Occupy Oakland: Police Brutality or Justified Force?
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On October 25th, Occupy Oakland and police collided in what can only be called a night of terror.
For both sides. Kevin Drum of Mother Jones was in the crowd that evening, and wrote of a slightly less simple confrontation than what is being widely reported by social networks. A protester appeared on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and admitted that protesters were, in fact, throwing bottles at police officers. Drum saw the same. An excerpt from his article:
Violence came in waves. Many demonstrators peace-saluted police and called through bullhorns: “This is a peaceful protest! This is a civilian movement!” But from the moment I arrived in Oakland at 10:15 p.m., I saw a visible minority spoiling for conflict. Tinder had built across the night at the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway, a mixture of expectation and adrenaline. Protesters had balked at what they saw as disproportionate policing: They’d been teargassed once already. But how to respond was a matter of intense debate in the crowd of about 1,000.
People shouted each other down while police—as many as 100, in full riot gear, from several different counties—bristled in their formation behind a single metal barricade; news and police helicopters provided the soundtrack. Xavier Manalo, a 25-year-old tennis instructor holding the forward-most protest banner, admitted there were “rogue elements” in the group but insisted the “pressure of the peaceful will be the deterrent” to the violence.
Manalo was wrong. I saw groups of protestors arguing, not only with the police—who were the constant subject of heckling and catcalls—but with each other. There were calls to retaliate by throwing things like eggs back over the barricade, just as a big group of around 40 people started to chant, “Don’t Throw Shit! Don’t Throw Shit!”
So when Drum arrived, he saw two factions. One faction was the Occupy group, peaceful, trying to control the event as best they could. The other faction was simply there to agitate. More from Drum’s article:
No one appeared in control and the group was divided into two groups: the largely peaceful, and a small, visible, determined group of agitators.
At the height of this melee, I saw two men throw bottles at the police. People screamed and scrambled for air ahead of the inevitable: a half-dozen canisters of tear gas—some crackling and echoing off the Rite Aid building. Caught up in taking pictures, I breathed and choked. It felt like I had swallowed chilies and then rubbed the chilies into my eyes for good measure. I heard reports of rubber bullets and saw demonstrators tending to the distressed. My Twitter feed told me of at least one bloody injury—a man hit in the head with a canister—but the gas made the intersection impossible to rejoin for 10 minutes to confirm injuries.
A brief lull, then this scene repeated. The group came back together—around 800—with protesters calling to those who were still cowering behind bus shelters or cleaning their eyes to “not be afraid,” to “not run away.” And so it began again: talks, disagreements about engagement, improvised debates about the meaning of nonviolence, and a swirling sense of anticipation.
The breaker: Another bottle was hurled from the crowd and tear gas canisters were lobbed back. Accord between the protestors had not been reached.
And finally, a quote from one of the officers at the protest, again from Drum’s article:
“Occupy Oakland is no longer playing a part in this protest,” one officer told me—rogue actors, he suggested, had taken control. And indeed by midnight, the earlier calls for peace had fallen away to catcalls and heckling.
Scott Olsen, 24 years old and an Iraq veteran, was seriously injured on the 25th, and remains in the hospital, unable to speak. He was hit in the head with a tear gas canister that was lobbed into the crowd by the police who were ducking bottles.
Anarchy:
1 a : absence of government b : a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority c : a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government
2 a : absence or denial of any authority or established order b : absence of order : disorder
Nothing about that evening is cut and dry, nothing about that evening is simple or certain. What is certain is that in any group, you will find agitators, be it a group of protesters or a police force. It’s when we as a society begin to generalize that anarchy finds a foothold.
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What disturbs me most about all this, is the citizen vs civilian meme I have been seeing at more than one place talking about this. Call me crazy, but I thought law enforcement officers were also civilians, albeit in uniforms.
They are all people Jess, and you are right. The police are civilians in uniform, and although in many cases they sympathize with the cause, they are unable to take off that uniform. They have to do their job.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VrvMzqopHH0
Fun fact: Whenever there are major protests that the government doesn’t like, they throw police in there to incite violence. This has been going on since the 60s and is still very present today. I’m not saying that the all the violence was due to undercover police, but often, most of it is.
