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Scenes From Occupied Oakland

thenewinquiry:

via Reuters | Stephen Lam 

A street-eye view of the clashes between protesters and police

by Christopher Chitty

Keith Shannon was the picture of American pride and courage in his sailor’s whites. As plumes of tear gas and police projectiles streamed around him, he alone held the line, standing almost at attention, gripping a “Veterans for Peace” flag with his left hand while extending a copy of the U.S. Constitution — open to the First Amendment — with his right.

In this simple gesture Shannon distilled the sharp contradictions of a political establishment engaged in a decade-long war against increasingly nebulous threats from abroad and from a domestic populace made increasingly desperate from the protracted economic decline. Police had just fired a projectile, probably a beanbag filled with lead shot, into the face of Shannon’s comrade, Scott Olson, also a veteran. As a dozen people rushed in to tend the fallen man, police lobbed a flash grenade into the huddle. Some scattered, but others carried Olson’s limp body away from the front line, shielding him from further volleys with their bodies. Olson, who returned unscathed from two tours of duty in Iraq, suffered a fractured skull and swelling in the brain. His injuries will require neurosurgery.

Whether the Oakland police’s initial denial of having deployed flash grenades and beanbag guns was an attempt at misinformation or just a consequence of institutional disarray — 17 different Bay Area law enforcement agencies were involved in the clashes of October 25 — the official line carries increasingly little water in the era of YouTube. Over more than three hours, police repeatedly read the riot act from behind a barricade to those “unlawfully assembled” at 14th and Broadway in downtown Oakland: the gateway to what the occupiers had dubbed “Oscar Grant Plaza” in memory of the young, unarmed African-American man shot in the back by police on the West Oakland BART platform early on New Year’s Day in 2009. In response to minor provocations — a splash of paint is said to have injured two officers, and later in the evening, a few bottles were hurled from the crowd — police opened fire. Protesters fled, only to reassemble a few blocks away, rinse tear gas from their eyes with milk of magnesia, and march back to the police line: a pattern that continued through the night.

Had Oakland become a war zone? Did the protesters’ marches up and down Broadway and Telegraph and their attempts to reoccupy the plaza constitute a riot? How easy is it to shift the line between what is peaceful and what is violent in what activists are just calling “the movement”? City government repeatedly warned the occupiers of Frank Ogawa Plaza about public-safety concerns during the week before their forcible eviction, citing an increase in public urination and defecation, a growing rat problem, and fire hazards from cooking. Above all, though, there was a risk from “sexual offenses, fighting, and public drunkenness.”

Americans have not been insensitive to the paradox of using stun grenades, rubber bullets, and chemical agents to preserve the health and safety of a mixed, peaceable crowd of all ages. No one, least of all Marines, likes to see police shoot at Marines. “Does anybody know where they took my buddy?” Shannon asked later, after protesters fled a second round of gas. He fixed his gaze upon a young woman who gave him the phone number for the National Lawyers Guild. His eyes reflected a steely calm, which I mistook for shell shock. After a quick phone call he turned to me and asked, “Do you know where Highland Hospital is?” I offered to look it up for him on my phone. “Those smartphones are great,” he said, as if he had never had the opportunity to use one.

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(Source: thenewinquiry)