California: Anti-Wall Street activists braced Wednesday for a possible confrontation with police after establishing a tent encampment on the steps of the University of California, Berkeley student plaza.
Campus police repeatedly told the protesters that they risked arrest if they did not take the tents down and leave. The campus has a ban on camping.
But the protesters remained in the plaza, where they were joined overnight by Daniel Ellsberg, a former defense analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
In nearby San Francisco, police arrested seven people and confiscated 15 tents at a splinter encampment of protesters supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement, said Albie Esparza, a police spokesman. Police in riot gear surrounded the area as protesters stood nearby pondering their next move.
No injuries were reported.
"They had been warned and asked to leave for several days and essentially these campers reduced a 30-foot sidewalk to about six feet," Esparza said. "Essentially it became a safety concern."
Larger encampments in San Francisco were not raided.
Gene Doherty, a media contact for Occupy San Francisco, said the group was surprised by the early morning raid. Members were meeting with Mayor Ed Lee at City Hall.
"We were not expecting it. Because of this morning's meeting, we thought that the city would be acting in good faith," Doherty said.
Protesters were expected to converge on the city later in the day for demonstrations supported by ReFund California, a coalition of student groups and university employee unions. The coalition plans to bus in protesters from UC Berkeley, the University of California, Merced and other schools to join San Francisco's anti-Wall Street demonstrators for a march to banks and a state building.
The encampment at UC Berkeley went up Tuesday during a daylong strike on campus against big banks and education cuts that culminated in some 4,000 people rallying at a speech by former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
He spoke on the steps of the same student plaza where the Berkeley Free Speech Movement was launched in the 1960s, and implored the protesters to take a moral stand against the very rich controlling so much of America's wealth.
"The days of apathy are over folks," Reich, now a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley, said to a roaring crowd at Sproul Hall. "There are some people out there who say we cannot afford education any longer, we cannot provide social services for the poor ... but how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before?"
The protests were disrupted earlier in the day when campus police shot a 33-year-old man who allegedly brandished a gun in a computer lab at the Haas School of Business. Campus spokesman Dan Mogulof said the man — an undergraduate transfer student attending classes at business school — later died at a hospital. The suspect's name has not been released.
The shooting didn't prevent thousands of students and demonstrators from gathering at the university to vote on a list of demands and await the Mario Savio Lecture by Reich. Savio was a political activist and leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
Elizabeth de Martelly, a 29-year-old UC Berkeley graduate student, said she was inspired by Reich's comments about social movements being born from moral outrage. She planned to spend the night in the new encampment.
"That said, I want to see the movement to expand beyond encampments," she said amid the music, light shows and dancing. "But this is a powerful thing for the time being."
The Occupy Cal students were joined by hundreds of Occupy Oakland demonstrators who marched the five miles from Oakland to Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue.
Police cleared their tent city outside Oakland City Hall on Monday amid complaints about safety and sanitation, and arrested 33 people.
Occupy Cal's general assembly voted to invite the university's chancellor and Board of Regents to a debate in early December and to send the educational officials a list of demands, including a tuition rollback to 2009 levels.
They also voted in favor of rebuilding their encampment despite earlier violence.
On Nov. 9, police jabbed students with batons and arrested 40 people as the university sought to uphold a campus ban on camping.
UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau launched an investigation into allegations that campus police used excessive force.
Birgeneau issued a statement to the students and Occupy demonstrators, saying the university leadership shares their anger and frustration over relentless tuition hikes and the growing burden on their families.
He called on political leadership from Sacramento to come to campus to engage with him and student representatives in a public forum on the future of public education.
"The issues require bold action and time is short," he said.
Bureau Report
First Published: Thursday, November 17, 2011, 00:48