Michael Heise | FilmingCops.com
OAKLAND, CA – Approximately 150 people took to the streets last night to protest a law that has been passed infringing on the peoples right to free travel and association.
Protesters marched from marched from 14th Street and Broadway to the Police Administration Building and then to Jack London Square, taking over the street as they went along.
This is in response to a new law passed by the mayor that bans protesting at night on streets, an obvious overreach into free speech and assembly.
The law makes it so that everybody must stay on the sidewalks, which the mayor claims is to curb vandalism, however there was no vandalism at this protest.
Civil rights attorney’s in the area are challenging the law as unconstitutional.
In addition to this, many of the large force of police officers sent to quell the protest were seen either with no body cameras at all, or with them turned off.
It is policy for the Oakland police department to wear body cameras, yet they told protesters on the scene every line in the book from “it fell during the protest” to “it’s broken” to “the batteries are dead”, which to me says they are so incompetent as to not even be able to manage something as simple as maintaining a body camera, or more likely, they are not held accountable for not maintaining transparency through those cameras.
Protesters clashed with police at about 9:00 after the police assembled and attempted to block them from moving forward at the intersection of 3rd Street and Washington in the Jack London district, even though the protesters were totally peaceful.
The group attempted to march through the police line, maintaining that the new policy is an infringement on basic rights and therefore is not valid.
Police began pulling people behind police lines to arrest them, and deploying gas canisters as a show of force.
One man was even arrested for not following orders to cross the street.
Eventually, a team of officers came behind the protesters in a pincer formation to trap and arrest all of them.
The protesters then peacefully sat on the ground while police began dragging them away to be charged with “unlawful assembly”.
Among those arrested was Oakland Planning Commissioner Jahmese Myers.
Protesters seem determined to continue opposing this new dictate of the mayor.
Watch the videos below for raw footage from the ground: