Violent crackdown on Occupy protesters in Oakland, California

By Fred Williams and Joseph Kishore; 26 October 2011 - WSWS
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/oct2011/oakl-o26.shtml

Police violently attacked hundreds of demonstrators in Oakland, California Tuesday evening, one day after clearing out the Occupy Oakland encampment, with several injuries reported. Protesters attempted to retake the plaza, which they have dubbed Oscar Grant Park (Ogawa Plaza).

Decked in riot gear, hundreds of police fired volleys of tear gas canisters and used bean bag guns and flash grenades against the unarmed protesters, who numbered in the thousands. Children, the elderly and disabled were among those trapped in the tear gas clouds. Police helicopters patrolled overhead.

Some videos of the police violence were available. See Tear gas thrown at Occupy Oakland and Police fire tear gas at protesters:

A reporter from the East Bay Express, an independent weekly newspaper, tweeted at about 7:45 p.m local time, “Tear gas fired into crowd… People on the ground with head wounds near 15[th Street].” There were reports of at least one demonstrator critically injured.

The violent crackdown is being carried out under the orders of Democratic Party Mayor Jean Quan. Quan is one of a number of Democrats who are overseeing the escalation of repressive measures against occupy demonstrators. The actions in Oakland come a couple days after Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff for Obama, ordered the arrest of 150 demonstrators in Chicago.

Police actions were also underway Tuesday evening in Atlanta, Georgia; Orlando, Florida; and Cleveland, Ohio. Police began surrounding the Atlanta encampment at around 11:00 p.m. local time, then moved in to clear the park and arrest those remaining.

In clearing the Oakland encampment early Tuesday morning, police used tear gas to drive away media covering the event. This was followed by flash grenades and rubber bullets, fired into the tents on the plaza. They then tore the camp apart and arrested about 75 protesters. Police beat people, slashed tents with box-cutters and destroyed personal property.

Helicopters hovered overhead, and sonic cannon were used sporadically in an attempt to disorient the people about to be arrested. A smaller number of people were also arrested at nearby Snow Park, which was an outgrowth of the main camp. One eyewitness said the occupants at Snow Park were treated more brutally than those at the main location. Another at the main camp described people being dragged down concrete steps while still inside their tents or sleeping bags.

As the police gathered near the Oakland Coliseum to prepare the military-style operation in the early morning, a local news station had reportedly alerted some protesters that the attack was soon to occur. This may have allowed some people at the camp to slip away before the police from Oakland, Hayward, Union City, Emeryville, Vacaville and several other cities moved in.

Those arrested were taken to several jails, including as far as Dublin, 22 miles away. Some were being detained on $10,000 bail and are being held until Thursday.

At a rally in the afternoon before the Oakland Main Library, the National Lawyers Guild announced that they had the names of 105 arrested; two people had their hands broken, and one had a head injury requiring hospitalization. The ludicrous charges leveled at the protesters were “remaining at the scene of a riot” (in fact, a police riot), resisting arrest and battery of a police officer.

Occupy Oakland, a part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, began on October 10. Within days, a sophisticated infrastructure had arisen which included round-the-clock cooking, sanitation, and communications.

Riot police maintained a presence in the city center area throughout the day on Tuesday, urging people to avoid downtown and at one point closing the local BART transit station.

--------------------------

1000 Strong March at Sunset
The Razing of Occupy Oakland at Sunrise

By MIKE KING; October 26, 2011 - Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/26/the-razing-of-occupy-...

Oakland.

In the early morning on Tuesday, starting before 5 am, the police temporarily destroyed Occupy Oakland, sending in a riot squad of over 500 that outnumbered protesters almost 3 to 1. Oscar Grant Plaza (officially Frank Ogawa Plaza) was too geographically large and open to be adequately defended against the armed tactical operation. Despite swallowing a lot of pride in watching the space get torn apart and dozens submit to arrest, Occupy Oakland made big strategic steps by picking our fights, beginning to define the terms of our struggle, preserving our forces, and maintaining the moral high-ground against a ‘Socialist’ mayor who is now wedded, however abusively, to the Oakland Police Department. Twelve hours later 1000 people marched against the police as stuck commuters cheered them on. Whatever the former communist Mayor once knew about dialectics, she apparently quickly forgot when she took office.

