I heard on the radio there were 50 to 100 arrests. Some stores looted. A lot of places in downtown were boarded up. Funny that the news this morning mentioned that " . . . windows broken last night were boarded up this morning . . . " and that sort of thing. I saw plenty of pics from yesterday showing buildings boarded up then to prevent looting.
Here are some pics of buildings boarded up Thursday before the verdict was read.
I didn't take the pics. They were posted by 44regular on arfcom and I shamelessly borrowed them.
Here are some links.
Link 1
Link 2
Link 3
There is so much wrong in this story that I don't know where to begin.
Remember that this could happen near you. Even if you live outside the big city you probably go into town once in a while, right? Best pay attention to the news and make sure you avoid this kind of situation.
3 comments:
Based on what the witnesses and cops were saying, it seems the people of Oakland actually comported themselves pretty well for a change.
It looks like the ones causing the problems were outsiders, anarchists, many white, who were there just to cause trouble and would have done so no matter what the verdict was.
It would be interesting to see the arrest statistics. I'm not sure how anyone who has not gone over the data including home address of the people arrested can say that the trouble was caused by outsiders. Of course the arrests don't tell the whole story by any means and for every person arrested there were many more doing the same thing who didn't get caught.
As for whites being troublemakers, all the people I saw photographed looting were black. Of arrests I saw photographed about half were white and half black. I suppose that the whites that were there to cause trouble weren't interested in picking up free merchandise so while they might have been smashing windows and doors they weren't going inside to steal stuff.
I agree that the riots were not as bad as they could have been. The presence of so many riot police helped as did the fact that they didn't wait a long time before moving in. From what I can tell the longer the police let a situation like that go on before acting the worse it gets.
Not a big fan of cities of any size. People are on the edge. A city is the last place I'd want to be when craziness happens. A lot of things have to function well to keep city services going.
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