Bad Night to Be in Oakland
Jan. 8th, 2009 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aI was down at Endgame tonight, as is common on Wednesdays.
We first noticed the police in riot gear around 7pm. Aaron and Chris assessed things and decided that there wasn't an immediate threat to any of us. I heard nothing more over the course of tonight's game playing (Nefertiti, Amytis, Galaxy Trucker) and so was very surprised when I left around 10pm to see rapidly moving police cars whizzing up Broadway. Fortunately, I've gotten pretty familiar with that part of the city, and I was able to avoid the BART stations at 12th and 19th, where I assumed the problems were.
(As far as I can tell from the reports I've read since, the police were holding a line at 14th & Broadway, so I did well avoiding my normal thoroughfare, which takes Broadway to Telegraph.)
It all dates back to a BART police officer shooting a passenger on the 1st. After being arrested for being unruly, the passenger was lying on the ground cuffed, apparently still resisting arrest, and the cop shot him in the back.
Now, I have every belief that it was an accident. I mean, c'mon, if you're a bad cop are you stupid enough to shoot someone in front of a huge crowd, many of them with video cameras rolling? Of course not. The BART police started being issued stun guns a couple of weeks ago and I'd lay odds that in the confusion and panic he thought he had his taser out.
The unruly passenger wasn't at fault, at least not for getting killed. But neither was the BART police.
The problem is instead a society that arms police officers with guns. Sure, they should have access to them when they really need them, but having every police officer armed with weapons on the street all the time is just stupid. That's what needs to be corrected, and that's what won't be.
Now what was going on in Oakland tonight was stupid too. You had people protesting in front of various BART stations, including (eventually) 12th Street.
That'd be fine if the protest didn't turn into a riot, with people setting cars on fire, breaking windows, destroying community businesses, and doing all sort of things that should make them ashamed to be human beings.
When people came out to protest their cars being destroyed, their businesses that they'd spent a lifetime building up being gutted, they were told that they were lucky they hadn't been killed.
Classy.
A classy bunch of assholes stupid enough to become mired in a mob mentality and thus forfeit their right to call themselves humans.
Of the folks involved to date--the police officer, the guy who got shot, and the mobs moving through Oakland--there's only one group that I find fault with, and it was of course those people out tonight.
On my way home I duly cursed not have a phone number for anyone at Endgame, so that I could tell them that they might want to consider a way to get home while avoiding the 12th Street BART. Hopefully they had it reopened by the time people started heading home.
We first noticed the police in riot gear around 7pm. Aaron and Chris assessed things and decided that there wasn't an immediate threat to any of us. I heard nothing more over the course of tonight's game playing (Nefertiti, Amytis, Galaxy Trucker) and so was very surprised when I left around 10pm to see rapidly moving police cars whizzing up Broadway. Fortunately, I've gotten pretty familiar with that part of the city, and I was able to avoid the BART stations at 12th and 19th, where I assumed the problems were.
(As far as I can tell from the reports I've read since, the police were holding a line at 14th & Broadway, so I did well avoiding my normal thoroughfare, which takes Broadway to Telegraph.)
It all dates back to a BART police officer shooting a passenger on the 1st. After being arrested for being unruly, the passenger was lying on the ground cuffed, apparently still resisting arrest, and the cop shot him in the back.
Now, I have every belief that it was an accident. I mean, c'mon, if you're a bad cop are you stupid enough to shoot someone in front of a huge crowd, many of them with video cameras rolling? Of course not. The BART police started being issued stun guns a couple of weeks ago and I'd lay odds that in the confusion and panic he thought he had his taser out.
The unruly passenger wasn't at fault, at least not for getting killed. But neither was the BART police.
The problem is instead a society that arms police officers with guns. Sure, they should have access to them when they really need them, but having every police officer armed with weapons on the street all the time is just stupid. That's what needs to be corrected, and that's what won't be.
Now what was going on in Oakland tonight was stupid too. You had people protesting in front of various BART stations, including (eventually) 12th Street.
That'd be fine if the protest didn't turn into a riot, with people setting cars on fire, breaking windows, destroying community businesses, and doing all sort of things that should make them ashamed to be human beings.
When people came out to protest their cars being destroyed, their businesses that they'd spent a lifetime building up being gutted, they were told that they were lucky they hadn't been killed.
Classy.
A classy bunch of assholes stupid enough to become mired in a mob mentality and thus forfeit their right to call themselves humans.
Of the folks involved to date--the police officer, the guy who got shot, and the mobs moving through Oakland--there's only one group that I find fault with, and it was of course those people out tonight.
On my way home I duly cursed not have a phone number for anyone at Endgame, so that I could tell them that they might want to consider a way to get home while avoiding the 12th Street BART. Hopefully they had it reopened by the time people started heading home.