Oakland Protesters Hold Rally After Chaining Themselves To Police Headquarters
OAKLAND (CBS SF) – Protesters in Oakland rallied at Frank Ogawa Plaza after some protesters chained themselves to the doors of the Oakland police headquarters earlier on Thursday.
The Movement for Black Lives has called for a national day of action against police violence.
Rallies were planned at both Oakland police headquarters and Frank H. Ogawa Plaza Thursday afternoon, part of nationwide #FreedomNow protests expected to last throughout the day.
Autonomous direct actions are likely to spring up, such as two protesters who chained themselves to the front door of the Oakland police building at 455 Seventh St. Thursday morning.
Thursday's actions follow a lengthy sit-in staged Wednesday afternoon when several protesters chained themselves to the Oakland Police Officers' Association building around the corner from police headquarters.
The protesters were allowed to stay but left voluntarily around 3 a.m. on Thursday, Anti-Police Terror Project organizer Cat Brooks said Thursday.
Similar actions were staged at police union buildings in New York and Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.
Protests have resurged in Oakland and throughout the country in recent weeks following the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana, Philando Castile in Wisconsin and Delrawn Small in New York. Recent protests over Sterling and Castile's deaths shut down Interstate Highway 880 in Oakland for hours.
Oakland organizers of Thursday's action say their demands are the recall of Mayor Libby Schaaf, to investigate and hold accountable the officers implicated in a sexual exploitation scandal, divest half the police budget and reinvest it in educational programs and to establish a civilian police commission, a proposal expected to go before voters this November but is opposed by the police officers' union.
"We are taking action in solidarity with Movement for Black Lives organizers who are taking militant action for a future in which they can be free from state-sanctioned violence and oppression. We echo their call for Freedom Now," Showing Up For Racial Justice organizer Sam Bickle said in a statement.
Oakland resident Sarah Raridon was one of two protesters who chained themselves to the door at Oakland police headquarters at 9 a.m. Thursday. She said she intended to remain there "until they stop killing black people."
"Specifically as a white person, I see a lot of white people immobilized by guilt and fear," Raridon said. "It will take a lot of us putting our bodies on the line to make change."
She said she wasn't part of some larger organizing group beyond taking up the call to action, but that she had been seeing what was going on in the news and "passion" drove her to affix herself to the door of the police headquarters building with heavy chains and sit on the concrete in the hot sun Thurstoday.
"This is the most direct way I could think of to physically stop police from murdering black people," she said. "I really do feel that none of us are free until all of us are free."
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