A day after antiwar “anarchy” shut down city streets, San Francisco cops keep a tight rein on smaller but still angry crowds.
Salon
March 22, 2003
By Katharine Mieskowski
The San Francisco Police Department made mass arrests of two groups of peaceful antiwar protesters on Friday night, when the demonstrators tried to take their message off the sidewalks and into the city streets.
By 7:30 on Friday night, a group of roughly 300 protesters had been corralled on the sidewalk for an hour at Franklin Street between Grove and McAllister, near City Hall. They were encircled by cops in riot gear, awaiting processing, while on-lookers shouted “Let them go!” On Hayes Street between Polk and Larkin, another group of about 100 were also surrounded by cops, awaiting the plastic cords, used as handcuffs.
“We’re outnumbered. There are more cops than protesters. It’s been like that all day,” said Chris Bartle, 36, a small business broker, via cell phone as he waited to be arrested. Like many of the protesters rounded up in these arrests, Bartle said that he hadn’t been planning on spending the evening in jail. In fact, he said he’d promised his wife that he wouldn’t. He’d just meant to participate in a peace march.
The SFPD’s policy about who got arrested and who got a second chance tightened up Friday, after the day of huge, chaotic protests on Thursday, which the acting chief of the San Francisco Police Department called “anarchy.”
> Earlier: San Francisco protesters stage a ‘vomit in’
