If There Are Helicopters Overhead, It Can't Be Good

Oakland is staging its own Rodney King revival, albeit in a much more tragic way. A 22 year old man was shot and killed at a BART station by a BART policeman in the early hours of New Years Day. The man was being restrained by several BART policemen, who had been called to the scene to break up a large altercation on the train. There have been reports that the officer may have thought he was pulling a tazer instead of his gun, and it is unclear how much the victim was resisting arrest or to what degree the charged atmosphere with numerous angry youths contributed to the escalation in the use of force. The undeniable end result, however, was a horrible mistake by the officer and a terrible tragedy for the victim's family.

The event did not become a major story until video taken by several witnesses on their cell phones surfaced some days later. The videos have been widely viewed on the internet, which has fueled a new storm of outrage. Yesterday afternoon, a protest at the BART station where the shooting took place turned into a full-blown riot by early evening. Later in the evening, the demonstration/riot transitioned to downtown Oakland. A number of store windows were broken half a block from by office, among other places. TV and police helicopters spent much of the morning today overhead, monitoring what I presume was another march, likely starting from the BART offices.

There is no way for this to end well, unfortunately. It begins with the basic tragedy of the death of a young man who, though he may not have been cooperating fully with the police, did not appear to be placing the officers in mortal danger. What makes it far worse is the belief some people have (some of whom are self-acknowledged anarchists) that the appropriate way to respond to an event like this is to destroy things. This article from the San Francisco Chronicle paints a bleak picture of the base motivations of the people behind the random violence. To pick one example, one person participating in the riot, described in the article as a young black woman, had no sympathy for the black woman who owns Creative African Braids, a hair salon a couple of blocks from my office that had its windows broken. "I feel like the night is going great," the protester said. "She should be glad she just lost her business and not her life,"

It is easily understandable that community outrage would follow what appears to be a totally unjustifiable use of force by a police officer that resulted in the death of a young man. It is not unexpected that cries of racism would be a prominent feature of that outrage, since the victim was black and the officer is not. It is shameful, however, that some people believe that the best way to express outrage is to injure, loot and destroy the property of innocent bystanders, especially when many of those bystanders share your race and your outrage.

This will probably calm down for the time being, until the trial of the officer (who has not yet been charged) takes place. I was in the Bay Area the weekend the Rodney King verdicts were announced. Even though the biggest riots took place in Los Angeles, San Francisco was a ghost town as people stayed inside until the tension dissipated. If the officer is aquitted, or found guilty of a crime less than murder (the charge the community is clamoring for), this will be a very tense place for a while.