Politics
Reporters from Oakland North and Richmond Confidential are shooting cellphone videos Wednesday evening as the Occupy Oakland protests move noisily into the streets, with BART and city police trying to corral their movements and keep them out of downtown BART stations. This raw footage was captured between 9 and 11:00 PM.
After Mayor Jean Quan’s first public comments Wednesday on the police raids of the Occupy Oakland encampments the day before, protesters returned to Frank Ogawa Plaza and gathered a nighttime standing-room only crowd into a “general assembly” meeting outside City Hall. A long crowd discussion led to a late–night vote urging a citywide general strike Nov. 2.
The aftermath of Tuesday’s Occupy Oakland eviction escalated into a street confrontation in the city’s downtown, with tear gas and multiple arrests. The story unfolds in this video by Dylan Bergeson and Byrhonda Lyons.
Roughly one hundred teachers, parents and children marched Wednesday afternoon in protest of the Oakland school board’s decision to close five elementary schools next year, walking from Mosswood Park to the Oakland Tech campus, where the school board meeting and scheduled vote on the closures was about to start.
Occupy Oakland protestors clashed with police forces last night at the intersection of 14th Street and Broadway beginning around 7:00pm and going late into the night. A number of reporters from Oakland North and Richmond Confidential were on the ground to cover the events.
On Sunday, Councilmembers Pat Kernighan (District 2) and Libby Schaaf (District 4) hosted a lecture by crime expert Franklin Zimring about New York City’s crime reduction successes and how Oakland could implement the same strategies to tackle crime.
As police and Occupy Oakland protesters squared off in front of City Hall this week, organizers of a recall campaign took their first formal steps this week toward an effort to remove Mayor Jean Quan from office.
By 6:30 Wednesday morning, only about 10 protestors remained near Oakland’s Frank Ogawa Plaza, the site of a clash between Occupy Oakland protesters and police that began Tuesday evening and carried late into the night, but more people were slowly trickling in.
After a day of clashes with police, approximately 150 Occupy Oakland protesters remained outside of Frank Ogawa Plaza as midnight approached. There were at least five new arrests as of 9:15 pm this evening, according to police, and 97 were arrested during the day after police raided two Occupy Oakland encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and Snow Park near Lake Merritt.