OAKLAND, Calif (Reuters) — Police in Oakland, a hot spot of anti-Wall Street activism in recent weeks, swept away the last of the city's protest camps early on Monday and the police use of pepper spray on protesters in the California town of Davis came under mounting criticism.
Police moved in at about 12:30 a.m. local time and ordered the removal of 20 to 30 tents that had been pitched in Snow Park, the only remaining Oakland camp still standing after another park and an adjacent vacant lot were cleared on Sunday.
"We made the announcement asking people to leave, and they did, and they packed up their tents and left," Oakland police spokeswoman Johnna Watson said. "There were no arrests and no fights."
"As we speak, there are no tents and no camps," she added. "We are enforcing no camps and no camping equipment anywhere in the parks. And that will be enforced throughout the city."
[See a collection of political cartoons on Occupy Wall Street.]
Oakland has been a flash point of the anti-Wall Street "Occupy" movement, helping rally support nationwide for demonstrations launched in New York in September to protest economic inequality and excesses of the financial system.
Protesters had been allowed to remain at Snow Park after the original Occupy Oakland camp, at Frank Ogawa Plaza next to City Hall, was shut down on November 14 and after Sunday's eviction of protesters from another park and vacant lot they had taken over on Saturday.
Miles away at the University of California at Berkeley, police last week cleared out a small tent city that had sprouted there in the aftermath of a clash days before in which UC police jabbed students with batons to drive back a crowd.
Attention over the weekend shifted to the UC campus at Davis, about 50 miles to the north, where the pepper-spraying of student protesters sitting on the ground was captured on videotape footage that circulated widely on the Internet.
Outrage over that incident and the earlier Berkeley clash prompted, UC President Mark Yudof to place two UC Davis officers on paid administrative leave and launch a review of police procedures at all 10 university campuses.
[See a collection of political cartoons on the economy.]
UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi, who has come under fire from some faculty and student leaders for her handling of protests there, announced on Monday that the campus chief of police also had been suspended.
In addition, Katehi asked the Yolo County District Attorney's office to investigate the police department's use of force and said she would create a task force to conduct a campus review and report recommendations in 30 days.
Student protest organizers reacted by calling for a massive rally on campus at noon on Monday in the quad area where demonstrators were doused with pepper spray last week.
The student protesters, whose grievances included tuition hikes and actions they viewed as police brutality at Berkeley, had pitched about 25 tents in a quad area earlier this month. But they had been asked not to stay overnight and were told they had to leave during the weekend due to a lack of university resources, school officials said.
Some protesters took their tents down voluntarily while others stayed. The pepper spray incident appeared to take place last Friday afternoon, when campus police moved in to forcibly evict the protesters.
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Brandt Hardin of TN 7:22PM November 21, 2011