By Nicole Rowland and Lukas Illa
The following speech was delivered at a teach-in sponsored by the Western Regional Advocacy Project and other organizations at Lake Merritt in Oakland, California on April 22, 2025. The teach-in was part of a nationwide effort to educate people about the impact of sweeps had on unsheltered people since last year’s Supreme Court ruling on Grants Pass v. Johnson, which overturned a 2016 ruling that prevents local governments from arresting unhoused people for living outside when there is no shelter or housing available. Street Sheet edited this piece for clarity and brevity.
What does militarization mean? What does it look like in our communities?
Militarization, culturally and physically, shapes society to prepare for violence. If we think about the police, they are the most visible city workers that hold guns, batons, and handcuffs, and now rubber bullets, Tasers, stun grenades, tear gas, drones and mass amounts of surveillance technology.
Since 1990, city police departments have been given more than $7.5 billion worth of retired military equipment straight from the U.S. Department of Defense. Hundreds of thousands of American police officers have trained with the Israeli Defense Forces, a foreign military that is actively committing war crimes and genocide against the Palestinian people.
But who faces the brunt of these attempts to militarize our police force? Homeless folks, of course! Some of the country’s richest cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, etc.—also have the largest unsheltered homeless populations, the largest and most well-funded police forces, yet some of the lowest crime rates on record. The focus of police and their violence target our unhoused neighbors and family, first and foremost.
Militarization looks like a man sleeping on the sidewalk being woken up by eight cops, some of whom already have their hands on their holsters.
Militarization looks like a woman sitting in Civic Center, being harassed to move every hour by Urban Alchemy workers.
Militarization looks like a community member entering a private park or business improvement district, having their every move tracked by a dozen surveillance cameras.
Militarization looks like an undocumented couple being tracked by geolocation data collected by SFPD and shared to ICE.
Militarization looks like housed neighbors using the 311 app to report someone they have profiled as unhoused.
We must resist militarization everywhere!
The Grants Pass decision was greatly affected by Bay Area Democrats, particularly San Francisco ones. Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch cited the legal brief filed by San Francisco eight times in his opinion criminalizing homelessness across the country.
While we hear our liberal politicians decrying Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and trans folks, Mayor Daniel Lurie announces his new plan to deploy centralized teams of armed cops on homeless communities, which are disproportionately made up of our immigrant and trans community.
But this isn’t new! We all know that these politicians will use identity politics to enact their violence; that they expect us to believe it a success when it’s the boot of a Black or gay cop on the neck of our homeless neighbor.
Hyperlocally, as we see a cavern of wealth disparity among the upper tech class, the working poor, and those living on our streets, capitalist politicians will frame the mere existence of someone in a tent as the sole deterrent to our economic revitalization; their lie that “economic revitalization” will include us; that it won’t mean a deeper investment in cops and surveillance tech and violence; that it won’t mean watching more of our neighbors die at the hands of racist classist cops.
To that I say, “Fuck that!” We will remain in solidarity against fascism and militarization levied against our communities– whether it comes in the form of the smug face of Donald Trump or the shit-eating grin of Gavin Newsom.
