Oakland, Other Cities Deny Coordinated Effort For Nationwide Occupy Crackdown
OAKLAND (KCBS / AP) -- While riot police sweeping through Occupy Wall Street tent cities in Oakland, Portland and New York City over the last several days may suggest a coordinated national effort, authorities on Tuesday maintained it was all purely a coincidence.
However, mayors and police chiefs in 40 cities with Occupy encampments acknowleged that they had held recent conference calls in which they discussed strategies to control crowds and avoid conflict.
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They said the issue took on prominence after protests in Oakland turned violent on Oct. 25. One protester, Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, was badly injured.
The city officials involved in the calls said they discussed several lessons, including avoiding setting specific deadlines for evictions and fencing off areas after an eviction so protesters couldn't reoccupy it.
KCBS, CBS 5 and Chronicle Insider Phil Matier:
"It was completely spontaneous," said Chuck Wexler, director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a national police group that organized some of the calls. "This was an attempt to get insight on what other departments were doing."
Interim Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said he participated in calls organized by Wexler's group and has talked with officials in the New York police department's civil disturbance unit and high-ranking police officials in San Francisco.
He said a theme was how the atmosphere at the camps had shifted from a haven for peaceful protest to one for criminal behavior.
"Some chiefs had been tolerant of the progressive movement, but that all changed when the criminal element showed up," Jordan said. "As police, you can't allow anything that foster criminal activities in any city."
Jordan said that he and other police brass and city officials began planning last week for officers to remove the camp outside Oakland City Hall for a second time after collecting enough evidence that gang activity and an open-air drug market had emerged at the park.
The camp's removal became an urgent issue after a 25-year-old man was fatally gunned down on Thursday.
"We don't need any more evidence than that," Jordan said. "We had to step it up."
The Oakland protesters' encampment was then peacefully removed by police on Monday morning.
Mayors of mid-sized and large cities held similar conference calls last week, organized by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
Portland Mayor Sam Adams said the primary issue among the mayors was how to get a message to a movement that didn't have any clear leadership. "A lot of time was spent on how do you effectively communicate with a group that doesn't have a leader?" Adams said.
In New York, where police cleared out a tent camp in a park near Wall Street that had become the center of the movement when it sprang up several months ago, authorities declined to discuss details of their talks with other agencies.
(Copyright 2011 by CBS San Francisco. All rights reserved.)
