aamusedinatx | Ground Zero: Oakland, CA

The man who organized Wednesday's BART police protest said he broke down in tears when he saw his peaceful march turn violent as some participants began throwing bottles, spitting on police cars and setting small fires.

Evan Shamar said he left the demonstration and watched on television as the situation got worse.

"I was devastated by it," said Shamar, 24, a photographer who lives in Oakland. "I worked diligently for the past 72 hours, and for it to be destroyed by a group of anarchists was extremely upsetting. I felt like my integrity had been compromised."

Full article here .

Community express outrage at BART Board Meeting

Grant family pleads for peace in wake of Wednesday night's riots.

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There is a lot going on in my little corner of the world right now and it has captured national attention. It makes me glad I did my necessary bank runs in downtown Oakland on Monday and Tuesday or I could easily have been caught in a mob. Granted the problems in Oakland on Wednesday and Thursday evening are no where near the level of violence or sheer numbers as say the Rodney King Riots, or the Paris riots of two years ago, or even the Athens riots at the end of 2008. Still, there was a sufficient number of people who caused sufficient damage.

Anger over runs common sense in the best of times, but in the worst of times mob mentality often means mob rules and anarchy descends. It's a shame really. Public protest is one of the most powerful and effective tools of free speech. Sadly, when a protest descends into violence (targeted or random) that powerful tool goes mute and becomes ineffectual.

It is too easy for me to sit here in my seat of white privilege and condemn the mob for it's brutish intimidation. Life is never that neat and tidy. Anger runs very deep in the black community here and with good reason. They have been marginalized and beaten down at every turn for a century. Police brutality went unchecked until the 1980s. The fact that a 'brother' was shot in the back while handcuffed and helpless by a white person in uniform is yet one more example of brutality and oppression in the mind of a group of people pushed so far to the fringe of community. That anger is going to boil over and it's going to explode and it has to have somewhere to go.

What is sad is that like a parasite the mob rule mentality attaches itself to a viable host: a legitimate public protest which was formed for a specific purpose: to call for justice. It wasn't formed in order to wreak havoc or have revenge, but the strong undercurrent of fear, outrage, anguish and hate works like an undertow. It surprises those standing firm in knee-deep surf making their voices heard in peaceful protest. It rips away the sanity and control of moderate people who believe in non-violent means to resolve issues and tumbles them head long into the sand while the anger ignites and spreads like a wildfire through those struggling to gain some footing.

What happens next and what matters now is that there is some visible road to justice for the Grant family and for the community which surrounds the family. It is a community rising up in disparate ways to protest what appears to be a truly fatal mistake. I'm braced for more problems here because even with a black mayor running Oakland the city does not have a history of honesty when dealing with its citizens. To be fair, the citizens don't deal honestly with the city either. And so there is a deep chasm of distrust on all sides and now we have a federal entity involved as well.

BART is a federal agency, it is not civic one. The construction of BART helped drive a final nail in the coffin of the once vital West Oakland community. The city condemned 12 square blocks of residences and displaced more than 10,000 families so that the BART line from downtown to the West Oakland terminal could be built and the Cypress Freeway fly over feeding to the Bay Bridge could be completed. The BART track runs along what was once the prosperous 7th avenue commercial district. Few if any of those business ever re-opened. The owners received only pennies on the dollar because the city condemned the properties--they didn't buy them outright for fair market value. The city and BART promised revitalization and jobs. In truth less than 2% of the employee roles of BART or the Department of Transportation was comprised of West Oaklanders. Out of 10,000 destroyed homes, less than 500 new apartments were ever built in the community after the Cypress freeway and the BART line and done their 'divide and conquer' job through West Oakland.

Those who joined in protest on Wednesday and Thursday are the direct victims of that sort of blatant discrimination. It happened to them, to their parents and grandparents. As a society we still like to pretend we're playing the loving civic parent: "I'm only doing this for your own good, you'll thank me later..." We play dice with peoples lives and livelihood and then we're surprised when the camel's back is broken and a valid protest about a terrible incident becomes incendiary. All those decades of hate, anger, fear, abuse, distrust all rise to the surface and boil over. Mob rule is the pot unwatched on the stove while the burner is left on high.

And we're surprised by this?

Why?