Occupy Oakland pt 2

If you've read my previous post, you'd have seen that I was mortified upon watching two videos (here and here) showing police teargassing protesters at Occupy Oakland. Yesterday, an article in the Guardian reported that the man on the floor (that can be seen at the end of this video) is called Scott Olsen. He's 24, an Iraq war veteran and now in critical condition "after allegedly being hit by a police projectile".

A video of Olsen being hit, laying on the ground, then police using a flash bang grenade to disperse those attempting to help him, can be seen on Youtube. It's important that this kind of evidence is public, so that people can speak out against this happening, and that's one facet of social media we can be thankful for. This is scary. Western democracies (or 'democracies'?) are behaving as the world's moral compass, yet this kind of unjustifiable violence is happening right in front of our eyes.

Let's hope Scott Olsen gets better, and hope too that this terrible incident causes some police to think again when they use tactics that inflict pain. Already it has prompted an "independent police review", as another Guardian article reports.

Occupy Oakland

This morning, Dorian Lynskey posted this on Twitter:

It links to this video, which shows peaceful protesters of the Occupy movement in Oakland, California, being teargassed - seemingly for no obvious reason and certainly having no justification. The police say at one point during the video that the protesters have formed an "unlawful assembly" - so much for civil rights (including freedom of assembly) being upheld in the US.

The movement began in New York as Occupy Wall Street, but the slogan 'We are the 99%' seems to have caught the attention of activists and others around the world - over 900 cities worldwide, in fact.

Another video can be seen on the Guardian, in this article, which claims: "police used teargas and baton rounds to break up the camp".

This outrageously heavy-handed response from the police must be condemned quickly, and by everyone. Neither the 99%, nor even the 1%, deserve to be treated like this.