Occupy Oakland: Police Brutality or Justified Force?

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

: absence or denial of any authority or established order b : absence of order : disorder 2 aabsence or denial of any authority or established order babsence of order

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.