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Hayward Mayor Barbara Halliday at a
community task force meeting in March.
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HAYWARD CITY COUNCIL
A Hayward community task force created earlier this year to update the city’s 25-year-old Anti-Discrimination Action Plan is recommending the city’s police force end its participation in Urban Shield, the disaster training exhibition and weapons trade show held annually in Alameda County.
The task force, which renamed the Anti-Discrimination Action Plan as the “Commitment for an Inclusive, Equitable, and Compassionate Community” (CIECC), wants the city to end its association with Urban Shield by July 2018. The recommendation was among 50 items the task force is urging the city to complete over the next two years to protect the city’s immigrants, the disabled and its overall community values.
But the recommendation of withdrawal from Urban Shield is by far the most divergent from Hayward’s existing policies. Hayward Police have participated in Urban Shield for the last seven years, including last summer.
The event has drawn increasing opposition from activists in many East Bay cities for increasing the militarization of local police departments and portraying some immigrant groups as the enemy in its exercises.
The trade show portion of Urban Shield in the past has often featured discriminatory t-shirts and signs for sale against Muslims and undocumented immigrants, for instance.
The outcry led the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department this year to issue new guidelines to ban vendors from displaying inflammatory and racist messages, prohibiting weapons sales, and eliminating racial stereotyping from its training exercises.
The reported use during Urban Shield training exercises of suspects depicted as Arabs, for instance, rankled many task force members, for promoting racial stereotypes of Muslims.
A city staff report acknowledged the task force’s concerns, but adds the Urban Shield disaster training exercises are useful to Hayward police officers.
“Staff recommends that rather than withdrawing from the Urban Shield training altogether, the City continue to work with interested community members to change the way in which Urban Shield is promoted and implemented, to increase community involvement in the program, to ensure that all levels of program participants understand the underlying principle of the training is to strengthen our communities, and emphasize the preparation of both first-responders and community members for the most likely events that will occur, such as local wide-spread disasters,” according to the staff report.
The Hayward City Council formed the community task force in late January primarily to update the city’s anti-discrimination policy. But with rising anxiety over President Trump’s inauguration and worries the incoming administration would crack down severely on various immigrant groups, the 22-member community task force was soon asked to issue a recommendation on whether the Hayward City Council should declare sanctuary city status.
The move was panned by critics and advocates for the appearance that Hayward city and elected officials were sidestepping the sanctuary city issue through the task force rather than placing it on a city council agenda and making a decision like many of its neighboring cities.
The task force ultimately recommended becoming a sanctuary city and the City Council approved the resolution in June, but only after nearly ever city in the East Bay had done so months prior.
ebcitizen.com 
Disaster preparedness with military grade weapons and tactical suits. Sure, that makes so much sense. Anything goes in Hayward. According to Peixoto, that's where Hayward Police Department learns its crowd control methods. Having claimed to have had the privelege of attending an Urban Shield excercise, he should know better.
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Of course city council supports Urban Shield. They are all endorsed by the Hayward Police Officers Association and Hayward Firefighters 1909. Why piss off their cash cows? Whatever happened to community policing? Whenever you have “warriors” you have to have an enemy. Fight crime, not citizens. Council, stand up for the community, not just your campaign donors.
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We learned the term dotard this week but for the last two comments I would just use fucktards to describe MW and his puppies comment
The police need to learn how to police w/o just pulling out their guns and murdering people
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@MW Then, we can all take a knee like Kaepernick to show solidarity for whatever the feel-good cause du jour is.
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By MW:
My suggestion is that rather than participating in Urban Shield, instead all Hayward city employees, and especially the members of the Police Department, should be required to be attendees at a series of lectures given by Baltimore's Marilyn Mosby.
Doing so would make them more politically correct and “improve” their “thinking,” and most likely also lead to Hayward having a considerably higher murder rate, and just as Mosby inspired “reforms” and policy “improvements” did in Baltimore. However it is totally irrelevant how extremely high the murder rate goes as long as we are all good little robots, lemmings, and puppets on a string spouting the latest pseudo liberal nonsense.
And after Mosby is finished “educating” us on how to “improve” our “thinking.” perhaps we could also have such people as Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, Nate Miley, and Nancy Pelosi share their “wisdom” with us.
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