These are my shots from the protest in front of the Berkeley city council from about 4:40pm to 5:50pm when I left. I have some very different shots from earlier in the day if you are interested. I have a ton of material so I'm going to try not to repeat signs from earlier and focus just on the new material.
As before, lots of media. You can see the sky is still blue, but it's pretty dark down below. This isn't the best time to be taking pictures, but I'll try my best.
Lots of media setting up.
This is the combined police/fire headquarters. At this point there are way more police here than anywhere although some were about to relocate. They'd had problems on and off with protesters blocking the doors and were feeling a bit defensive, I think.
The street is blocked from car traffic but almost nobody is in the street. The group you see in front of city hall was mixed with both groups, despite it being the anti-Marine side in the morning.
Just a closeup of the group guarding the station.
I'm not going to comment on every sign unless there's a story behind it or I want to point something out.
Mixed group arguing.
The number of police was very large - as an example these were guarding the way to get behind city hall, which nobody was particularly interested in.
The white things on their hips are two styles of disposable handcuffs. They're very popular with police because real handcuffs are expensive and they tend not to make it home when you transfer a prisoner and these are fine for protesters who are mostly being arrested voluntarily. If they want to arrest somebody dangerous I suspect they'd grab the real cuffs.
Pro-Marine.
This is looking across the street - in addition to being equally represented on the city hall side the pro-Marine group maintained what it had on the MLK park side. But you can see it's not totally clear cut - notice there's a few kids with the orange bandannas from this morning arguing with the pro-Marine crowd.
"Make Out Not War". This is probably as good a time as any to mention that the pro-Marine crowd was generally horrified at the number of unsupervised kids running around and spitting and cursing and generally being a pain.
Code Pink had spread out a bit - the earlier World Can't Wait side had basically dissipated into the general crowd.
This directed at the city council.
The remains of the World Can't Wait side.
Birds of a feather.
Media. There were tons of them around, but I'm just going to include a couple.
The key bit is that this guy's from the Peace and Freedom party.
Steps of city hall. (Technically the old city hall, but the mainstream media keeps calling it city hall so I'm going with the flow).
Code Pink concentration.
At this point for no obvious reason the police decided to form a double line down the street, right between the two groups. Until this point really nobody was in the street, but after this the street filled. It was a totally pointless move since half the pro-Marine group was on the other side of the street anyway. The result was that the two groups felt much more comfortable walking around in the street and it soon filled - bringing the groups closer together. I just don't get it.
Haven't had your fill yet? Go on to part two.
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