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Indybay Feature

First arrests on Market- Photos

by chp
I attended the main march and the breakaway march on March 20th. Below are my photos of what developed during the first wave of arrests. I will put my other photos of later events in another wire story.
320inmarket2resamp.jpg
A fairly large group gathered at 2pm at Polk and Grove, and took off with less delay than similar marches in 2003. After taking some time making their way through the larger Peace March which was fairly large, about 800 people were with the breakaway at the beginning. The crowd took up two city blocks. After going west for a couple of blocks, the entire group suddenly turned around and went against traffic down to Market street between 6th and 5th street.

My photos start at this point. After a one block run onto Market street, which left the police scrambling to catch up, police motorcycles blocked off Market street at Fifth. Over a bullhorn, people standing in the street were ordered onto the sidewalk. About half the crowd were on the sidewalk anyway. After a couple of minutes, the police commander ordered lines of officers to quickly encircle a large group of at least 150 in the middle of Market. A subgroup of the encircled people tried to run out of this encirclement and police started using batons and hitting them. Several individuals were able to run away, but a group of 50-70 were still left in the street. Most of these people who remained had not attempted to run away from the encirclement situation. Perhaps 7-10 were grabbed and beaten fairly violently by police as they tried to escape from the center of the street.

After this, the remainder of the group stood on the sidewalks for quite some time, sometimes quiet, sometimes chanting, and one person released some smokebombs, and another sprayed some water in the general direction of police from a bottle. The Infernal Noise Brigade band kept playing most of the time, and eventually joined the marchers in resuming the breakaway up Taylor street. Pictures of this will be in another story.
§Crowd in Market
by chp
320inmarket3resamp.jpg
Here you can see how large a group was standing in Market street and on the sidewalk and nearby Bart station plaza.
§People trying to get out
by chp
320conflictresamp.jpg
Here it was fairly violent as police beat people trying to leave the center of Market street. It was difficult to take in what was all happening, but it seemed similar to the 7th and Mission incident last year. I had seen zero property damage - no graffiti or boxes tipped over. A number of people were able to get away and onto the sidewalk
§Police hitting protesters
by chp
320conflict2resamp.jpg
§Batoning
by chp
320policebatoningresamp.jpg
Here, a number of less aggressive people didn't get away and were put down on the ground. Note the officer beating someone.
§smoke in air
by chp
320smoke2resamp.jpg
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AUTHOR
DATE
Pastor M
Tue, Mar 23, 2004 11:54PM
chp
Sat, Mar 20, 2004 8:58PM
chp
Sat, Mar 20, 2004 8:52PM
chp
Sat, Mar 20, 2004 8:50PM
chp
Sat, Mar 20, 2004 6:39PM
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