The formerly leftist Mayor succumbed to OPD pressure by raiding Oscar Grant Plaza and signing on to support a youth curfew in the last few days, after Police Chief Batts stepped down two weeks ago due to tensions with the mayor. The City Attorney left for similar reasons earlier in the year. In a progressive town with a vibrant history of resistance, where Occupy Oakland has broad support, the Mayor has succumbed, without much visible struggle, to the forces that truly run this town – the police, the fear-mongering media that thinks ‘Oakland’ is simply a synonym for ‘murder,’ and the wealthy and upper-middle class that clamor for more and more law and order. The ruling class and political establishment do not much care that the cost of that law and order is the gutting, not only of peoples’ rights, but also schools, libraries, health clinics, jobs programs, after-school programs and more that the ruling strata don’t personally need to survive, unlike a large and growing number of people who are slipping from struggling to desperation.

The fact that a Mayor who is seen as ‘ultra-Left’ could preside over such a budget, one that cedes roughly 2/3rd of total city funds to the police, and then bend to the police when they ask for full control of the city, tells us a number of things. The real enemies of the majority of the city’s residents – the working class, working poor and dispossessed – are the people who run the city. Electing more ‘radical’ politicians is an utter waste of time. When the State destroys our occupation, or smears us, or race-baits white radicals, or sends undercover cops into our space, or tries to intimidate us, they draw lines that they cannot erase in the minds of the Occupiers. A chant of ‘shame’ directed at police who beat and arrested a man simply for taking video quickly turned to a resounding ‘Fuck the Police.’ They are the enemy, they made that point clear to everyone who didn’t already know. Now what?

“Every hour, every day, occupation is here to stay!”

As the sun was coming up in downtown Oakland Tuesday morning, many of the evicted Occupiers snake marched through downtown, out-maneuvering the police, as workers made their way to their jobs honking and yelling their support. One of us apologized to a white working-class man, in his 30s, in worn overalls whose old pick-up was blocked by our presence in the street; as he hooked a u-turn, he said with a smile that there was no need to apologize and that we should keep fighting. There was a controlled anger and an overwhelmingly clear look of determination in the eyes of the evicted that we would come back stronger. Not next week, but in a few hours. And we did.

A 4 pm re-convergence was called that became a march of over 1000. I believe that is the biggest number of people to come out at one time over the whole vibrant two weeks at Occupy Oakland. Early, after the main raid Tuesday morning, the Occupy movement re-took a smaller park in Oakland, Snow Park near Lake Merritt, that had also been held and was lost in a police raid earlier Tuesday morning. There are no public plans, but several Occupiers expressed a strong desire to re-occupy Oscar Grant Plaza. A few people I spoke with said the police would need to put up a fence, barbed wire and have 24-hour patrols to keep us out – at which point we would occupy something bigger and better. Tuesday morning was the end of the beginning. Tuesday night is shaping up to be the beginning of something more as police fire tear gas amidst their own periodic retreat.

Who Occupies Oakland?

The order of the day is to decolonize, transform, and liberate Oakland. This means being real about who actually occupies Oakland. Politically, economically, discursively, militarily – the Oakland police run this town. At one point Tuesday morning a phalanx of riot cops blocked us from the scores of other cops tearing down free schools, medical clinics, a kitchen, dozens of tents, our abandoned barricades – a whole mini-township and community that had been built over the last two weeks. A young protester yelled at the police line that they had brought a ‘fascist police state’ to the city. The truth is that all that happened was a geographical redeployment of an already existing militarized police force from the Deep East, Fruitvale, and West Oakland into downtown for the night. What the racially and politically diverse Occupy Oakland encampment faced in the early hours of the morning was a glimmer of the daily, lived experience of black and brown working class people in this city. From racial profiling gang injunctions to recently fast-tracked curfews, and ongoing killings of unarmed black men, there has been a police state here for many years – that means more than evictions, but life and death.

Oakland has long been occupied by a police force that lives largely elsewhere, in comfortable suburban homes bought and furnished by exorbitant salaries that start at $90,000 per year, for rookies, before overtime. The police are not part of the 99% – that goes without saying. They are obviously not in the top 1% of earners either, no matter how hard their Chief and union have been trying to get them there. Furthermore, the whole ‘99%’ language glosses over contradictions, erases oppression and paralyzes us, in a similar sense that consensus does. While we shouldn’t shun populism, we erase and reproduce a whole lot of inequality by using this frame. While the percentage may not be 99%, most of the people who live in this city not only want change – they need it. The first part of destroying inequality is shedding light on it. The first step to undermining it is recognizing privilege and oppression in a way that builds solidarity and trust through engaged political work all over the city. That work has begun and will continue.

