There was a small riot in Oakland last night. Jesus.

For everyone who doesn't know, a cop shot an unarmed, handcuffed black man at a BART station last week. Obviously, no one is happy about it. And on the contrary, in fact, there are a lot of angry people.

A large group gathered to protest last night and about 200 of them split off to cause havoc. They did extensive damage to a police car and set it on fire, as well as destroying a number of storefronts and other cars.

What I don't understand is that the protest was against maltreatment of black and Latino citizens, yet many of the stores which were damaged were owned by black citizens, not to mention some of the cars, too. It doesn't make sense...

Anyway, I was saddened to read the news today. I only hope that the violence doesn't escalate...

Wow. I call it the stupidness of the masses. In many cases it's something deeper and people use it as an opportunity to release their pressure and flip out. Of course it's ironic that they destroyed stores and shops because of whom they demonstrated for.

On the other side it reminds me a little bit of the assassination of Martin Luther King. It's sad that those things still happen nowadays. Do you have any information whether it was racialistic motivated?

My assumption is that it was racially motivated, but I really don't know. The police officer who shot the man to death just quit the police force today. Probably a good move on his part, assuming guilt, of course.

I read about this in the news. I don't understand violent protests that end up hurting the people that folks intended on protesting for in the first place, but then again I've never been in a protest situation that escalated to the point of mass hysteria. I mean, we've got a community that is grieving and a community that's not all too affluent having felt oppressed by 'the man' for a long time now. So it takes an incident like this to release the pressure. According to one protestor: ""We live a life of fear, and we want them to be afraid tonight." So there you go. Lots of anger (a lot which is justifiable) here.

Anyway I read that there was a mass arrest of 80 people last night. According to CNN, what started out as a sort of solidarity movement quickly turned ugly.

LA has had its share of riots - I will never forget the Rodney King riots. Those were awful and it was really unnerving to see it all unfold on television. The news kept playing that clip of Reginald Denny being dragged out of his truck and beaten profusely, over and over and over again, just in case us viewers weren't completely outraged and disgusted the first hundred times we saw it.

It's hard to tell if the cop shooting that guy was racially motivated. This sort of thing - cops shooting unarmed minorities - happens a lot here and we only ever get part of the story. It's easy to label something a hate crime, and there's a lot of dirty trigger happy dick swinging cops out there - but I don't know. we don't know the motivation. Apparently ths guy who was shot (he was 22) was shot in the back with his face to the floor. The cop who shot him has already turned in his resignation.

Policemen should all get a brain for next christmas.