Oakland Solidarity Protest: Last Night’s March Madness

As you may have heard, literally, Occupy Wall Street protesters marched through the streets of Manhattan and passed through several neighborhoods to show their support for the demonstrators in Oakland who were treated like enemy combatants by the police there earlier in the week.

A little after 9PM, the group made their way from Zuccotti Park to City Hall, including Sergeant Shamar Thomas, the hulking Marine who gave the NYPD a piece of his mind while they were making arrests in Times Square a few weeks back. In the video below (1:30 mark), Thomas said he was there for Scott Olsen, the 24-year-old Iraq war veteran badly injured by police during an Occupy Oakland march.

That’s where they met some resistance as the police repeatedly told the crowd to remain on the sidewalk or resist arrest, a threat that didn’t phase the group, resulting in the first round of arrests and attempts by the NYPD to deploy kettling nets, a technique that proved futile throughout the night. In one instance, protesters reportedly snatched the netting from police and carried it away.

Flanked by officers on foot, scooters, and horseback, they winded through the streets of Lower Manhattan, eventually getting into another confrontation with cops at the corner of Reade Street and Broadway. But it didn’t end there.

That’s when the march kind of split in two, although both clusters had the same destination in mind: Union Square. So, some protesters started headed west while others continued north. At one point, they made a sharp turn onto Mercer Street and walked down the middle of it, causing another clash between them and police.

They then veered onto Broadway and from Washington Place all the way to Union Square, they took the street, while startled drivers looked on as traffic was brought to a standstill and the NYPD was virtually nonexistent. Minutes later they arrived at the Union Square and began cheering as they assembled on the stairs and police reinforcements began flooding the area. And that’s when things got really anti-climatic as people just wandered about and eventually headed back down to Zuccotti Park. (Photos: ANIMALNewYork)