San Francisco Police Attack
Peaceful Protesters;
ABC News Ignores it, and
calls my friend "lily-livered"

A friend of mine emailed this to me on the afternoon of Thursday March 20, 2003.
While a handful of protesters were not peaceful,
NPR said the majority of the crowd was peaceful.

"And as for the police state at home, I just got back from a very disturbing confrontation with police during today's protests in San Francisco. We marched around the federal building for a while and then on to Market, all the way to Sixth Street, where we were then stopped by police barricade. After a few minutes, the protest just peacefully turned around and tried to go back the way it had come, but then the police barricaded us at seventh street. My friend and I, who had reached our physical threshold of protesting after marching, had just decided to go back and were trying to leave at the time, but the police would not let us cross the lines. We explained that we were just trying to get back to work, but they told us not to speak to them or cross them, and ordered us to stay beyond arms length from them by raising their batons (laterally, not as thought to strike us, fortunately).

We were trying to figure out what to do, since we were trapped between police lines, when we realized that the police had not only surrounded us but were now actually closing in on us, advancing in closed lines with their batons, wearing their visored helmets, like we were a riot-- even though the demonstration was totally peaceful. They steadily pressed the demonstrators (a couple of thousand people) in from both sides, rounding everyone up (including regular people who just happened to be on the road). The protest was very peaceful, but the police tactics were extremely provocative and stress-producing. I suppose the spontaneous demonstration didn't have a license and was just massively blocking traffic, but the police gave no direction to get out of the street, or use the sidewalks, or even disperse--they just started rounding everyone up like cattle, pushing everyone back in lines with batons.

They wouldn't let us out, but as they steadily marched the crowd back, I realized that we could probably get passed by the advancing lines if we ducked into one of the stores, but we were in the sex shop district and my friend didn't want to go into the sex shops. But the lines kept approaching, sweeping all passersby out of doorways and stoops until I finally persuaded my friend and we darted into a sex shop in hopes that the line would pass us. For a while it looked like the police were even going to come into the sex shop and round us all out of there, since they could tell some of us were not regular customers, but then I suppose the police realized that entering private property to round us up would have crossed too far over the legal line. So we escaped arrest, which is what apparently happened to others in the crowd. We waited in the sex shop for a while, which was really revolting, and then had to get through a few other police lines to get back to work the very long way--but the rest of the police were not in riot formation and allowed us to pass.

Then on the way back we saw an ABC camera man photographing the federal building and we ran in front of the camera to tell him what was happening, and he got really pissed off that we'd cut off his shot, so we apologized and waited for him to finish filming the (now) empty federal grounds, and then we told him the story and he defended the police and mocked us. At which point I tried to just walk out on him, but my friend was still peacefully trying to argue with him. And then he said something insulting about us being lilly-livered and I ended up just yelling at the top of my lungs that I'M SORRY, BUT I'VE JUST BEEN THREATENED WITH VIOLENCE BY MY STATE AND I'M A LITTLE PISSED OFF. FORGIVE ME FOR INVOLVING YOU I JUST THOUGHT YOU MIGHT CARE, BASED ON YOUR PROFESSION AND ALL and then striding away. I think I embarrassed my comparably peaceful friend. We noted that his news organization did not cover the incident, though others did.

Alas."

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