From Speaking Truth to Power, to Becoming Our Own Power

We are in the initial stages of what will be a long series of struggles. We shouldn’t be wedded to any static plan or draw from outdated blueprints or de-contextualized (or unintelligible) theories. The inequalities we seek to destroy are primarily political – about power and self-determination – or the lack thereof. The general sentiment of the Occupy movement is about transcending existing political institutions, about ridding ourselves of politicians, not replacing them. I think that those of us who hadn’t come to the conclusion already are beginning to see that speaking truth to power is not a strategy, or even a logical impulse.

The movement from the occupation of public parks to the occupation of private property, workplaces, universities, shuttered public schools in many cities, foreclosed homes, etc. is a likely scenario in the coming months. Tactical escalation will necessitate political and organizational development to broaden our bases and begin to gain the active and engaged support of larger and larger segments of the broader society. The movement needs to align itself with the struggles of the most oppressed – making issues like police brutality and occupation in communities of color, persecution of immigrants and acute joblessness central – while also linking with university student struggles over fees, student loans, and cuts, and with workers inside and outside of workplaces. The State’s biggest fear is the coalescing of these populations and the existing movements around these issues. We saw this in the non-profit/police/media/politician mantra of outside agitators when anarchists joined the Oscar Grant struggle. Their biggest fear is in our solidarity, in our collaboration and potential cohesion. We need to figure a way to be their waking, spreading, ever-present nightmare.

The idea that 99% of the population in this country is going to support a just social order, here and now, is more than a little naive, but believing that simple protest and activism alone will transform this society is even more naive. We need to build our own political structures and our own politics, rooted in participatory and accountable democratic processes at the local level.

I am not proposing a vanguard party or even a platform. I am simply trying to push the conversation. We shouldn’t misread the Zapatista call to ‘make the road by walking it’ as being synonymous with the old deadhead slogan ‘Not all who wander are lost.’ We don’t have to march in line, but we don’t have time to wander.

If we, in fact, ‘want everything,’ lets figure out how to get it. And then get on with getting it.

Mike King is a PhD candidate at UC–Santa Cruz and East Bay activist. He can be reached at mking(at)ucsc.edu

-------------------------

A Military-Style Eradication Mission
The Fight for Autonomy in Oakland

By DARWIN BOND-GRAHAM; October 26, 2011 - Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/26/the-fight-for-autonom...

Oakland.

In a pre-dawn raid Tuesday involving hundreds of officers drafted from seventeen departments across northern California, the notoriously aggressive Oakland Police violently raided
and wiped out that city’s Occupy encampment. By sunrise most of the protesters had fled beyond a cordon that stretched for several blocks back of Frank Ogawa Plaza, so far back that reportedly no media or bystanders could watch the scene unfold within. A communique from Occupy Oakland described the military-style eradication mission:

“Tear gas and flash bangs were fired into the camp where children were sleeping, people were beaten and shot with rubber bullets. The assault was also levied against our property in the camp, and the cops tried their best to completely destroy everything we had there. Almost every tent has been destroyed, many slashed with box-cutters, structures smashed, basically this was not an eviction, they came in to destroy everything we had.”

Upwards of 85 persons were arrested and dragged away with their arms zip-tied behind their backs, and charged with unlawful assembly and illegal lodging. Many Oaklanders close to those arrested report that the charges also include failure to disperse and crossing a police line, and that bail is set at $10,000. A smaller satellite camp just blocks away at Snow Park was also raided and torn asunder. Numerous first hand accounts circulating on the Internet tell of rampant acts of police violence during the blitz against mostly slumbering occupiers.

“Police used sound weapons and tear gas on the people there,” says one Oaklander.

“They kept the media and legal observers out, surrounded the camp and destroyed everything, including the kitchen, a free school/library, a childcare center, an arts center, and diverse cultural monuments to peace. People were brutalized and injured and many will spend the day in jail for attempting to envision a different society.”

From Washington D.C. (away on a lobbying trip) Oakland Mayor Jean Quan issued a statement after the police raid, recycling the city’s talking points that had been circulated days earlier in an eviction order, with no deadline, posted on the city’s web site: “over the last week it was apparent that neither the demonstrators nor the City could maintain safe or sanitary conditions, or control the ongoing vandalism.”

On Quan’s orders the police attempted to patrol the encampment from its beginning, but had been rebuffed by the occupiers who are serious about establishing their independence from the state and political parties in order to critique these corrupt institutions.

Reports of a sexual assault and then physical violence from within the encampment surfaced days ago from city officials. Speaking for city hall, spokeswoman Karen Boyd said a mentally ill homeless man attacked others within the camp and was forcefully expelled as a result. Whatever happened it’s clear that occupiers chose not to involve the police, for reasons that are clear to those familiar with the OPD’s violent reputation, but also because the encampment’s participants appear to be taking the challenges posed by state violence and austerity seriously, responding with efforts to autonomously care for and govern themselves.

