In the wee small hours this morning, the Occupy SF encampment in the Financial District was dismantled by authorities. OccupySF is the offshoot of the Occupy Wall Street protests that have been going on in New York since mid-September. From the Chronicle:
San Francisco police and Public Works crews dismantled a Financial District encampment early today that had been occupied by activists protesting economic inequality.
About 80 officers wearing riot helmets confronted some 200 campers and their supporters at about 12:45 a.m. at the Occupy SF camp in front of the Federal Reserve Bank’s building at 101 Market St. near Main Street. The officers guarded city workers who removed tents, sleeping bags and other belongings…
The camp was taken down hours after several hundred people marched through the Financial District in an Occupy SF-organized protest.
KQED’s Amy Standen was downtown today and said about 150 protesters are still there. Apparently, the Department of Public Works has told protesters they can have their belongings back.
“It looks pretty organized,” Standen reports. “There’s a big stack of books, bags of food, chairs. There’s a communications system the protesters have set up.”
One protester she talked to said he had been at Occupy LA for two weeks and was in town now to help set up a movement here.
Here are two female protesters, 91 and 81 years old, speaking about the protest. Both are from Berkeley.
Florence Hicks: There’s not apathy. They like to say there’s apathy, but there’s no apathy.
Margo Smith: A lot of the action has been on the internet and I think there’s a realization with the Arab Spring that you have to be there with the body, and not just on the internet.
Hicks: There’s a big march at 3 at the federal building and we’ll be at that.
Smith: It makes us very happy to see the young people out here. we’ve been doing this along time. My friend Florence here is 91 and I’m 81 and we’ve been doing this for a long time and it makes us really really happy to see young people out here doing it.
Hicks: I remember when we said “scholarships not battleships!” (in 1937, during the Spanish civil war, protesting fascism.)
San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr told KQED News intern Kamala Kelkar today that he wants people to exercise their First Amendment rights, but that protesters cannot be safety hazards. “Anything that’s going to pose a hazard to the general public or the demonstrators themselves, we’re going to act upon that to keep everybody safe.”