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Oakland protests went wrong - 152 arrested Article:Oakland protests went wrong - 152 arrested:/c/a/2010/11/06/BAL91G8A33.DTLArticle:Oakland protests went wrong - 152 arrested:/c/a/2010/11/06/BAL91G8A33.DTL advertisement|your ad here SFGateHome of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Oakland protests went wrong - 152 arrested Kevin Fagan, Chronicle Staff Writer

San Francisco Chronicle November 6, 2010 07:23 PM Copyright San Francisco Chronicle. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Sunday, November 7, 2010

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Paul Chinn / The Chronicle

Oakland neighbors Shareene Lindquist and Philip Means tell what happened Friday night when protesters smashed car windows.

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(11-06) 19:23 PDT Oakland --Philip Means could sympathize with the hundreds of people protesting Johannes Mehserle's two-year sentence for killing Oscar Grant Friday night - right up until they surged into his neighborhood and started screaming, jumping on cars and smashing windows.

Means, 23, burst from his house at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street in his underwear, took in the situation at a glance and decided to flee.

"I was afraid for my truck because it was parked right in front of the house, so I jumped in and took off," he said. "All I'd heard was smashing and yelling.

"It sounded like a protest gone wrong. I wasn't going to wait around for my stuff to get broken."

Means was experiencing the tail end of a day of protests over the Mehserle sentencing - a day that had begun peacefully with tears, songs and speeches at Oakland City Hall, but ended with destruction and more than a hundred arrests.

It wasn't the kind of protest conclusion organizers had hoped for.

"Our demonstration at City Hall was really, really beautiful, where children, mothers, elders and youngsters all had the opportunity to express the great emotion that Oakland felt yesterday," said Cat Brooks, co-chair of the Onyx Organizing Committee, which helped put on the demonstration. "That part of the day was very successful."

The only "damper" on the afternoon, she and others said, was the way police officers lingered around the gathering. Nearly 500 people assembled to protest the sentence, and at least as many police officers from jurisdictions as far away as Monterey tried to prevent the protests from turning into riots the way they did July 8.

That rally against Mehserle's involuntary manslaughter conviction devolved into looting that left 100 downtown businesses damaged and 78 people arrested.

This time police kept a much closer hand on things. Though 152 were arrested, destruction was mostly limited to the windows of one East Oakland business and about a dozen cars.

It all went well until nightfall, said Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts.

March starts

Shortly after 6 p.m., as the speeches in front of City Hall finished, about 200 protesters headed southeast toward the Fruitvale BART Station, where Mehserle shot unarmed BART rider Grant to death Jan. 1, 2009. Brooks said the plan had been to march to West Oakland's DeFremery Park, but police lines appeared to block the way, so some decided to head to the BART stop instead.

The police weren't going for that.

At Laney College, about a mile from downtown, a line of officers tried to stop the march. The crowd broke through a fence and headed past Lake Merritt into East Oakland and began wandering toward Fruitvale, flanked by police.

Along the way, some in the group smashed more than a dozen car windows, and the windows of the San Huo Fine Arts & Sign Co., at 22nd Street and International Boulevard. About 7 p.m., one of the protesters ripped a holster and gun from an officer's belt. He was arrested immediately, and Chief Batts decided to put an end to the night.

He declared the gathering an unlawful assembly based on the danger of the gun theft.

Arrests

The remaining 150 or so protesters still marching were soon penned on Sixth Avenue between East 17th and East 18th streets by lines of officers. Several hundred police waded in, and by 9 p.m. 152 protesters had been arrested, most on charges of unlawful assembly. Some of the protesters had mace and gasoline in their backpacks, police said.

As they waited to be arrested, several protesters trampled yards and smashed car windows. Chants of "We are all Oscar Grant" filled the air.

"It was a crazy scene," said 32-year-old Shareene Lindquist, who lives on the block, a modest stretch of Victorians, duplexes and apartment buildings. "I totally agreed with what they were saying, but destroying someone's property - who does that help? Is that honoring Oscar Grant's memory? I don't think so.

"It just makes working people think they shouldn't do business here, and that doesn't help anyone."

E-mail Kevin Fagan at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle

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Related Topics: BART Police shooting of Oscar Grant, Fruitvale (BART station), Sixth Avenue (Manhattan), Manslaughter, Laney College, BART Police, Lake Merritt, List of streets in Manhattan, Oakland, California

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