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Video and police records indicate that Oakland Police Officer Robert Roche threw a stun grenade at protesters trying to help the injured Iraq War vet. ...
One of the most indelible images of the Occupy movement to date is that of Marine veteran Scott Olsen being carried away from a skirmish line of riot police at 14th Street and Broadway on October 25 in Oakland. Stunned and bleeding from an ugly gash on his forehead, the 24-year-old Wisconsin native had been struck in the head by an unknown projectile during the first salvo of tear gas, flash-bang grenades, and less-than-lethal munitions fired at hundreds of Occupy Oakland supporters facing off against Oakland police and several other Bay Area law enforcement agencies called in on mutual aid. ...
As several protesters ran to Olsen's aid, someone from the cluster of police appears to lob a flash-bang grenade into the crowd gathered around the young veteran. The stun grenade explodes amid a cloud of tear gas and deafening noise, scattering Olsen's rescuers.
Sergio Ballesteros, 30, has been involved in Occupy LA since the movement had its California launch in October. But this week, his activism took an abrupt turn when he was arrested on a felony charge — lynching.
Under the California penal code, lynching is “taking by means of a riot of any person from the lawful custody of any peace officer," where "riot" is defined as two or more people threatening violence or disturbing the peace. ...
Ballesteros is not the first protester to face this 1933 California law. ...
In the handful of protest cases in which lynching has been used as a charge in the past, it later has been dropped. However, in one case, a court concluded that “lynching” could include “a person who takes part in a riot leading to his escape from custody." ...
Ballesteros is an activist outside the Occupy movement -- building homes through Habitat for Humanity during his spring breaks, aiding at a children's camp for the poorest kids in the Appalachians during the summer, and acting as mentor for disadvantaged kids in the Los Angeles area.
[Clearly, he must be locked up to protect public safety. Also, there is nothing at all perverse about this appropriation of the anti-lynching laws. -L]
Those books we were able to save, we handed to the army unit that was blocking Sheikh Raihan Street. The irony of handing the books to the army while uniformed soldiers and plainclothes police continued their attack on us from the adjacent roof was lost on nobody.
Egypt lost much more than a building that night.
...it is clear that the only people to gain from this shameful disaster are the elements of the old regime who benefit from this state of chaos and anarchy, which is slowly but surely chipping away public support for the protesters, who were once depicted as heroes but are now increasingly portrayed as thugs and vandals seeking to destroy and destabilize Egypt.
The Oakland Police Department has disciplined two officers for violating department policy during the Occupy Oakland protests, The Bay Citizen has learned. The suspension of one officer and the demotion of his supervisor are the first known disciplinary actions OPD officials have taken in the wake of hundreds of police misconduct complaints following the Occupy demonstrations.
The department suspended Officer John Hargraves for 30 days for covering his name badge with a piece of black tape, a violation of California law. Lieutenant Clifford Wong was demoted to sergeant for failing to properly report the incident, according to police sources.
The department is still investigating the case of protester Scott Olsen, who suffered a fractured skull during an Oct. 25 clash between protesters and Oakland police. Olsen, an Iraq War veteran, is recovering from his injuries and has hired a lawyer, who sat in on Olsen’s first interview with Oakland police investigators several weeks ago.
Occupy Los Angeles is just beginning. Occupy 2.0 is now being launched.
On Monday evening, I was brutally beaten by my brothers on the Seattle Police force as I stood before an entrance to Pier 18 of the Seattle Port, wearing my clergy garb and bellowing, "Keep the peace! Keep the peace!"
An officer pulled me down from behind and threw me to the asphalt. Between my cries of pain and shouts of "I'm a man of peace!" he pressed a knee to my spine and immobilized my arms behind my back, crushing me against the ground. With the right side of my face pressed to the street, he repeatedly punched the left side...
Union leaders said today that they oppose efforts to recall Oakland Mayor Jean Quan because she's a strong advocate for labor and they think she's doing a good job under difficult circumstances.
The increasing political sophistication of the local squatters has convinced some fairly mainstream affordable-housing groups to lend a hand this time.
On November 2nd nearly 70 students walked out of an introductory economics class at Harvard in solidarity with the Occupy movement. The mainstream media largely ignored the protest. That’s regrettable since the economics profession has provided the intellectual framework and justification for the inequality and centralization of corporate power the Occupiers are challenging.
“You can’t get into so disastrous a situation as we are in now without extraordinarily bad thinking and the economics departments were the source of that bad thinking,” ...
“Today we are walking out of your class, Economics 10, in order to express our discontent with the bias inherent in this introductory economics class,” the protestors explained in a letter to Mankiw. The course “espouses a specific—and limited—view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today.”
First, credible reports, supported in some cases by video footage, have now emerged that Occupiers were beaten and otherwise brutalized by LAPD officers on the grounds of City Hall park or its close environs. In most cases, this physical abuse occurred after the LAPD had given its final order to disperse and was only allowing its selected ‘embedded’ pool reporters access to the park and its environs.
Second, once in custody, arrestees were held on Sherriff’s Department buses for up to 8 hours with no access to bathroom facilities or to prescribed medicines. ...
As one Occupier put it, now middle class white protesters are learning some of what minority communities in LA have had to put with for many years.
I finally got home Thursday afternoon after spending two nights in jail, and have had a hard time getting my bearings...
...There was nothing peaceful or professional about the LAPD’s attack on Occupy LA–not unless you think that people peacefully protesting against the power of the financial oligarchy deserve to be treated the way I saw Russian cops treating the protesters in Moscow and St. Petersburg who were demonstrating against the oligarchy under Putin and Yeltsin, before we at The eXiled all got tossed out in 2008. Back then, everyone in the West protested and criticized the way the Russian cops brutally snuffed out dissent...
While people are now beginning to learn that the police attack on Occupy LA was much more violent than previously reported, few actually realize that much—if not most—of the abuse happened while the protesters were in police custody, completely outside the range of the press and news media.
...I heard from two different sources that at least one busload of protesters (around 40 people) was forced to spend seven excruciating hours locked in tiny cages on a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Dept. prison bus, denied food, water and access to bathroom facilities. Both men and women were forced to urinate in their seats. Meanwhile, the cops in charge of the bus took an extended Starbucks coffee break.
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