Charles Hill

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August 16, 2011 | 5:19 PM | By

Anonymous # OpBART protest closes Downtown San Francisco BART stations

Ali Winston

BART tactical police confront protesters at the entrance of the Embarcadero Station on August 15, 2011

Four downtown BART transit stations were closed during rush hour yesterday by a protest decrying the Bay Area Rapid Transit Authority’s decision to shut down cellphone service last Thursday to avert a potential protest over the July 3rd fatal shooting of Charles Hill by rookie BART Police Officer James Crowell. Dozens of BART and San Francisco Police officers were deployed in riot gear and on motorcycles to keep tabs on the protest, but save from a few baton shoves and a great deal of invective, yesterday’s protest was free of violence.

The protest was called by Anonymous, a loose-knit, transnational hacker collective responsible which has aligned itself with pro-democracy demonstrators in the Middle East and the controversial whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. Anonymous labeled Monday’s actions #OpBART, sparking a flurry of traffic on the social networking website Twitter.

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FILED UNDER: Community, #OpBART, Anonymous, BART, BART police, Charles Hill, Officer-involved shootings, San Francisco
August 15, 2011 | 3:19 PM | By

FCC: We’re monitoring BART’s cell service shutdown

By Casey Miner

BART board president Bob Franklin this morning defended the agency’s decision to disable cell service on several platforms last Thursday, saying that any inconvenience passengers might have experienced paled in comparison to the potential danger and chaos of a large protest. “As a board member I cannot tolerate a protest on the platform,” he said. “In downtown San Francisco at the peak of the evening, there’s way too many people, trains coming in at 80mph, a thousand volts of electricity nearby, it’s just dangerous.”

On July 11, a month before last Thursday’s shutdown, demonstrators upset about the BART Police killing of a homeless man named Charles Hill filled downtown stations, crowding platforms and at one point attempted to climb on top of a stopped train. “No one was killed,” said Franklin of that demonstration. “And someone could have easily been killed.”

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FILED UNDER: Police, Anonymous, BART, BART police, Charles Hill
August 12, 2011 | 3:10 PM | By

BART’s cellular shutdown: Safety or suppression?

Mike Kline

BART shut down the cellular signal to thwart a protest. Should they have?

Anticipating a protest during the commute hours Thursday evening, BART Police took the unprecedented step of shutting down cellular service at the Civic Center Station. For unknown reasons, the protest–an planned action reportedly in response to the shooting death of San Francisco’s Charles Hill–never ended up happening.

BART Police Deputy Chief Benson Fairow says that at first, web postings on an activist site indicated that a peaceful protest was planned for the Civic Center Station. Later updates, Fairow says, “indicated that demonstrators were planning on committing crimes.” What sorts of crime is unclear, but BART police were concerned that such a protest, on the platform level, could result in fights, injury, or someone falling on the tracks. “That’s when it became a safety issue,” Fairow says. BART Police were placed on high alert and commuters were warned to expect a disruption.

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FILED UNDER: Police, BART, BART police, Cell phone jamming, Cell phones, Charles Hill