Police Attack Occupy Oakland

By on November 3, 2011 in News 17

Is this the moment when Occupy turned from protest to revolt? The San Francisco ABC affiliate KGO-TV reports on a dramatic turn in California (for an alternative take check out the #OakFoSho live stream):

Thousands of ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protesters peacefully marched in the streets of Oakland on Wednesday picketing banks and disrupting operations at the nation’s fifth-busiest port.

Around 10:30 p.m. a group of a couple hundred protesters went into the Travelers Aid building to occupy it. For a while the crowd danced in the streets outside the building and used large dumpsters to block the road leading to the building on Telegraph and 16th, near Frank Ogawa Plaza and hung a banner saying, “Occupy Everything.” Around 3:30 a.m. the protesters decided to peacefully head back to their camp at Frank Ogawa Plaza and back away from the police line.

At 11:45 p.m., we started to receive reports via Twitter that police were moving in on protesters at the Travelers Aid building that occupiers took over. If you have any photos or video of Downtown Oakland, please send them to us at: uReport@kgo-tv.com.

Bay City News reported that tear gas was deployed on an Occupy Oakland crowd marching through downtown Oakland early this morning…

[continues at KGO-TV]

, , ,

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_2F36I3P43APVHLPSBDVSGCB6X4 Jim Bean

    You can tell how peaceful it was by the broken windows and debris 

    disinformation, indeed

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QTSPVMKF3UOZOK2Z2O2QDN3OJQ ScareCro

    agent provocateurs.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_QTSPVMKF3UOZOK2Z2O2QDN3OJQ ScareCro

    agent provocateurs.

  • Anonymous

    This is misleading. I live in Oakland and saw a great deal of what happened yesterday. There was a small group — really small, not more than 5, 10 people, dressed in black and covered head to foot, hoodies and bandanas to hide their faces. They were tagging things and breaking windows. There’s video of the protestors trying to stop them, doing everything short of actually tackling them and turning it into a brawl.

    The protestors intended to open the foreclosed building, which was a charity center before closing, to occupy it as a statement about foreclosures. Apparently a couple people tagged some of the walls inside and rolled dumpsters into the street and threw rocks and bottles and fireworks at cops (unlike the other night when police claimed it had happened but clearly didn’t). Again, there are videos of people doing everything short of brawling with them to stop them, and there were people trying to push the dumpsters back up onto the sidewalks to undo what the “hooligans” had done. At one point they set fire to the barricade. There are photos of a single person, again, black hoodie, face covered, walking around outside the police line breaking windows in businesses while the police have the camp surrounded and they’re firing flash-bangs, tear gas and rubber bullets into the middle of the camp. This was not a protestor. The protestors were busy doing things like helping the homeless guy who’d been shot by police because he was sleeping in a doorway.

    It’s less than a handful of people using the 40,000+ people who turned out for the strike. They’re either cops trying to create reasons for the crackdown (there’s video showing known police among the crowd so this isn’t some odd conspiracy theory http://www.businessinsider.com/oakland-police-undercover-occupy-wall-street-to-break-up-protest-2011-10 ), or they are hooligans thinking they can get away with being dicks because of the high number of people out there. When the police refused to arrest the vandals but instead arrested 60+ people in the camp, I got a pretty good idea of which that was. If it was just vandals, why let them run free and arrest other people instead? They didn’t even arrest the guy who rammed his car into protestors and sent two of them to the hospital!

    Edit to add: I should also point out that a number of the businesses who had windows broken by this lone person during the police crackdown were businesses that had supported #OO in some way. This seems strangely targeted if it _wasn’t_ police agent provocateurs.

  • something different

    its fucking oakland. That is peaceful for oakland. At least its not an empty headed sports riot with no obvious reason. This is against life styles of the rulling class that are preventing further progress in our society. A protest in it self is an assault, a warning of the chaos  that is sure to come if the status quo  does not change to suit the times. 

  • efoinl!

    Have any of you seen this:  http://boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ooantipeace.jpg ?  Came out a few days ago.  Might be related.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1274188230 Bill Perkins

    http://wh.gov/TIy sign a petition to get the Administration to condemn police brutality against Occupy protesters!

  • Anonymous

    I hadn’t seen those. Yeah, that might in fact be related, though it doesn’t change my assessment that it’s either cop plants or a few numbnuts who are too dim to understand the point of a peaceful movement. All violence will do is escalate the situation and turn others away from the cause. In order for Occupy to result in lasting change, it requires the vast majority of the population to mobilize. If they see images of the police acting like they did a few days ago, videos like the one of the cop who specifically takes aim at the crowd trying to help Scott Olsen, that behavior against a steadfastly peaceful group of people, that will anger people enough to prompt them to do something to help the protestors. Every time the cops harass one of these groups, they have larger numbers the next day. It makes the oppression graphic and un-ignorable. Vandalism and setting things on fire will turn the average person away from the movement, not to mention making us indistinguishable from the violence arrayed against us. That’s really what it comes down to. Unless literally everyone suddenly turned up in their own riot gear with weapons at the same time to fight back, a violent revolution will end with the revolutionaries getting picked off a few at a time, as they join the violence. We may come to a point where violence is inevitable. We are not at that point yet and we do not have enough support among the populace at large to be instigating for it. If it does become inevitable, we need to have enough people turn to it all at once for it to make a difference. Otherwise it’s just a an excuse that makes the police violence more valid as a response in the eyes of the public.

  • Olivia

    weird breathy voice at 8:37

  • Suggbeat

    also, it’s important to point out that the building they occupied was an empty building, that had been forclosed upon by it’s financial lender. It used to provide services to the homeless, now it sits, unused. They were trying to bring books in, to convert it to a library, when the police showed up.

  • Anonymous

    Redneck, indeed

  • nathan willard

    police were so far unnoticeable…

  • http://voxmagi-necessarywords.blogspot.com/ VoxMagi

    Beyond the tradition blac-bloc cop ops…we now already have repeated incidents of conservative activists infiltrating crowds and sparking violence.These people are zealots willing to face arrest if necessary…as long as they can smear and defame the Occupy movement…which is far more legitimate and infinitely larger than any right wing ‘astroturf’ protest. We can take from this the confidence that Occupy is making its mark…because the frothing lunatics that comprise the right wing of this country are willing to make every effort, legal and illegal, to stop this movement in its tracks.

  • AUSTIN ADAMS

    Hey, that’s what Americans do.  Riot after winning a sports championship.  It’s America’s version of the England hooligans.

  • AUSTIN ADAMS

    Yep.  Where is the mayor of Oakland?  Where is the governor of California?

  • Jarel
  • anon438

    two wings of the same bird.