For a group of people so willing to admit they are ignorant about the facts, the crew of Morning Joe sure is ready to condemn the Oakland police for quelling the Occupy Oakland riot Tuesday night. Harold Ford kicked the discussion off:
Joe Scarborough then threw it over to Willie Geist for his thoughts on Oakland’s “overreaction.” Geist offered:
The Oakland PD was not facing a “peaceful” protest “about jobs and their incomes.” This was an organized mob intent on a physical goal: over running police and retaking the plaza they lost that morning.
What Geist, Ford, and Scarborough are apparently ignorant of, is that last week Occupy Oakland “protesters” pepper sprayed and beat a homeless man. And later in the week, when OPD was called to investigate a separate assault on a member of the press, the occupiers surrounded the cops and chased them out of the park chanting “Cops go home!” Occupy Oakland even issued an edict banning the media from the plaza.
The Morning Joe crew also appears ignorant of the fact that the city of Oakland posted an eviction notice to the occupiers last week citing, “increasing frequency of violence, assaults, threats and intimidation.” Scarborough and company also seem unaware that the initial OPD eviction of the occupiers Tuesday morning was over in minutes with little to no incident or injury.
It was only after the protesters regrouped that night, there numbers swelled to over 1,000, that the violence began. Again, the protesters were not just exercising their first amendment rights. OPD would have been happy to let them do that. The Occupy Oakland mob had a very specific physical goal Tuesday night: to retake Frank Ogawa Plaza from the cops who were guarding it.
It was only after protesters threw rocks, bottles, paint, and firecrackers at cops that police dispersed the crowd with tear gas.
“They didn’t have to force police into that situation,” Helen Walker, 46, a nurse from Albany, told The San Francisco Chronicle. “It was totally provoked, and if I could have, I would have stopped those idiots from throwing paint.”
