http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2003/02/1574666.php
here are my pictures on indymedia - there are more there.
This breakaway march didn't match my initial predictions - because there were hundreds of police both nearby in lines and squads, and on neighboring streets on horses and motorcycles, and I thought we would walk around, but that no one would risk sacrificing themself right before the war. This turned out to be several times as intense as the previous one on January 18th when people bashed in the INS building window, and it came to an end with half the people running down into the BART when police were forming box-in lines in both directions.
Here, first there was a big violent confrontation when a line of 20 police, with 8 horses behind them, and motorcycles behind them, wouldn't let people get near Union square, so a big grouped just charged to try to run by them, and the horses were running around.
Then on market street, these hundreds of police were suddenly gone, so much graffiti was made, and reports from the people in the mall were that they heard firecracker sounds and everyone thought there was a gun attack and ran up to the second floor experiencing panic. Then people looped around. An irritating hippie started the climbing onto the trolley. A news reporter was interviewing an ex-marine and he kept diving in front of the camera. Anyway, after looping around, everyone got boxed in near the civic center. San Francisco police don't do the 'broken window' approach of New York, but they tend to lay off and then suddenly ratchet up to mass arrests of everyone on the street. Lots of old people, tourists, main march people were mixed in with the breakaway march. When finally people got out of the box-in, a lot became really violent - it surprised me, and was sort of scary. There was a 10-20 minute period where police had no control at all. The ordinary riot control tactics just weren't working at all - for instance when big police vans showed up, big groups of 30 people were just surrounding the vehicles. The entire event took about 4 hours. People just surrounded police horses and seemed to show no fear at all, and the horses finally just ran away. 3 people got arrested here. No chemical weapons were used. The entire time when people were doing graffiti etc, every second person had a camera click click click. People were hitting police and throwing things at them. This turned into a standoff so I finally went home, but some persistent people were arrested, but I think a lot of these last 20 were new people who had showed up at the scene.
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