Posted by
Steve on Friday, November 04, 2011 12:27:07 PM
A disturbing thing happened at the Occupy Oakland riots yesterday. A man in a Mercedes ran over a couple of protesters. That is the basics, now for the rest of the story.
The Occupy Oakland protesters were busy rioting. They had attacked a Bank of America branch and destroyed an ATM and broke windows. They then attacked a Whole Foods store with people inside. They broke windows and threatened the people inside. The police managed to evacuate the people through a back door. When the people left, the protesters wrote graffiti on the walls of the Whole Foods store.
About that same time, a man in a Mercedes came down the street. He obeyed the traffic lights and stopped his car. That was his first mistake. The protesters saw the car and surrounded it. They started beating on the car with their fists and anything else they could find. One protester stood in front of the car and would not allow the car to leave. The driver tried to move his car forward a number of times but was blocked each time. With each attempt, the protesters ramped up the attack on the car. Finally the driver of the vehicle had taken all he could and gunned the car, running over two protesters in the process.
The BART police investigated the accident and released the driver of the Mercedes. The protesters were upset to begin with and they became incensed with the release of the driver. They wanted the driver to receive the punishment he deserved for running over their fellow protesters. The investigation of the matter is now in the hands of the Oakland Police Department.
The protesters that were interviewed all said that the driver of the car tried to drive through the crowd and hit some of the innocent protesters. None of the protesters admitted that they were attacking the car just before it sped off. If you believe the protesters, they were completely innocent bystanders and this driver just irresponsibly drove into the crowd to injure people.
What should the driver have done in that situation? I am not sure. His first mistake was obeying the traffic laws when he saw a mob. When he identified the mob’s presence, he should have removed himself from the area as soon as possible in order to minimize the danger. It becomes a little murky after he was surrounded and the protesters were pounding on his car. There is a video of this entire situation, so the facts should not be really in doubt. Remember that he is in a car that is not structurally reinforced. The pounding on the car will eventually lead to the protesters getting into the vehicle. If they get into the vehicle, the driver should rightly fear for his safety. This crowd was out for blood. They had already destroyed two buildings and had terrorized the people inside of one of them. On the Glenn Beck radio show, they suggest that the driver should have kept moving the car forward slowly. That may have worked, but with the number of people present, they might have been able to stop the vehicle from moving. If they stopped the vehicle from moving on their own, the protesters would have become unstoppable. Keeping moving was the driver’s best option. If he could have moved the people from in front of his vehicle by keeping moving, he could have left easily. But none of those things happened. He was at a standstill and was being hammered into submission by the crowd. Eventually he cracked under the pressure. I am sure that almost anyone else would have done the same. The driver is in a lot of trouble because of his actions. He did injure two people with his vehicle. Getting a fair hearing in Oakland or in the entire San Francisco Bay area will be extremely difficult. Most people around there would most likely sympathize with the protesters. If that is the case, the driver would stand no chance in court.
That is just one of the scenarios that we have to plan for in the future. What would we do if we were surrounded by a crowd that would not let us go? How could we escape with our life? We have to roll play those scenarios in our minds now, before we confront them in real life. That way we can rationally plan out what we will do.