Page One

When Berkeley's bad-ass brothers next door pay a Telegraph Avenue visit to its smaller uptown brothers, you might expect trouble on the Avenue. You might also expect that the marchers from downtown Oakland might be met by police. 

But expectations went unfulfilled, as OO made nice, with self-memorials, while sticking it to cops. 

The action had been billed as yet another "Fuck the Police," march, just the most recent in a series of FTP marches that often end in violence. 

It takes two to tangle, as the saying goes, and our cops didn't tango. Nor did they tangle. 

Based on a tip, I surveyed Telegraph, starting at 9:45, looking for cops. At 10:15, I headed for the Andronicos parking lot, an ideal police staging area. The lot was vacant, but by 10:20, I could hear the marchers approaching Derby and Telegraph. 

They blocked traffic, but some cars honked their approvals. “Fuck the police” was chanted not like a mantra, but like an exercise in oral interpretation. Still there are only so many ways to intone the weird idea, which could be analyzed by critics as a latent love of police. 

Love and hate have mated before, and often make a handsome twosome. 

By the time the marchers, fifty strong, reached the basement of university police headquarters at the south side of Sproul Hall, the FTP theme was at high pitch, and it perseverated. 

Three UCPD officers positioned themselves outside the doors of their headquarters, which are located beneath a flight of stairs to the ground floor. The stairs to the headquarters were barricaded. 

That the protestors were not going to fuck with the police now seemed likely. But then, the police seemed uninterested in fucking back, anyway. 

As one protestor explained, "without Oakland police beating on us, we're peaceful." 

I joined the march for its ascent up Bancroft Way to International House, a Rockefeller write-off in the 1920s, home, at various times, to six Nobel prize winners. The idea of men and women living under the same college roof was scandalous. 

Why march to I-House? To support Occupy Cal, and to support Occupiers who were speaking at an I-House event. Occupy Cal has ties to Occupy Oakland, but not to Occupy Berkeley, whose student members have thrown in with OC. 

While pretending to "Fuck the Police," the two neighboring Occupys rubbed each other’s backs. 

With the permission of I-House management, Cal Occupiers had pitched six tents on a small patch of ground out front. 

Four grim-faced university cops, at the I-H doorway in riot gear, blocked entry to anyone, but I-House residents. 

Occupy Oaklanders chanted Fuck the Police. It is the kind of slogan that grows on you—like sneezing. 

But there were also short speeches. Berkeley boy Zachary Running Wolf Brown, who recently turned 49, and announced he was again opposing Tom Bates for mayor, seemed greatly popular with OO. 

Brown drew many cheers and hoots of approval with his emotional account of the action four years ago at Memorial Stadium to save sixty-six oak trees, a two-and-a-half year protest which Brown claimed had been costly to the university. 

Brown claimed that his speech brought tears to the eyes of one of the cops. That's as intimate as it got at Fuck the Police. 

At 11:30, two jam-packed-with-cops black sedans passed I-House. Their glares almost seemed to say, "well fuck you, too," but they'll just deny it. It was a brief appearance. The police never returned. 

Nor did they stir, when later a thinned OO of mostly students left I-H to tour campus sites connected with Occupy—radical tourism. 

First tour stop, was the remains of the oak grove, which was acknowledged as the father of the Occupy movement. Then on to Haas School of Business, which was soundly drubbed for living up to its name, as a score of Haas hires were criticized for their economics. 

Next up, Doe Library, where tenters had surprised police by relocating their tents in the dark of night, Wheeler Hall where OB had dumbfounded university police by rigging a balcony so that any attempt to dislodge occupiers would have tossed them all to their deaths. 

"Even Cal cops couldn't do that," the tour guide noted. Last stop was the Sproul Hall steps, scene last year of protests reaching thousands. Fuck the Police was down to less than ten. But at least no one was hurt, except perhaps the police, and, they'll just deny it