US Railway Cuts Cell Phone Contacts to Prevent Planned Protest

An American rail transit provider cut mobile phone services in a move to prevent protests in California Bay Area over police shooting.
The move has attracted criticism and is compared with crackdowns on dissent in the Middle-East and Britain.

Demonstrators in northern California’s Bay Area had planned a protest to condemn the shooting death of Charles Hill, who was killed on July 3 after Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officers responded to complaints about a man at a station in the city of San Francisco.

Hill was fatally shot in the torso – police said he had lunged with a knife – and protesters responded eight days later with a demonstration that shut down three San Francisco BART stations.

BART’s police force had been criticized before, in 2009, after a white officer responding with several colleagues to a complaint restrained an unarmed black man on the ground of a train platform and then fatally shot him in the back. That shooting also prompted protests, and the officer served less than two years in prison after being convicted of involuntary manslaughter.

In a statement released on Friday, BART said organizers planned another protest over the Charles Hill shooting during busy commute times on Thursday, which “could lead to platform overcrowding and unsafe conditions”.

“Organizers planning to disrupt BART service on [Thursday] stated they would use mobile devices to co-ordinate their disruptive activities and communicate about the location and number of BART police,” the statement said, Aljazeera reported on Saturday.

“BART asked wireless providers to temporarily interrupt service at select BART stations as one of many tactics to ensure the safety of everyone on the platform.”

James Allison, the deputy chief communications officer for BART, told Cnet News that mobile services were disabled in four San Francisco stations from 4pm to 7pm local time.

But BART offered varying explanations, likely with different legal ramifications, for how the shutdown had actually occurred.

In its first statement, BART said it had asked mobile service providers to stop their service. Then, a BART deputy police chief told the local online news outlet SF Appeal that BART turned off the services itself, as it is allowed to do under its contracts with the providers – Sprint, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. Around the same time, BART changed its official statement – which was posted on its website – to say that “BART temporarily interrupted service”.

The mobile phone disruption comes at a sensitive time: Regimes in the Middle East have in the past eight months used Internet and mobile phone blackouts to squelch dissent, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron suggested this week that he would examine ways to hamper the use of social media to prevent civil disturbances and riots like those that brought violence to London and other cities over the past week.