The encampment therefore not only set up its own security system by which volunteers help one another keep the peace, but a major part of Occupy Oakland has included attempts to set up, albeit on a micro-scale, the very services the city government has been destroying in recent years: a free school, library, food kitchen, clothing distribution, child care, health care, and much more. The occupiers’ general assemblies (organized as facilitated consensus meetings) is its own autonomous version of hyper-egalitarian politics, contrasted against the extremely anti-democratic City Hall and Congressional processes dominated by corporate capital and the wealthy.

The mayor and several city council members initially praised the Occupy protests, specifically hailing the massive Occupy Oakland convergence and general assembly on October 10th because they misunderstood it as a critique solely aimed at Washington D.C. and distant centers of economic power. But from the very beginning Occupy Oakland took a radical stance and localized the terms of struggle. At the first rally cries of “fuck the police” peppered comments equally critical of local government and powerful Bay Area corporations which have pressed harmful budget cuts upon Oaklanders.

When the encampment sprang up that night and then so suddenly filled with hundreds of tents covering the entirety of the city’s proverbial Tahrir Square, Oakland’s liberal leaders began formulating their law-and-order position based on “concerns” over “safety” and “public health.” These same justifications have been echoed in the ultimatums of city establishments across America attempting to evict the occupations, some with violent police attacks equal to that just visited upon Oakland.

The irony, and perhaps a strategic victory of the Occupy Moment, is that these justifications and the subsequent police attacks, have exposed the hypocrisy of “main street” city regimes across the nation. They claim to stand for security, health, and order, when in fact they have facilitated a ghastly attack on the ever-expanding ranks of the poor, the foreclosed upon, the homeless and unemployed through the imposition of fiscal austerity and police militarization. The spread of occupation’s encampments from Wall Street to dozens of major cities has effectively broadened the terms of struggle to include longstanding human rights abuses of local governments and police forces against communities of color, the poor, [homeless], youth and women.

In Oakland, as in all of the occupy encampments, the terms of struggle have become sharply defined not just by national political issues like imperial wars and brutal income inequalities, but also by locally specific struggles over urban space, homelessness, gentrification, struggles against police brutality, and efforts to save schools, libraries, parks, and health services from the agents of austerity. The budget slashers implicitly criticized by the encampments and the social services they provide, and explicitly criticized during rallies, sit in Oakland’s City Hall, just as as they reside in distant seats of federal power. Their economic benefactors reside in the posh gentrified condos of Jack London Square or exclusive enclaves like Piedmont, just as often as they live and work in the world’s financial centers on Manhattan Island and Connecticut’s Gold Coast. The occupiers in Oakland and every other city understand this and have expressed the ugly truths of these injustices through municipal budget cuts and police militarization.

Over the last year Oakland has grappled with a budget deficit of $58 million (quite large in a city of just under half a million with a half-billion annual budget). Compounding the pain of budget gaps in prior years, Oakland’s most recent spending plan has required deep cuts to city services, including public safety and sanitation. Schools, parks, libraries, and nearly all other branches of government have been starved since 2008, and all this came atop several decades of post-Civil Rights Movement divestment by capital and the middle class from the inner city.

The twisted irony then is that the same public officials who pulverized the Occupy encampment over concerns for public safety and health haven’t been able to provide these rights to Oaklanders for lack of resources on the one hand, and an unprecedented, several decades long build-up of the police and prisons on the other. In one moment the nakedness of the emperor has been revealed for all by a spontaneous commune of tent dwellers whose brilliant weapon was to claim their own right of autonomous self-government and self-care in the absence of a welfare state.

Oakland’s immediate fiscal pains are primarily due to a collapse in property tax revenues and flattened sales tax receipts resulting from the economic depression beginning in 2007. Unable or unwilling to turn against the masters of local and state government — among them some of the same uber-wealth elites and corporate monsters who have colonized politics so thoroughly at the national level — city leaders like those in Oakland have been forced to watch neighborhoods literally fall to pieces. They wring their hands while families suffer the further deprivations of impoverishment, and bicker among one another about how to allocate increasingly dwindling funds and workers, while the city endures the desperate and hopeless violence of alienated and criminalized young men who see no future for themselves.

Few cities in California have been struck harder by foreclosures than Oakland. The predatory sortie of home seizures led by banks like Wells Fargo and Bank of America have included 28,000 Oakland residences in just three years. Most of these stolen homes are concentrated in the city’s vast eastern neighborhoods populated by Black and immigrant communities. Many of these displaced families have been pushed into slummed rental housing, while some have become homeless. Their plight is Oakland’s for the decline in real estate values which has accompanied foreclosures, and in many ways caused the dispossession of the masses, has erased $12 billion in real estate values across the city, 1% of which previously filled municipal coffers.