There is absolutely no evidence of such a thing, and I spent my life in COPS so I guarantee I would know if anything like that was done. I also guarantee, if it was, I would be shouting it to the rooftops. At MMA we prefer to write what we know can be supported by the facts not by mere speculation.
Did you watch the Youtube link I put up along with my post? It’s clear evidence that either the cops are putting in their own into the protest, OR that some cops are very different in their time off. But I think it’s more of the first.
Also, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO That’s what the government does to activists. Regardless of whether or not the program is inactive, the tactics that they used are still widespread in American law enforcement agencies.
Show me something timely where the police use undercover officers to incite, agitate, or encourage disorderly conduct or rioting for some insidious government purpose. I watched the video and read your link. If there was such a program, and there may well have been 40 years ago, there is no such program today. Once again please find me a link, a credible link, such as .edu or .gov that supports the premise and I might be willing to accept it, or, at the least research it. I see this as an effort to paint the police in a bad light, so prove me wrong.
Well, of course there’s no .gov website that will admit to saying any of that. And from the footage I’ve seen on youtube, none of it proves that any of the police were behind the violence. But at OWS, I’ve seen people that were on the protester’s side that were screaming at the police and whatnot, only to later on be on the police side with badges hanging from their necks like plains clothing cops do. Cointelpro might not be around in that state, but its spirit lives in policing agencies.
The police one day decided, while it was raining, to pull the tarps off the OWS library because they suspected there might have been bombs underneath, exposing some books to rain. This happened two times after that. Can you please give me a reason for that to have happened other then they were trying to bully us with whatever powers they had?
That makes no sense. Why in the world would the police want to make work for themselves and risk getting hurt the process? Come on dude! That makes no sense.
Because they make us look bad! Many officers are good people, but they are just following their orders. If the police saw us as people that needed protecting, I’d understand you but instead, we’re getting visits from members of the FBI’s terrorism unit.
That may be due to the fact that someone threw a chemical bomb at a security table in Boston AND the fact that Occupy has allowed Anonymous into the fold. They are criminals, no matter how you slice it-hacking is illegal-and many people much smarter than I consider them anarchists. Not the best combination-peace loving protesters and a group who wants to overthrow the government. And you wonder why things go wrong.
As someone who regularly participates in civil disobedience acts, (me) I will give you a tiny piece of advice. Next time you see someone acting out of the ordinary, trying to get others to do damage in whatever way , walk up to them and shout real loud at them, hey you, you are goading people to try and get them to (insert whatever damage here) why don’t you do it your own self. I’ve done that more than once and yes, most of them just walk away having been busted as the lead talker of shit that won’t get down in the mud. It’s more the idiots who just want to break things come in and stir shit up then run away so they don’t get popped.
Thanks for sharing, Mike. It’s easy to see an unfortunate event and skew coverage to fit one argument perfectly. Unfortunately, life and events are never that simple. I have never seen anything that even TRIED to give a full picture of what was going on. One can feel righteously outraged, but it really is difficult to be righteous when you really don’t know the scene. Outrage is fine, but be careful about the target of your outrage.
Erin did a fine job of analyzing the situation Marsha. This is what I call “fair and balanced” reporting.
Rogue protestors were actually police agitators. But they don’t report THAT.
No they don’t report that. It is far more sensational to report that protesters were agitating and police were being brutal in their response.
I think what Anonymous means, and I have heard this all over the Web, is that the agitators were police officers. I had a friend post a comment on Facebook that the “arrestees” (sic) were wearing the same boots that the police were. I responded that I had worn combat boots in high school, and I’m certain that if I had been there wearing those boots, I would have been called a “plant”. The police officer quoted in Drum’s article was correct-Occupy Oakland, at the end, was no longer playing a part in this event.
There will always be a minority of trouble makers with an agenda to cause havoc at any peaceful protest. This is particularly true in bigger cities where outsiders can hide in plain sight and pretend to be with the group. In cities like Flagstaff where I live and have joined the Occupy marches the fact the city is small and up a big mountain makes it pretty difficult for troublemakers to hang out and disrupt the peace.Law enforcement is put in a difficult position always BUT there absolutely needs to be restraint in any response.
I agree that restraint is important for both sides of the argument Peggy.