"Mario Brito has to run away from the crowd," said a cameraman narrating the pursuit. "As everyone calls him out! He's trying to put himself in a political politician position! That's why you're running away!" To a bystander, the cameraman cried, "Watch out, he's gonna hurt you! He puts people in headlocks! That's what he does all day!"
Julia Wallace, an Occupier who was an early critic of the police, can be seen in one video denouncing Brito for having "posed as a leader of the Occupy movement."
"He's proven himself to be a charlatan," Wallace tells the Weekly. "He's someone who tried to collude with the LAPD. He's a political opportunist and a thug."
But for many people, Brito's expulsion left a bitter taste.
"It was ugly," Elise Whitaker says. "It was really ugly the way that happened."
Brito prefers to move on. He's now working for Alarcon's campaign for state Assembly and does not want to reignite old controversies. "This process was an eye-opener in many ways," he says. "I don't think I'm anywhere near as idealistic as I was."
The offspring of Occupy have continued to stage actions. A group of about 10 people — many homeless — has been camping outside the office of the Central City Association to protest downtown gentrification. Some participants were arrested for chalking on the sidewalk, which led to a chalking protest at the Downtown L.A. Artwalk festival in July.
That protest led to a confrontation with cops in riot gear. Someone threw bottles at the police, who responded with rubber projectiles. Several people were injured. Though the Occupy protesters said they were victims of an aggressive response, some also said the action was poorly planned and made little strategic sense.
"You can't have people getting hurt without having consented to it," Whitaker says. "You can't grow public support if people are turned off and afraid of your movement."
Whitaker had been deeply involved in organizing Occupy L.A. But she'd begun to step back. She has since joined up with a group called 99 Rise, an Occupy offshoot committed to getting money out of politics.
"It was really difficult for me emotionally to disconnect from Occupy," Whitaker says. "It had been my home. ... I understand why people feel the need to hold on. But there's not much to hold on to."
Julia Wallace also has stepped back, and now is involved in groups including a "women's circle," which sprouted up to combat sexual assault and harassment at encampments. There is also a "men's circle" with the same objective, and an anti-rape group called Smashing Patriarchy. (In addition to its original hand signals, Occupy L.A. now has a "point of ovaries" — forefinger and thumb in a circle, three fingers extended — which indicates that a woman is in trouble.)
But as one cohort of Occupiers burned out and moved on, others hung in and rose to prominence. One of them was Ulises Hernandez, the 21-year-old undocumented immigrant with a GED and no previous political experience. Hernandez used to go door to door, offering to fix roofs. But when his family started fighting with Bank of America, he got political.
The Hernandez family bought their home in Van Nuys in 2005 for $546,000, through Countrywide. They put no money down. When the interest rate went up, they found themselves unable to make the payments, and unable to work out a loan modification. In September 2011, the house was sold back to the bank at auction for $270,000.
Soon after, Hernandez heard about protesters being arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge. He ended up paying a visit to the Occupy L.A. encampment.
"It felt right," he says. "There were middle-class people talking to the homeless, and homeless talking to the middle class. It was beautiful. They were trying to build a new form of society. I really did feel that. I still feel like another world is possible."
After the raid, some Occupy protesters started breaking up foreclosure sales at the Norwalk courthouse. They occupied homes, drawing media attention and, in some cases, winning a reprieve for the homeowners. Word spread, and distressed homeowners began coming to the meetings for help.
Similar home occupations took place around the country. In May, Occupy protesters were driven out of a foreclosed home in Minneapolis, only to return repeatedly. That action was cited in an Adbusters "tactical briefing," which praised what it saw as "a new model" for Occupy: "Small groups of fired-up, second-generation occupiers acting independently, swiftly and tenaciously pulling off myriad, visceral local actions, disrupting capitalist business-as-usual across the globe."
When Hernandez got his own eviction notice, Occupy San Fernando Valley relocated to his home. Media attention drew Bank of America to try to work something out with the family, although bank officials say the Hernandez family has not supplied the necessary paperwork. A month into the occupation, eviction still looms.
