It’s been an interesting few days in Oakland. The day we came back from Florida (New Year’s Day), early that morning (as a spillover of New Year’s Eve activities) a man was shot and killed by a BART police officer at the Fruitvale BART station. In this age of instant media, it was captured on video (mostly cell phone video) by a number of folks and the video has been picked up everywhere.
In a case reminiscent of the Rodney King situation (with a much more dire outcome), it’s sparked a huge amount of controversy about police brutality. The videos show a police officer shooting an unarmed man while he was already subdued on the ground by other officers. The officer who shot the man has since resigned rather than answer questions, and has been receiving death threats.
At any rate, it’s a big old mess that has ignited quite a bit of outrage in the community. Not unlike the Rodney King riots and the WTO riots, a lot of the negative energy seems to have been pent-up energy looking for a catalyst to release.
Tuesday night, I finally read up on the incident, and got up to speed. When we came back from Florida, Sean mentioned police activity at the Fruitvale station when he went home, but we didn’t think much of it. On Sunday we walked around Lake Merritt and noticed news vans at the 300 Lakeside building (not far from my office). We didn’t put all the pieces together then, but that building houses BART’s administrative offices so it was a good “photo op” for the news folks.
Monday and Tuesday I went into work and all was quiet. Yesterday, since I had a long dentist appointment, I worked from home. Sean and I went to a movie at the Parkway Theater, and as we came out at around 9, we could see helicopters hovering over the downtown area. We knew that protests at Fruitvale were planned – what we didn’t know till we got home and read about it was that it had gone from peaceful protests to a violent march through downtown.
Today, I worked from home again, but had an appointment to donate blood at a blood drive near my office … in the 300 Lakeside building. I’ve been over there before to go to the post office, plus my employer has offices there (though I’ve not had to work there yet). Today was different – side exits were blocked off and the main entrances had only one door open with a security guard stationed there. I was asked to show building ID (I could have showed my work badge, but since I was going to the blood drive, he let me in). I was confused till I remembered that the BART board had a meeting scheduled for today.
As I left to go home, I noticed all the news vans and helicopters in the area. Got home, checked my work email, and found an email urging employees downtown to use caution around protestors and avoid wandering around downtown too much. At around 1 p.m. we got another message sending all downtown employees home by 2 p.m. Though they didn’t expect protests to turn violent, they did it as a precaution to have everyone out of the area before dark. Made me happy I was already working from home.
As far as I know, today’s protests stayed peaceful, but after last night, things were certainly on high alert. I wasn’t in Seattle when the WTO riots broke out, but I can imagine a similar weird energy about the city – wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. I hope that the powers that be can take the right steps to calm the energy in the city over the next few days.