THREAD: Downtown Oakland is busier this morning than any time in the last few months. From roughly OPD HQ (7th & Broadway) to the Honda dealer (34th & Bway), there are dozens, if not hundreds, of workers sweeping glass, boarding windows, and hosing/wiping spraypaint off walls.

I also saw about 20 volunteers collecting garbage, fixing potted plants that had been overturned, etc. The property damage last night was unprecedented in recent Oakland history -- more than any single night of the Oscar Grant uprising, #Occupy or #BlackLivesMatter .

Escalation began around 8:30 when protesters briefly shut down 880. Looting & confrontations w/ police mostly tapered off around midnight. The only generalization I’ll make about the crowd is that it was mostly young people (late teens, early 20s) and racially diverse.

The vibe was all over the place. There were many moments of solemn chanting (“Say his name -- George Floyd!) and furious screaming (“fuck the police”), but also...

...lots of cheering, people helping others who were injured, and even celebration (fireworks, drinking looted champagne in the streets, cars spinning donuts while blasting NWA).

Unlike previous protests in Oakland, I didn’t see many instances of protesters fighting each other. Those in the crowd who were not engaging in property destruction (the majority of protesters) generally didn’t interfere with those who were.

The only personal attack I saw was someone smashing a car window when the driver was trying to push through a crowd.

It seemed like the police mostly stayed close to OPD HQ. For at least an hour, when Walgreens & Chase Bank on 14th & Broadway were being damaged/burned, there was zero police presence. City Hall and the Federal Building were also both spray-painted and sustained broken windows.

The police remained completely absent when part of the crowd (300-500ish) made its way up Broadway, hitting Target, CVS, Mercedes Benz, Honda, and other businesses (Cookies weed store, Twilight Zone smoke shop, Bandcamp). As many have noted, Youth Radio was also tagged.

Around 11pm, people started building a flaming barricade just south of the Honda dealer on Broadway.

As a historian & journalist, I had accompanied the crowd to document events, but when I realized the smoke was blowing towards the Kaiser Hospital complex, I yelled at people not to set fires so close to medical facilities.

Things were starting to feel extremely unsafe (i.e. cars speeding through the crowd, barely dodging protesters), so I went home.

When I checked the news this morning, I was stunned to hear about the Federal Bldg drive-by that killed a security guard and wounded another. I was near City Center Starbucks filming video of the fire around the same time, but didn’t overhear anybody talking about it last night

I retraced the protest route this morning around 11am and the speed of the clean-up effort is surprising. After protests in previous years, graffiti lingered for weeks, sometimes months, but there’s tons of re-painting and power-washing already happening today.

The most common slogans, painted hundreds of times across downtown walls and windows, are FTP, various permutations of “kill cops” and phrases related to recent police killings (RIP George Floyd, I can’t breathe).

The purpose of this thread has simply been to document the events of May 29/30, 2020 as I witnessed them. As a historian, I’m far more comfortable contextualizing the past, so I’ll just close by saying #BlackLivesMatter