Last night, occupy San Diego was raided at both the civic center(the main site of the demonstration), and at children's park. There was some small mention of this in the local news. They are crafting a false narrative along the lines of, "unlawful homeless protesters clash with police!" I had to go to the civic center to try and find out what had actually occurred. Follow me across the jump for a report + analysis.
At around 2am the police raided the civic center. There were many of them, and they had full riot gear. They were from SDPD, and other agencies as well. Somewhere around half of the occupiers were arrested.
I arrived to find the civic center almost completely locked down. I found barricades at the street entrance. There was also an insane police presence. There were police on the street outside the civic center, in the civic center plaza. Surprisingly, there was also a police presence on many of the nearby street corners and I saw what appeared to be paddy wagons on standby.
Photo of the barricades taken from the Occupy San Diego FB page.
I would estimate the number of police at or near the civic center to easily be more than 100. All of this for a peaceful assembly- what are they afraid these people might do?
Besides the insane police presence there were still some occupiers present. There were perhaps 20 people out on the street and 40-50 in the plaza. It didn't seem like there were many people there, but I quickly discovered that about 50 people from the core group of occupiers had been arrested. It also appears that they lost a ton of supplies- not only in the civic center- but the police also took away a motor home at another location that had been used for storage/resupply.
I was told that 37 males and 14 females had been arrested. The raid went down while most everyone was asleep, either with no warning at all or any warning was not heard by most people. People were arrested on various charges from unlawful assembly to destruction of private property.
One of the occupiers was describing last night's events. He was very upset. He described being woken up in the middle night and running out of the civic center away from police. Then when he heard the screams of his fellow occupiers, the police wouldn't allow him back in. When he or others on the mic described last night's events and gave accounts of girls being beaten or stomped, the police were just obviously laughing about it- so indignant.
The occupiers that had been there last night were visibly traumatized. What they basically described was that: the police came in the middle of the night without warning that anyone was about to be arrested, the police went directly for the media tent/the coordinators and were very selective in who they arrested, the police beat/stomped/otherwise injured a lot of people including teenage girls.
There were very obvious signs that something bad happened last night. There appeared to be blood stains from people that were injured during police action.
The occupiers were concerned that the police wanted to remove the blood stains- evidence that a crime had perhaps been committed? The occupiers were hoping that someone from the NLG or ACLU would come down to investigate the blood stains. It was a tense time, and there was a standoff with the police. I thought that I would be witness to more violent police action.
Here a group of occupiers is trying to prevent the blood stains from being washed away.
It seems that the police backed down, and some of the area was not completely cleaned of blood stains. I must say that power washing is a tremendous waste of water and doesn't do that great of a job cleaning- has the city ever heard of a broom?
There was a plain clothes officer or detective that seemed to be taking pictures of the individual demonstrators. I don't want to think about the disturbing possibilities of what can be done with a single photo in today's surveillance state.
The guy holding the camera in the center of the frame is plainclothes law enforcement(saw the badge under his shirt), possibly talking to another plainclothes officer?
Tonight there will be a solidarity event wherein some unions/other groups(can't recall which) will be staying the night. Also some people that were arrested have made bail(others will be in jail all weekend if they can't make bail), so perhaps there will be a bit of a boost in numbers tonight. It is not clear what will happen. There were 9 tents yesterday, and they are all gone now. The police have even apparently said that sleeping bags will not be allowed(though these are the same people that at one point said water was not allowed), but it is not clear if they can/will enforce that too.
UPDATE: a facebook posting from someone at the civic center says that the police have now hassled a woman for laying down on the concrete, and have said that ALL overnight camping will now be prohibited. This could play out very dramatically because tonight is basically the "sleep over" night where some unions and veterans groups have joined the movement to camp out tonight. Everyone else was also invited to stay at the civic center tonight.
SECOND UPDATE: Union members have arrived, there are reportedly ~600 people in the civic center plaza, and police are locking down the entrances.
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Here's some more photos from today:
You can see that these cops have very oversized clubs: