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Special to the Planet / Copyright by the author (including photographs)

This is what I saw—or believe I saw—at the Sunday April 27, 2017 protests in Downtown Berkeley. I was in one place, for one period of time (as I’ll explain later), so I’m mainly going to write about that, not speculate on what happened elsewhere, before or after.

I want to clarify that I did not go as a journalist. I didn’t take a notebook, or interview people. I mainly walked around, talked with people I knew, and took photographs.

The parable about the blind men touching the different parts of an elephant and drawing different conclusions about its nature applies to the experiences of Sunday. So does a version of what Robert McNamara (an East Bay native and UC alumnus) called the “fog of war”. In this case the appropriate term might be “fog of protest”.

Consider the Wikipedia definition of “fog of war”. “The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.”

I’m going to write in some detail about what I saw on Sunday. But, first, here here are my conclusions from that experience. 

1. There was no organized fascist / Trumper / racist demonstration or rally on Sunday in Civic Center Park. A few identifiable Trump supporters showed up, and stood around individually or in pairs talking to, or yelling back and forth at, counter protestors. I guessed about a dozen pro-Trump protestors. Someone else later told me that a friend of theirs did try to carefully count, and came up with about 15.
2. In contrast, there were thousands and thousands of people who came to peacefully and creatively be part of a counter protest both in Civic Center Park and, to a greater extent, on other Downtown streets. This was a great showing for Berkeley, and it was substantially overlooked or dismissed in the media accounts.
3. The police efforts to sequester Civic Center Park and prevent people from bringing in weapons, or weaponizable objects, worked, but also had an unintended side effect. The enforced separation between those in, and those outside, the park appeared to mean that many of those counter protestors outside the park did not realize that almost everyone in the park was also a counter protestor, not a Trump supporter or neo-fascist.
4. As partial evidence of this, I offer the text of a friend who was outside the park on Center Street, waiting to pass through the police frisking point. She texted in part (quote): “The Nazis are bellowing at the park, which is closed off.” This was not accurate. When she texted that, I was in the park. Almost everyone still there was a counter-protestor from what I could see. And the shouting / “bellowing” she heard from a block or more away was actually the antifa contingent chanting down in front of old City Hall. But it was an illuminating message to receive, since it implied that those outside the barriers, who couldn’t clearly see into the park, may have thought there was a significant fascist demonstration in progress that they needed to get in and confront.
5. Many of the antifa arrived weaponized (sticks, sprays, shields, helmets, masks) and apparently ready to fight someone in a solid contingent down MLK Jr. Way, following a flatbed truck with an amplification system. (Question to City and police officials. When you’re going to rigorously stop people from carrying sticks, balloons, or soda cans into a demonstration area AND when you are blocking streets to traffic, what’s the reasoning for allowing someone—whomever they are—to DRIVE A HUGE TRUCK right up to the demonstration site?) And yes, they did appear to be antifa; marching behind a banner that says “Antifascist Action” was a big clue.
6. It appeared to me, looking from inside out, that the antifa contingent thought that there was an actual Trump protest presence in the park that they needed to break up. But there actually wasn’t. What we had was a confused and surreal scene when people with the same basic objective were standing on both sides of police barriers looking across at each other, and not in a position to communicate.
7. As is almost always the case with demonstrations, here or elsewhere, some scattered confrontations shaped the media narrative, and what really happened on Sunday was not accurately conveyed to the broader world.
8. The City and the police have a responsibility to clearly signal what they are doing and what rules they are going to enforce. In my view this was imperfectly practiced on Sunday. Hundreds of people (including me) went into the park abiding by those rules, and the rules worked within the park. The police had a good strategy within the park; have a big presence, but keep it pulled back, and station individual officers calmly where trouble seemed to be starting. But when the police pulled back from their own barriers and let the antifa in, that was, in an important sense, abandoning their own rules.
9. That said, I did not personally see the police hit or threaten or manhandle or spray or gas anyone. There were several departments present (I saw uniforms from Alameda County, Berkeley, San Leandro, and Pleasanton). There was only one moment—which I describe in more detail below—when I saw a young sheriff’s deputy get flustered and do something I felt was unwise and unnecessary.
10. By the same token, I didn't see any who wasn’t with law enforcement or anyone else engage in battery or direct personal threats.

I traveled from about a mile south of Downtown. All along the way I saw groups of people walking towards Downtown and the demonstrations, many of them carrying anti-fascist signs. There were apparent family groups, friends, couples, individuals, and quite a number of small children. I passed dozens and dozens. It was surreally like a Cal football game day, a few hours before the kickoff, when thousands of people are trickling through the streets in one direction and with one destination. 

I went to the Veterans Building, and then Civic Center Park. I went through a police checkpoint at Milvia and Center. It was low key. I took some bulky objects out of my pockets (camera, phone, etc) and showed them as I went through and one police officer patted my pockets. Others were filtering into the park the same way and there wasn’t a line to enter when I went through. 

The police had concrete barriers set up all along Milvia and MLK Jr. Way, and a substantial presence in both locations and within the park. In the park (as you’ll see from my photograph taken about 11:24) there were two parallel rows of orange plastic barriers across the lawn, apparently designed to separate people into “pro” and “anti” demonstrations, with a no-man’s land, and police, in between. 

But no one was paying much attention to the orange barriers. Almost everyone who came into the park went to the fountain terrace. And the orange barriers were “open-ended”, literally. You couldn’t cross them, but you could easily walk around the ends. 

When I arrived there were probably a couple of hundred people there within the park and by mid-day the crowd grew to several hundred. 

Amongst those several hundred there were a handful—a very, very, few—who were visibly pro-Trump demonstrators. They had no organized presence or visible leadership that I saw. 

The most important thing to understand about the situation inside the park is that there was no pro-Trump rally. None. Almost the whole lawn area was clear. 

There were maybe ten or a dozen people—possibly less—who were intentionally identifying as Trump supporters. They stood in ones and twos, not attempting to form any sort of rally group. 

I haven’t studied the identity of any of the pro-Trump leaders, so I didn’t recognize any of them. But those few in the park seemed like an almost comic second or third string. A few had flags or pro-Trump banners around their shoulders. They talked, laughed, and filmed themselves with their smart phones. One guy had a pro-Trump placard (“God Bless Donald Trump”) and when someone yelled “Impeach Trump!” he yelled back “But Trump is El Presidente!!” (Good reason, perhaps, for impeachment; no United States head of state should be worshiped as “El Presidente!”) 

The pro-Trump people talked, or argued, by ones and twos, with counter-protesters in the crowd. The atmosphere was not seriously hostile although there were a lot of impassioned words, and some chanting. There were little children playing in the playground along Center Street, and other children and teenagers around the fountain, although the crowd was mainly adults. A large group of Civic Center Park’s homeless contingent sat on the sidelines on the steps of the Veterans Memorial, playing music and chatting. 

Most of the counter protestors stood talking calmly in groups, strolled around, sat on the walls around the fountain, or took pictures. There were a lot of people with cameras (including me). 

Again, almost everyone there was visibly a counter-protestor. People carried a wide variety of creative signs, and a banner had been stretched above the fountain terrace.

The police tactics within the park seemed to be two-fold. First, to watch from a distance in substantial numbers. Second, when an individual confrontation seemed to be developing—two people getting in each other’s faces and yelling—one police officer would walk over and stand right next to them, just a few feet away. If things got more heated, maybe a second officer wandered over. This seemed effective to me. I didn’t see any hitting. 

As the day wore on, there were some heated arguments. When one occurred, a knot of spectators would quickly crowd around, many of them with cameras held high, trying to photograph or film the “confrontation”. Those at the center were quickly obscured. 

There were a couple of instances where these groups rapidly coalesced and started to move towards one end of the park or the other, sometimes with some shouting. I presumed one or more of the people in the confrontation was walking or being pulled, away. There were a couple of times when the police took someone out of the park. 

I took these episodes to mean that a pro-Trump protester was leaving or being pushed out, or someone had been found with a weapon, but I wasn’t in the midst of those concentrated crowds. Once people clustered, it was hard for anyone to tell exactly what was going on in the middle of the group. 

But none of this activity was sustained, much of it just taking place in moments or a minute or two, and the curious crowds quickly broke up again and started wandering and talking. 

