New America Media, News Report, Poornima Weerasekara , Posted: Jul 12, 2010

In the aftermath of the Oscar Grant verdict, citizen watchdogs used social media, including an open-source disaster mapping platform developed in Africa, to monitor the streets and help the city stay calm.

A chirping sound on his laptop alerted George Chamales, a self-described freelance hacker, that the Foot Locker, a sports shoe store in downtown Oakland, had been vandalized, 15 minutes before the news appeared either on police radio streamed online or any mainstream media outlet.

Chamales and his girlfriend were mapping notable incidents of violence in downtown Oakland on Thursday night, using Ushahidi—a disaster-mapping platform first built in Kenya (the word means “testimony” in Swahili).

Their aim was to prevent any loss of lives after the peaceful protests demanding justice for Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old unarmed black youth shot by a BART cop, turned sour.

Chamales, an independent computer security consultant, discovered Ushahidi in April, when it was successfully deployed to map the devastation from the earthquake in Haiti. It is an open-source platform that aims to provide reliable, real-time information about a crisis as it unfolds, to help people on the ground stay informed and be safe.

The Oakland police had braced themselves for a riot after Johannes Mehserle, an ex-BART officer who had been charged with Grant’s murder, instead was convicted of involuntary manslaughter by a Los Angeles jury.

“I realized that I could use this tool in my own backyard, to help the community and to relay truthful facts about what happens,” said Chamales, a resident of Oakland’s Rockridge neighborhood. “ I started working on it just two days before the verdict was due and was able to have the oscargrantprotests.com site up about an hour before the verdict was announced at 4.00 p.m.”

Although the manslaughter verdict was believed to be the first time that a white police offer was convicted of a significant felony in California for shooting an unarmed black man, many felt it was inadequate. Crowds poured onto 14th Street and Broadway in downtown Oakland, demanding justice.

Chamales scanned Tweetdeck, a tool used to follow several Twitter streams at once, for the latest updates from people on the ground, while listening to a police radio signal that was streamed online. He also browsed mainstream media websites to verify the updates he was getting through Twitter about the situation on the ground.

Both BART(@SFBART) and the Oakland Police (@OaklandpoliceCA) had their own Twitter streams to provide situation updates. But this was the first time they were experimenting with this tool in a crisis situation, and there was a significant time-lapse between when the information came in and was relayed to the public, Chamales said.

“At one point we received information that the 19th Street BART Station in Oakland was closed. Just as we were about to tweet it, we saw that BART’s official twitter account had sent a newer update saying that it was reopened. When we called to double check we realized that the confusion was due to delays in getting the right information to the people handling the official social media tools at BART,” Chamales said.

In instances like this, Chameles’s website had an edge over both the official channels of communication and the mainstream media. “We were experiencing all the action from a meta-pervasive level,” he said. “ We were tracking the voices of many people, who were tweeting real-time from the ground. So we had the advantage of having hundreds of eyewitness accounts.” In several instances, Chameles knew about a violent incident 10 to 20 minutes before it was broadcast in the traditional media.

At first, Chamales used mainstream media to validate the authenticity of the Twitter content. But he soon realized there was a better way: by looking at past content. “As we followed the information related by different individuals, we quickly spotted who had been consistently accurate,” he said. “We picked them up as trustworthy sources.”

Interestingly, tweets from professional journalists emerged as some of the most trustworthy sources of information.

Chamales and his girlfriend tracked the incidents till around 1:00 a.m, when the action died down and the police retreated. “I felt that the overall protest was relatively calm, despite the incidents of vandalism,” he said. “A lot of the sentiments expressed in the twittersphere reinforced the call for nonviolence.”

Many micro-bloggers who were tweeting from the ground were disappointed with the screaming headlines in the mainstream media the next day. “The newspapers and websites were filled with pictures of broken glass, the graffiti and the few dumpsters that were burnt. But there were more people who came out and tried to say that violence was not justice. How did the media miss that point?” questioned a citizen blogger with the Twitter handle @OakFoSho.

Indeed, as the mood turned chaotic, with vandals starting to break windows at a Rite Aid pharmacy, the crowds started retweeting the message, “Come on #Oakland, stay #NonViolent! #OscarGrant #protest at 16th & Broadway.”

There was also plenty of frustration in evidence “Post-racism will be the shortest era in American history ever. Welcome to post-post-racism. Or in other words, back to racism,” tweeted @dahlak. On Facebook, meanwhile, fan pages sprung up quickly, both supporting and opposing the verdict, providing a forum on whether justice was delivered in the case and rallying points for organizing future protests, to keep the memory of Oscar Grant alive.

Robert Gerstle, an Oakland resident who was part of the “Violence Is not Justice” protest organized by the community groups Youth Uprising and the Urban Peace Movement, witnessed how some civilians were trying to stop the vandalism on their own as “{the OPD stood around and watched while they maintained scrimmage.”

“Those individuals didn’t get much media attention as to their efforts to convey the Grant family’s wishes for peace,” Gerstle said. “Honestly, the next day I told my friends not to even bother looking at the newspapers. There shots and stories only reinforce their own macabre beliefs about the people of Oakland.”

George Chamales discusses his map of the Oakland protests with Sandip Roy on New America Now


Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly attributed the following quote to Holly Joshi, an Oakland Police Department spokeswoman: “At one point we received information that the 19th Street BART Station in Oakland was closed. Just as we were about to tweet it, we saw that BART’s official twitter account had sent a newer update saying that it was reopened. When we called to double check we realized that the confusion was due to delays in getting the right information to the people handling the official social media tools at BART.” The quote is from George Chamales, not Joshi. The story has been corrected (7/21/10)

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