Many of these families have been struck equally hard by the state’s unemployment crisis, causing a cyclical decline in consumer spending, leading to fewer sales tax revenues. With no recovery in sight Oaklanders have turned to their local government in a time of need only to find schools closing, libraries cutting hours, infrastructure crumbling, and all other aspects of the public sphere and the safety net being pulled out from under them. And yet the city’s leaders have issued statements condemning the protesters of this austerity campaign of being unable to shelter and care for one another?

Just this year the city underwent a wrenching public debate about whether to shutter most of its library branches and lay off staff, while massively reducing hours at the main library. The proposal brought hundreds of Oaklanders to City Council meetings to plead for libraries. Money was ultimately found in the budget, but Oakland’s library system remains a woefully under-funded resource suffering from decades of divestment. Many low-income residents use the libraries to hunt for jobs, search the Internet, educate themselves and their children, and even just to get off the streets.

Last month a coalition of hundreds of angry parents occupied an Oakland Unified Schools Board Meeting demanding that they withdraw plans to close five Oakland schools. Predictably the schools on the closure list serve predominantly working class Black and Latino students. The closures, say board members, would save $2 million annually for a school system hard pressed for resources. For the city’s majority, schools are not just places of learning for their children, they are part of the safety net. Thousands of children are fed through free or reduced cost school meal programs daily. Schools provide health services to children and act as a day care for busy parents. Many schools are social anchors of working class neighborhoods that are enduring extreme job losses, foreclosures, crime and police violence, and other symptoms of growing economic inequality.

When Occupy Oakland organized its own free school, child care center, lending library, and food services, it wasn’t just looking after the logistics of a large encampment. The occupiers were critiquing the failure of the City of Oakland and State of California to create a just and humane society. In no area has Occupy Oakland’s efforts to exist autonomously from City Hall proved more difficult, but also more revealing than security.

Police have never been associated with public safety by the nearly half of Oaklanders in whose communities the cops patrol more as an occupying force than as public servants. But even for the city’s middle class the police have proven a continual source of problems. White and middle class Oaklanders have variously bemoaned the police force as understaffed, and incompetent among other things. Due to the city’s fiscal contraction the force had been reduced to 640 officers from a previous high of about 800. The lack of manpower and money for the OPD has led Oakland’s middle class neighborhoods to worry that the violence which daily afflicts working class Oaklanders in the flatlands will begin to spread into their privileged enclaves in the hills. The unfortunate response of the middle class to this dynamic has been to spend money on private security forces, or to support the now decades long political shift away from the welfare of schools, health care, and high wages, to the warfare of draconian laws and prison building.

In the largely Black, immigrant and working class expanses of West and East Oakland the cops are widely despised because of their itchy trigger fingers and rough methods. The Riders scandal of 2000 exposed the Department’s brutality and corruption to a national audience when a clique of officers was accused of routinely fabricating and planting evidence and wantonly beating citizens. But it didn’t take a scandal and civil suit to set much of Oakland’s Black and immigrant communities at odds with the cops. Remember that the Black Panther Party, founded in Oakland, was organized in part to police the police. The Riders scandal only set in motion the latest official turmoil, leading to a federal consent decree with 51 reforms required of the OPD by the US Justice Department.

The day after Occupy Oakland’s encampment began OPD Chief Anthony Batts suddenly quit as result of an ongoing feud with the Mayor and Council. Batts claimed the city’s political leaders had hamstrung his efforts to curtail crime, but in reality the Mayor and Council have been torn over controversial policing methods such as gang injunctions and curfews — more of the warfare approach to dealing with social strife borne of gross inequality — and the obvious need to build social justice through humane city services. The OPD’s consent decree has been extended because of the department’s inability to comply and reform itself, and now the threat of federal receivership has been floated. Oakland’s police have proven incapable of protecting and serving the people.

And yet it was the claim of Oakland officials that the Occupy Oakland Encampment could not police itself that partially led to Tuesday’s police raid. “We’ve had three days now where we’ve had incidents where people have been hurt,” Mayor Quan told the press days before the raid. “We really can’t let the encampment keep going.”

In a way it’s like saying “we can’t let Oakland keep going.” Oakland suffered 95 murders in 2010. The city is awash in threats to public health stemming from a desperate poverty and inequality that is as much the result of local political decisions as national laws and economic forces. Oakland’s people need help. In the very least they need the space and peace to help themselves. Occupy Oakland’s organizers were attempting to create this kind of political space. Their mere presence, and the mere phenomenon of people helping to feed, educate, care for, and protect one another, autonomous from the state, and in the shadow of City Hall, was apparently enough of a front to City Hall’s increasingly bankrupt authority to warrant an attack by the police.