As the day wore on, more and more people entered the park through the police checkpoints. By 12:45 or so there was a lot of shouting and marching noise from Milvia Street between the YMCA and the Civic Center Building. I walked up there, on Allston Way, but the police on the inside of the barricades were insisting that people inside stay quite some distance back from them, so there was little exchange between what was now a solid crowd filling Milvia and periodically chanting, and a scattering of people in the park. On the “outside”, many people were pressed up against the barricades, looking in. I also saw a couple of people try to exit the park at Allston and Milvia, and get turned back by the police at this time. 

From the signs and chanting I assumed that most of the people on Milvia were counter protestors who had walked down the two blocks from West Crescent. 

In about 15 minutes there was a new wave of outside-the-park crowd noise from Martin Luther King, Jr. Way and many people in the park, including me, walked down that direction. 

A march of black-clad people was coming slowly along the street, southbound from Addison, behind a flatbed truck with a P.A. system on it. There were shields, banners, poles, flags, and a core of people wrapped like mummies in black. 

Here the police (mainly Alameda County Sheriff’s deputies in the area I was standing) formed one line facing outward behind the concrete barriers along the sidewalk, and another line facing into the park. Most of the spectators and demonstrators inside the park were standing on the skateboarding terrace. 

The new, individually anonymous, mummified protestors, were shouting slogans and formed a line against the concrete barrier, facing the park behind a huge banner. 

Someone on the truck started giving instructions that they were forming a “defensive line” and people who didn’t want to participate should step back towards old City Hall. “Defensive” against what wasn’t stated. 

Black-clad people pushed forward to the concrete wall with shields, sticks, and chanted. There was a brief scuffle as protestors tried to drape a long banner over the concrete, and the police pushed and pulled at the cloth. By the time stamps on my pictures, most of this was taking place a bit after 1:00 PM. 

A few of the sheriff’s deputies seemed somewhat confused. One of them ridiculously (in my view) stood up on a wall, higher than everyone else, holding what appeared to be a tear gas gun at a 45 degree angle, and periodically pointing it directly down towards the outside crowd. 

He was highly visible, facing the protesters in the street and of course he immediately became the focus of chants from outside the barrier, “put down the gun!” 

In the park, some people moved forward to see what was going on (gun? who had a gun!?) and some of the sheriff’s deputies facing into the park became visibly nervous. One younger woman deputy held up her baton horizontally with both hands, pushing it forward (but not touching anyone) and shouted, “get back, get back, get back!” at the people in the park, until another deputy came over and talked more calmly. 

Others knelt down and started to put on gas masks which, of course, triggered the protestors beyond the barrier into shouting that the police were getting ready to use gas. This was the most tense moment I directly witnessed, and it didn’t last long. 

It also seemed historically reminiscent of how confrontational events can get out of control. If someone in the outside crowd had thrown something at the sheriffs, or a sheriff’s deputy had drawn a handgun or hit a protestor with a baton, a confused cascade of violence could have easily ensued. 

Also, at one point someone let loose a canister of purple smoke in the southwest corner of the park. It quickly dispersed. 

Even outside the concrete barricade in the street there wasn’t a completely unified crowd. My photographs show dozens of people standing in the street and up against the barrier doing exactly what many of us in the park were going—watching and taking pictures. 

One picture I took, looking east at about 1:15 PM, tells a very interesting story. The lawn is almost entirely empty. There are still a few dozen counter protestors standing up around the fountain. 

Again—when the large groups of counter demonstrators arrived from Oxford and other sites, there was no pro-Trump or Nazi demonstration going on. The park was substantially empty, within the barriers. 

Just before 1:20 PM contingents of police started pulling back from the barrier and gathering on Center Street, well away from anyone. They didn’t say what they were doing, and people inside the park kept their distance. Although I didn’t realize it, this was apparently the point when the police had decided to start pulling back from the barrier. 

At that point I headed east to leave the park and get to a 2:00 PM engagement, so I don’t have any further first-hand accounts of what was going on in the park. 

I left through one of the barricades at Center and Milvia, and walked south of Milvia. There was a march of some hundreds of people heading south on Milvia. I walked south past it, and encountered another march heading west on Channing, that briefly stopped and blocked Shattuck. Both marches temporarily obstructed traffic, but appeared basically peaceful. 

After I got home in the early evening and looked at the news, I was completely shocked to see that the narrative in many places—particularly on SFGate—was that it had been a day of violent confrontations. That was not what I experienced or observed.