Hundreds of law enforcement personnel dressed in riot gear and gas masks arrested at least 85 people while removing Occupy Oakland from Frank Ogawa Plaza before dawn this morning. At least 10 law enforcement agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, the Alameda County sheriff’s office, the Oakland Police Department, and various other East Bay police departments participated in the raid. The Oakland Tribune reports:
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One police officer said that during the plaza camp shutdown, protesters threw several objects at police, including bottles, skillets, other kitchen utensils and rocks.
They also “threw plates at us like Frisbees,” the officer said. Protesters also chanted “Police go home, cops go home” and banged sticks on anything they could find. Some chanted, “Police are the biggest gang in America.”
The raid was mostly without incident, but the San Francisco Chronicle did report that “after a protester apparently released a smoke bomb, officers began putting on gas masks. A police helicopter flew overhead with its spotlight on. Some protesters set of fireworks, filling the encampment with smoke and flashes of light smoke.”
Mayor Jean Quan was not in Oakland for the raid, she was in Washington, DC, lobbying the federal government, but she did issue a statement including: ”
They can certainly exercise their free speech rights from 6 in the morning to 10 at night. But at night we had people who were hurt, that we were not allowed to treat and we had, you know, several criminal activities. … And so it was clear that we had to close it down over the weekend.
It will probably take us a good amount of time to clean up the park before it can be occupied by anybody.
While protesters claimed they would immediately try and and retake the park, by 6:45 AM cops had erected metal barricades around the plaza.
The Occupy Oakland raid occurred just as President Obama was arriving in the Bay Area for a $7,500-a-plate fundraiser at the W Hotel in San Francisco. The White House has banned all local media from the event. No word on whether or not Occupy San Francisco will try and protest the event.
