mobilized over the past few months to fix up the house, raise money for the moms, and defend them from eviction. Oakland city council members, including Nikki Fortunato Bas and president Rebecca Kaplan, even got behind the moms and attempted to negotiate the sale of the home to the Oakland Community Land Trust, a nonprofit that stewards permanently affordable housing and land assets on a community’s behalf. Still, Wedgewood refused. When Bas reached out to the company’s CEO to offer help in facilitating a meeting with Moms 4 Housing and the land trust, she says the message she got back read: “I will never negotiate with criminals.”

“I was really moved by the story of the moms. They’re working, they’re going to school, they have very young children. They have worked within the system to find resources, and the system isn’t working for them,” Bas told Mother Jones earlier this month. “Sometimes our laws don’t always align with what is just. What the moms are doing is an act of nonviolent civil disobedience, saying that there was a human right to housing, a right to adequate housing.” 

In December, Moms 4 Housing filed a right of possession claim to the house, but on Friday a judge ruled against them and ordered the sheriff’s office to evict them. Hundreds of supporters came out to block a potential removal Monday evening. Sergeant Ray Kelly, a spokesperson for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, told KTVU that the department had no plans to evict the moms Monday night and wanted a peaceful resolution. “We can deal with passive resistance. That’s fine,” he said. “It’s one of those you can’t win situations for law enforcement…It doesn’t benefit us to be confrontational.”

In reality, the police waited until just after 5:00 am Tuesday to arrive, and they brought along a tactical team and battering ram. (The department said the doors were barricaded.)

Two moms, Misty Cross and Tolani King, and at least one community supporter were arrested Tuesday. No children were home at the time. Dominique Walker, another mom living in the house and the public face of the group, wasn’t arrested as she was appearing on Democracy Now! at the time of the eviction. She left mid-interview when she got news of what was happening, and Cross and Tolani were released later in the day Tuesday. 

“They came in like an army for mothers and babies,” Walker said as she teared up at an impromptu press conference just after the eviction. “I feel like I should be standing with my sisters, but I’m standing right here for them. Right now. This movement is just beginning, and we see what we’re up against, but we also see what they’re afraid of. They’re afraid of us mobilizing over 300 people in 15 minutes. That’s what we did. Because we all care, and we all have humanity, and we want to change this system.” 

“If you’re not angry, you should get angry that our tax dollars went to this extreme force to evict mothers and children,” Walker added. Kelly said the eviction process cost tens of thousands of dollars. 

Speaking with journalists later on Tuesday, Kelly said the department succeeded in its mission to keep the eviction “simple,” “non-confrontational,” and as “low key as possible,” noting that no one was injured and the arrests were executed peacefully.

“We made tremendous steps to make sure we did not look like a militarized force going in there,” he noted. “We didn’t want to go in there with a heavy footprint…but knowing some of the threats that were out there and some of the things that had been said, we had to have people on standby.” 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate