San Francisco: 1,400 arrests in second-day protests (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/21/03):
"This is the largest number of arrests we've made in one day and the largest demonstration in terms of disruption that I've seen," said Assistant Police Chief Alex Fagan Sr., a 30-year department veteran.
The vast majority of demonstrators were peaceful as they denounced the U.S. war with Iraq and shut down more than 40 intersections beginning at 7 a.m. But small bands of protesters clashed with police, accosted motorists and vandalized a wide swath of the Financial District. . . .
"After 16 hours of fighting communists and anarchists, a Red Bull can help us go another 16 hours," said Sgt. Rene Laprevotte as he bought two cans of the energy drink at a Fifth Street market. "We're here as long as they are."
More San Francisco: "Hit-and-run" tactics work (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/21/03):
The city that nursed the sit-ins and be-ins of the counterculture protesters of the 1960s was gummed up by a form of demonstration that relies on the whims of small knots of activists, who flitted from block to block instead of lumbering with the predictability of a mass march.
Although a loosely knit affiliation of small groups called Direct Action Against the War coordinated Thursday's demonstration, even its organizers didn't know where the hydra was going.
More San Francisco (San Francisco Chronicle, 3/21/03):
John Peter Ross, as proud as a father can be, got to the corner of Montgomery and Washington streets just in time to watch his son get arrested.
"That's my boy," said Ross, gazing fondly as John Peter Ross II was being handcuffed, photographed and led by four helmeted riot cops into a police bus. . . .
At 7:15 a.m., six young men wearing orange vests and hard hats swiped from a construction crew furtively dashed onto the Eighth Street offramp from Highway 101. They plunked down 13 orange cones, three men-at-work signs and lit five flares. The whole operation took 90 seconds, then they ran off on Eighth Street, dialing their cell phones. . . .
About 20 young people calling themselves Pukers4Peace emptied the plaza in front of the Federal Building with a street performance -- of induced vomiting.
"Militarism makes me sick," said Don Abbott, a Contra Costa College journalism student who headed the group. "Puking is the most disgusting display of emotion that is still legal. We've gotten flack from other protesters, but we are past trying to appeal to people's sensibilities."
The group splattered its message between 7 and 10 a.m., but pools of vomit still covered much of the plaza at mid-afternoon. Everyone who came within yards reeled away, fingers on noses.
