From Brighton to Oakland

Occupy Brighton has begun: activists held their first general assembly Saturday with an estimated 130 protesters gathering at the 16-tent camp in Victoria Gardens. The Times’ Brighton correspondent described the session as “fruitful.”

Authorities across America have continued to crack down hard on occupation camps: New York’s fire department had confiscated Occupy Wall St’s generators and fuel as the Times went to print, citing a fire risk; while police in Oakland, San Diego and Atlanta broke up local protests with batons, tear gas, flashbang grenades, rubber bullets and kettling, ending in dozens of injuries and arrests.

In an Occupied Times exclusive, a street medic and member of AnonMedics from Occupy Oakland checks in with her own account of police brutality.

We arrived in Oakland before the march began on Wednesday. Between a thousand to two thousand people gathered on the library steps making speeches. People said the [Oakland Police Department] attempted to force the library to close, but the library refused.

We started off from the library, raucous but peaceful, and into downtown to rally around the jail. Cops tried to kettle, block by block, and the first major altercation occurred when one of them got (harmlessly) splattered with blue paint. At this point, batons came out, kettle got tighter, they split the march (my partner medic got cut off from me), and they gassed the half of us that got caught, including little children and bystanders. I found gas victims on the ground in a parking lot, and washed their eyes with LAW [liquid antacid and water].

We found the other marchers and approached Oscar Grant, née Frank Ogawa, Plaza. [Grant was an Oakland resident shot in the back while pinned to the ground in police custody in 2009. His killer served two years for involuntary manslaughter.] The plaza was barricaded, so the march moved around downtown, consensus taken repeatedly about where to go next.

The first gas, bullet, and flashbang attack happened at the plaza, as we rallied in the intersection. It happened again and again — gas, flashbangs, bullets, the crowd scattering, and within ten minutes everyone was back at the barricades, unfazed, every time. Street medics pulled person after person out of the cloud, washing their eyes and mouths with LAW, bandaging and photographing their bullet and grenade contusions. Some medics, without protective masks or armor, were gassed three or four times and kept going back in.

The victims were shaken, weeping, shocked that they were being attacked for no reason, by people who we paid to protect us. And it happened five times that night.

By Rory McKinnon