The cops have been by several times in response to neighborhood complaints. Three weeks into the occupation, someone phoned a tip to the Department of Children and Family Services, alerting them that children were in the home without water and electricity. A social worker showed up at midnight. (The complaint was false, and the social worker left.)
@xicano007 @sjrivera my 2cents. They have a passion to part of a movement, but don't have the passion to be a movement... #notready2die4it
@rtops Totally agree!! That's one of the fundamental differences from their movement and previous ones. @xicano007
Sloppy journalism- far too many generalizations... Fort Hernandez is not the new ground-zero for Occupy LA- it's just one out of numerous ongoing actions. Sloppy journalism to assume that the movement has failed, sloppy journalism to assume we ever "hibernated"... articles are suppose to be objective and a truthful accurate reflection of a series of events, not this pseudo-reporting littered with the writer's shitty opinion. And some of the people interviewed haven't even been much involved with Occupy LA since last Winter- some of their opinions on the movement aren't very valuable.
The King Koopa Initiative has been immortalized in print. What a great name to galvanize opposition to a union/communist co-opt of the movement and express our tone and stance. Seriously not serious or not seriously serious, I'm not sure which one.
The Lex Luthor Initiative was fairly successful but I believe the OccupyLA media director should get the credit for solving the problem before the initiative really took hold at the camp.
Finally, The Duck Hunt Initiative was a mixed bag. Post-raid it was much more difficult to build a coalition of occupiers willing to potentially sacrifice their standing in the group. The fallout exposed me to state surveillance and poisoned my other occupy activities. I learned that it's important to build coalitions through consensus with active participation from all parties, even in cases where autonomous individual action can be justified. In other words, I became what I was fighting against.
Regardless, lessons were learned and no hard feelings were harbored. All this was done to help express the group will and give a constructive outlet to frustrations with "leaders" that were causing people to leave the movement.
I hope the strong and motivated people who these initiatives were directed at can trust that I only had the best intentions. I would be happy to build relationships with all of you in the future.
Horizontalidad!
This article does a lot of things well, but does one specific thing VERY poorly:
You wrote: "While the encampment was a powerful symbol, it was also a logistical nightmare. Just keeping the Port-a-Potties operating was a major drain on resources, not to mention providing food for the local homeless population and keeping the peace within the camp."
"They wore out their welcome," Alarcon says.
This is nested in the middle of a bunch of Richard Alarcon quotes (who, for the record, did not draft the resolution in support of OccupyLA. Eric Garcetti did, give credit where it's due). This quotation gives the impression that the city was providing any of these things, and/or that these points relate at all to the city and their logistics.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As one who personally woke up each morning during final weeks of the encampment to swab and clean those Port-a-Potties by hand, only to have the health inspector show up, compliment our work, then walk around the building and write up a bogus health violation and hand it to a different person altogether (any person would do, they liked going up to the media tent for some reason), I'm somewhat resentful of any notion that the city had anything to do with it. OccupyLA provided the port-a-potties, OccupyLA provided the food, OccupyLA kept the peace within the camp. The city was too busy denying us access to water, even for limited hours of the day, despite their being dozens of available faucets for that express purpose on the outside of the building. Cyclovia gets access every month to the city's water, but citizens of Los Angeles who were residents/participants in OccupyLA were denied. It should be noted that Mario Brito also intentionally prevented members of OccupyLA from attending negotiations to discuss these issues with commissioners within the parks department and DWP, despite repeated requests for access to the same table to which he had access.
@paganangel. Ciclavia does not happen every month. It happends twice a year and we do not use the water at city hall.
*there being dozens of available faucets.Why is this water issue specifically relevant? The #1 health code violation claim made (despite us paying out of pocket hundreds of dollars every month for hand washing stations and supplies for restocking): insufficient access to handwashing. This comes despite the fact that we were serving only pre-packaged foods, and the city had an available remedy only feet away. But to provide the city's resources to the city's inhabitants, even in a controlled and metered fashion, would be too much even to discuss.
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