Do they serve the 1%? You fucking bet they do.

anyway, yeah, what’s happening is inevitable, and the logic of Capital hasn’t yet manifested an effective strategy for framing the discourse in oakland. it’s doing fine in most other OccupyWhatever situations, as the white middle class has made their movement(s) completely irrelevant by using their logically incoherent (yet hegemonically consistent) insistence on “nonviolence” to maintain legitimacy, which fundamentally includes maintaining institutional violence. oakland will recover, wounds will scab, the park will remain occupied by rats and undesirable humans, and all will return to normal.

And you are spot on. Criminals don’t lock people up. You know, because they are criminals. You ought to go sit in a criminal court for a few days and see the things that people do to each other for the stupidest (or no) reasons. The police caught every one of the people there, and I guarantee you’d rather be locked in a room with your average cop than any of those people.

But whatever. As long as the police are protecting you whether you want it or not you are free to act as if all police are equally bad.

EDIT: I would also like to point out that the “sociopaths” you fear never locked 3 million of their brothers in prison.

Meanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday.”

Seems like the Mayor, and/or whoever she is taking orders from, is trying to engineer something unpleasant. Swelling the Occupy crowd – filling the police lines (including disgruntled cops losing their day off). This, with the recently released images of police pretending to be protesters, doesn’t bode well.

Take care out there. Keep it peaceful. Document everything.

You might want to work on your geography, because with hyperbole like that you must be thinking of the next town up. 

So here’s my armchair analyst advice: instead of turning this into a game of “he said, she said” suck it up, admit something went really wrong, and lock yourselves in a room together until you’re able to come out with a solution.

If you don’t want to be a part of that, quit. Go be a cop in a more conservative state, where your orders are more consistent, you’re enforcing laws that taxpayers voted for, and are appreciated for doing so.

Let Oakland – let California – burn. You can’t fix a state that is intent on self-destruction. And if you stand on the line, with neither your leaders nor your citizens backing you up, you’ll only get consumed.

I think you’re obtusely misunderstanding the point of a strike.

Nobody wants to be there, but when you can’t do your job because of an utter failure of leadership (and the police are the ones with the greatest reason to strike) then you take to the picket lines. Police who are not on duty should have the right to attend. Nobody -wants- to attend.

It’s just what is left.

(edited to add this: thanks for getting my point dagfooyo)

In any case, the mayor should give the police the day off in solidarity!  No possibility of violence or teargassing.  Of course it would also mean carte blanche for every criminal in the city, not to mention a golden opportunity for plants to sabotage the movement by rioting.  So… maybe the police shouldn’t have the day off?

EDIT: I misread the post. Certainly if the police want to participate in the protests they should definitely be allowed to. Maybe it’ll make the on-duty police less likely to repeat earlier incidents, knowing their brothers and sisters are standing with the protesters.