Last night Oaklanders responded to their eviction by attempting to retake Frank Ogawa Plaza (which they have renamed Oscar Grant Plaza after the young man murdered by BART Police in 2009). The Oakland Police repelled the occupiers by rioting with their armaments of tear gas, sound weapons, and rubber bullets. For now the ideals of autonomy and mutual aid in the shadow of the warfare state have been expelled from Oakland’s central square, roaming about the city’s streets.

Darwin Bond-Graham is a sociologist who splits his time between New Orleans, Albuquerque, and Navarro, CA. He can be reached at:darwin@riseup.net

-----------------------------------
Inside the Shocking Police Crackdown on Occupy Oakland: Tear Gas Used, 85 Arrested

By Susie Cagle; October 25, 2011 - AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/story/152870

Over the last two weeks I've seen a community rise up seemingly out of nowhere -- one based on consensus decision-making and strong anti-oppression values for all people involved. One that included free food and a clean kitchen, a community garden, free school and twice-daily yoga.

Last night I saw that community torn apart by a show of force so grossly outrageous in terms of mass of force, brutality, and cost to an already broke city that nearly shut down most of its libraries, and is on the verge of closing schools.

All day rumors of an impending eviction had been swirling around the tent city occupation in Frank Ogawa Plaza. After several nights of false alarms, campers seemed split over what to believe on Monday. It was Occupy Oakland's two-week anniversary, and a group of demonstrators partied at the 14th and Broadway plaza entrance with cake, balloons and dancing. The General Assembly was smaller; there were clearly more tents missing than on the previous day. But people were engaged, and strides were made. Someone announced that a nearby church had donated use of its kitchen for the Occupation. There would no longer be a need for the propane the city had found so problematic. There was more talk of growing the camp than defending it. When I went home around 2:30am to feed my cat and charge my phone, I felt confident the plaza was safe for the night.

Halfway through my tea I read on Twitter that campers had spotted police mobilizing a few blocks from the camp. By the time I arrived back at the plaza, campers had barricaded the perimeter of the camp as well as the entrances to the plaza. I walked the perimeter and didn't see any police, so I entered the camp, where feelings were tense. That's when I heard the roar of police motorcycles on Broadway. By the time I pulled my video camera out and crossed the street, about 500 Oakland police and supporting troops from more than a dozen nearby departments were mobilizing in riot gear, clubs and guns in hand. They announced that by remaining in the camp, protesters might face "chemical agents" and "bodily injury."

I couldn't get the man making the announcements to meet my eye.

A few minutes later, police broke their lines and some of the news vans along 14th were allowed to leave. It was then I noticed that I and a couple dozen others who were primarily filming the police action were now between a second and third line of officers. We were pinned. I heard a few pops, a flash, a crack, and saw a puff of white smoke that kept growing. Suddenly we were moving quickly down 14th street, followed by a cloud of tear gas. At least 85 protesters were arrested, of the approximately 200 who remained in the plaza. Many remain in jail on $7,500-$10,000 bails awaiting arraignment on Thursday.

More than an hour later, after shutting down much of downtown Oakland within a large barricaded perimeter, and after the end of park curfew at 6am, police mobilized to clear out Snow Park, the expansion sister camp to the main plaza. Several protesters were arrested there after refusing to leave their camp, which had been facing eviction notices for nearly a week. The demonstrators there had brought a manual lawnmower and were maintaining the overgrown park; they had no portable toilets or sanitation issues; and they were not cooking with an open flame. When asked why they were arrested during open park hours, one officer responded that the park was "a crime scene" so it could be closed at any time. At that point I couldn't help but laugh. "I'm serious," he said.

These camps are now flattened, but occupiers remain defiant. As I write this, people are organizing. That's what I feel the need to do here, but while I want to provide more synthesis, I don't feel like I can do that yet. I came to Occupy Oakland as an independent journalist and it was made known to me that my right to free speech as a member of the media is about as valuable to the city of Oakland as the rights of the occupation that they're holding in cells. I think I'm still reeling.

But I guess what I'm saying is that the city council meeting might be kind of crowded tonight.

-----------------------------------
Six First-Hand Observations From Last Night's Chaos in Oakland

By Joshua Holland; October 26, 2011 - AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/article/685959/six_firs...

I spent most of yesterday in Oakland bearing witness to a hectic day of protests that featured a good deal of violence. Here are some observations.

