First arrests on Market- Photos

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.