The Oakland Moment

The Protesters, the Press and the Cop with the Kitten

OpinionsAlex Manley — Published November 1, 2011

In light of what went down at Occupy Oakland’s headquarters in the city’s downtown Oscar Grant Plaza on Oct. 25—I can now add how brutal Oakland’s police force is to the list.

Last Tuesday, Oakland police decided they wanted to make a name for themselves. After New York’s police tried and failed to evict Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park, the title for ‘Toughest Police in America’ was up in the air, evidently, and the OPD stepped up to the plate with a look of grim determination on their faces.

The stakes were high, but these guys were swingin’ for the fences. Starting around 5:00 a.m., a 500-officer police force razed the Occupy Oakland camp to the ground, evicting everyone, arresting 70, and destroying and appropriating property as they saw fit. Problem solved, right?

Wrong. These insidious Occupy protesters didn’t know what was good for them. They maliciously insisted on attempting to ‘re-take’ the square only a few hours later, by organizing a non-violent protest march towards it. The cops congregated. It got ugly.

These people—whose ranks included children and seniors—got fucking wrecked. The OPD opened up with an entrée of tasty tear gas and grenades, injuring the protesters, who hadn’t done anything violent.

But the cops obviously overlooked that when they shot Scott Olsen in the face. Olsen is a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran who is currently recovering in an Oakland hospital from a fractured skull after being shot in the head with a projectile fired by Oakland police.

He still cannot speak as a result of damage done to the language centre of his brain; he communicates primarily through gestures and short written notes, often consisting of a single word. He has little energy, and often asks his visitors for time alone to rest.

It’s worth pointing out at this juncture that this terrifying and threatening march, which involved approximately 1,000 people with a legitimate cause for dissatisfaction, was not generally anti-police. Nor was it anti-Oakland police specifically.

It wasn’t even, à la G20 in Toronto last year, a protest against who the cops were there to protect. Rather, it was a protest against a system that impoverishes millions while rewarding a select, greedy few.
It was a protest that included, by its very mathematical nature, the police within its scope.

That’s right. If you think about it, the protesters were actually on the same side as the cops that were brutalizing them.

Of course, one of the most frustrating aspects of all this is not what happened on the ground, but how it got treated in the mainstream media. The next day, for instance, the photo that ran with the Occupy Oakland story in the Washington Post was of an Oakland cop petting a kitten. Let me repeat that: A cop. Petting. A kitten.

Though the Post explained it away by claiming that when the violence was going down, the issue was going to print and, let’s be honest, it’s a good photo. But the fact remains that the Oakland police were guilty of some pretty serious, unprovoked anti-citizen brutality that morning.

This cop-pets-cat photo, with its narrative of the policeman showing kindness to a poor innocent creature cruelly left behind by the callous hippies, should not be the main photo to describe that moment for any major paper.
It exhibits an extreme and willful dishonesty about what was going on in Oakland and, really, what is going on in American and Western society as a whole at the moment. The journalists who make up the American media, like the Oakland police, are part of the 99%.

They are being paid to protect the interests of an elite that doesn’t care about them, and their continued bowing and curtsying to the rich will only serve to de-legitimize them in the eyes of anyone paying attention.
Traditional print media has enough to worry about right now given the rise of citizen journalism, Twitter, bloggers, YouTube, and every other manifestation of the Internet that leaches away the once-mighty power of the traditional press.

You’d think they’d cop to that and start to pander to the people—but if they had that kind of foresight, they wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.