Again and Again

I heard this spiel blasted over loud speakers so many times last night that I have it memorized:

This is Sgt. Whatever with the Oakland police department. I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. You must leave the area of such-and-such (mostly 14th Street and Broadway) immediately. You can disperse via X street, heading in X direction (mostly 14th Street heading East). If you do not disperse immediately, you will be subject to arrest, regardless of your purpose. If you do not disperse immediately, chemical agents will be used. If you do not disperse immediately, you will be subject to forcible removal, which may result in serious injury.

The problem is that we're taught from an early age that we have a right to peaceably assemble and protest, and that this right is guaranteed by the Constitution and can't be over-ridden by the city of Oakland. It's not an accurate view of the law, which is more nuanced, but it is pervasive. So protesters did not acknowledge that they were assembling unlawfully, remained, and then the tear gas came flying. And this happened again and again for much of the night.

Missing the point

That's not to say that a few idiots in the crowd didn't throw some objects at police.

In the age of camera phones and Youtube, finger-pointing inevitably follows clashes between police and protesters. Who instigated what? Who provoked whom? Which came first -- that protester throwing a water-bottle at cops, or the cops deploying teargas at protesters. And these debates not only miss the central point, they obscure it entirely.

Long before any act of violence occurs on the streets, a series of command decisions are made, and it is those decisions which ultimately determines whether a protest will be largely peaceful or descend into chaos. Smart crowd control requires letting protesters protest – giving them an outlet. Yesterday evening in Oakland, long before anything bad happened, police decided to deny Occupy Oakland that outlet. A peaceful, if rowdy march was headed from the main library towards Frank Ogawa Plaza – the location from which they'd been forcefully evicted the night before. They were headed off by a hastily assembled line of police clad in riot gear. The protesters decided to change course and head towards the jail where, according to a National Lawyers' Guild legal observer on the scene, 105 protesters were being detained.

Again, the police blocked their route. They made another turn – I don't know what the objective was at that point – and were again blocked. The police did not have the manpower to actually block the many cross-streets that we crossed, but somewhere a commander decided to put 5 or 6 cops on every side street. This was a stupid move, as 5 officers cannot keep 500 protesters, now angrier than they had been at the onset, at bay.

It was only then that I witnessed the first violence. Protesters swarmed around these 5 officers, they started swinging batons, made two arrests and then found themselves completely surrounded. I am certain it was a scary moment for those officers. There was another line of riot police a block away – a thicker line. And at some point they realized their comrades were in a jam, and maybe two dozen came running and responded with extreme force (it was at this point that a flash-bang grenade came flying towards me, going off about 3 feet away and leaving me shaking for about an hour). One officer, at the front, was firing less-than-lethal projectiles wildly at the crowd – which, at that point, was in full retreat -- until he was physically restrained by another (maybe a supervisor). There were injuries and arrests, and I think none of it would have happened had they decided to let the protesters chant 'let them go!' for a while in front of the jail instead of forcing them – seemingly arbitrarily -- to walk around in circles facing off against line after line of police blocking their way.

As I mentioned several times on Twitter last night (follow me!), the police response last night was not the most brutal I'd seen, but it was the most inept. By hyper-aggressively boxing in protesters again and again, they just ratcheted up the pressure for no readily apparent purpose.

The Costs of Eviction

You could of course take this a step further: the entire exercise was unnecessary. One can only guess how much resources the cash-strapped city devoted to evicting Occupy Oakland in the first place. And not just Oakland. Various reports have suggested that 10 or 15 different law enforcement agencies were involved – I saw officers from at least 5 agencies myself. I have no idea how much this is costing in overtime, but it must be a fortune. An then there's the opportunity cost – police clad in riot gear standing a line against protesters aren't out catching bad guys, writing speeding tickets, etc.

These protests aren't ending anytime soon, and Oakland finds itself having to guard a small chunk of public property with dozens of riot cops. Protesters appear resolute about reclaiming that space as soon as they can. So this vast drainage of resources may go on indefinitely. I'm not sure City Hall considered what the end game might be, but if they thought the Occupy Movement was going to go away, they made a stunning miscalculation.

Oakland's Justification Rings Hollow

On that point, there have been two justifications given for the eviction: health and safety violations – I've heard a lot about rats – and at least one reported incident of violence at the camp.

Here's irrefutable evidence that these justifications are complete nonsense: Snow Park. Snow Park, on a grassy slope on the side of Lake Merritt, had a small satellite occupation. Whereas the main camp was densely packed with humanity, had a kitchen and was no doubt messy – as campsites tend to be after 3 weeks -- Snow Park was just a few scattered tents on a hill. When I visited it on Saturday, it was clean and neat, and there had certainly been no reports of violence.

The courts have long held that the right to assemble isn't without limits. Communities can determine the time, place and manner of protests. But – and this is a crucial “but” – any limits must be narrowly tailored o achieve a legitimate government purpose. If an act of violence occurred in the camp, they should have dealt with it like an act of violence at a private club – you don't destroy the club, you arrest the perpetrator. If they wanted to clean up the park, they could have done it in shifts, or worked with the occupiers to address sanitation issues or taken any number of less restrictive approaches.

Oakland has effectively banned overnight protests within the city. As I wrote last week, this is, on its face, unconstitutional in the context of a movement whose defining act of political expression is occupying public space over an extended period of time.

Self-policing

Last night in Oakland I saw both law enforcement and protesters policing themselves. It is all but guaranteed that in any crowd – be it a group of protesters or a PTA meeting – there will be a few hot-heads. I saw a number of self-appointed 'marshals' among the protesters intervening – physically-- to prevent damage to property or acts that would provoke police violence. These folks, I imagine, are sophisticated enough to understand that the media are never on the side of protesters, and can only get a semblance of a fair shake by remaining peaceful expression of outrage.

Where Does This End?

“You see all these people here?” asked a protester as we rinsed the residue of tear gas out of our eyes a few blocks from Frank Ogawa Plaza. “They're all going home more radicalized than when they arrived.” I think that's right – this kind of crowd control doesn't deter protesters, it steels them. I only heard more resolve as the evening progressed. It may, however, intimidate the MoveOn types, leaving a harder core to continue challenging the police.

These Occupiers aren't going away. I'll be out in Oakland tonight to see what unfolds.

-----------------------------------

At Occupy Oakland Crackdown, Oakland PD Put Iraq War Vet in Critical Condition

By Kristen Gwynne; October 26, 2011 - AlterNet
http://www.alternet.org/newsandviews/685964

Last night, I gazed in horror at my computer as I watched cops fire flash-bang bombs, rubber bullets, and tear gas upon peaceful protesters at Occupy Oakland. I couldn't help but think how the police response, or perhaps better said attack, resembled a war zone. Photographs show several military personnel at the action, and for those who had served time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and especially those with PTSD, the experience must have been a horrific reminder of the atrocities they witnessed abroad.

For one Iraq War vet, the scene may have become all too real. After being shot in the face by a "police projectile," a canister from tear gas or a flash-bang bomb, Scott Olsen, 24, is in critical condition. He does not breathe on his own; a respirator at Oakland’s Highland Hospital does that for him.

The videos of his injury (below) are heartbreaking. The victim is lying in the street, bleeding from the face. Demonstrators run to help him, and a cop tosses a tear-gas canister at the crowd gathering around the injured vet. It explodes. Carried out by a group of organizers, Olsen emerges from a cloud of smoke, bleeding from the head, his eyes in a daze. His body is limp, with his arms dangling above his face. When they scream "what's your name?" he can't respond. His hand moves, but his eyes stare straight ahead. The crew screams in horror "MEDIC!! MEDIC!!!"

A disturbing addition to the horrific image is the marine jacket he wears. Olsen served two tours in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. His friend, Keith Shannon, served alongside him, and told the Huffington Post: "We both came out against the war." Shannon also told the Huffington Post that Olsen had been attending Occupy San Francisco events and had answered the call to join Occupy Oakland in solidarity. "He doesn't agree with the way the banks aren't regulated, the way they drove the economy in the ground. He wants there to be regulation of the banks," Shannon said.

For Olsen, his opinions on the economy were enough to land him in the hospital, under very serious conditions. According to the Huffington Post:

"Right now, he's under sedation," Shannon said. "He walked into the hospital." But soon after his arrival, Shannon said, doctors found that there was swelling in Olsen's brain and put him under. He did not get a chance to talk to his friend. "They are waiting for a neurosurgeon to examine him to see if he needs surgery or not," Shannon said. If he doesn't need an operation, he'll be moved to the intensive care unit.

When reached at her Wisconsin home, Sandra Olsen, Scott's mother, told HuffPost that her son's condition was serious. "He has a head injury," she said. "They are still trying to figure it out with him. I don't want to tie up the phone line. He's not in the best shape."

That Olsen is a marine adds a dark undertone to the police brutality now characteristic of the Occupy movement. No military serviceman, or peaceful demonstrator, deserves to be subject to violence by the police, the very men and women whose role is to serve and protect (and whose jobs the Occupy movement fights for).

Watch the videos: