SFPD gets their canopies

Shortly before midnight last night, 50 SFPD officers marched into the Occupy SF encampment. The officers aggressively removed the camp's two canopies. Then, they trashed and seized the belongings and supplies of the camp. The 150 camp members and supporters attempted to block the streets to prevent the DPW trucks filled with their belongings from driving away.
A number of participants tried asking the SFPD to end this intimidation and asking the truck drivers to show their support. Instead they were met with swinging batons and were nearly run over as the first truck filled with supplies was leaving. Protesters who laid down in the street to block the police vans from leaving with those arrested were beaten with nightsticks and thrown to the curbs.
The results of the night were five arrests, one injury, one serious injury, and a vivid reminder of who's side the police stand on.
The SFPD tore-down and trashed many of the personal belongings of the camp. They need our support to rebuild. Go to occupysf.com for a list of items required.

Join today's General Assembly meeting at 6pm at Justin Hermann Plaza (Embarcadero BART Station) to show your solidarity.

The story gets crazier

Of all the lunacy going on all over the world right now, San Francisco might be the biggest drama queen of them all.
Specifically, I'm talking about the SFPD shooting of 19 year-old Kenneth Harding over a $2 transit pass, a case which saw three different bombshells dropped today.
1) Police Chief Greg Suhr, fresh from last night's "evacuation" from the Bayview Opera House, struck back by announcing that Harding was killed by a .38 caliber bullet that doesn't match either the guns issued to the cops or the gun allegedly found on a "parolee" identified by a youtube video.
And oh yeah, apparently, that guy either had a different shiny gun-looking object at home than the one he allegedly picks up in a youtube video that doesn't seem to exist on youtube, or the shiny gun-looking object lying on the ground in the youtube video that actually does exist on youtube is totally unrelated to the officer-involved shooting of Harding (as in the handgun was just lying on the sidewalk several yards from where a guy shot himself, and two different witnesses took both guns, and all the shell casings from the scene without several cops seeing anything). In either scenario, at least one gun is missing.
It is also possible that there were no guns other than those being fired by the police. Just because they weren't officially issued a .38 doesn't necessarily mean that they didn't shoot Kenneth Harding with a .38. Also, there were several other armed law enforcement officers on the scene, possibly UCSF security? One officer with a machine gun can be seen in video footage. What other kinds of guns were there?

2) Despite claims that officers had possession of Harding's gun 6 hours after the shooting, police are still seeking the "man in the hoodie." That also means that they raided some other random dude's house and arrested him and took his shiny .45-caliber gun for no reason other than to lie and say that they found Harding's gun (i.e. "proving" that Harding had shot at officers and deserved to be murdered).
However, if the "man in the hoodie" still has Harding's gun, then that means that the "man in the hoodie" really did pick it up off the sidewalk several yards in front of Harding's dying body. That means that Harding shot himself in the head, and then hurled the gun several yards forward. I'm no physicist, but I think that if a man shot himself with his right hand in the right side of his head while running at full speed forward, the gun he used wouldn't end up as far in front of him and as far to his left as the alleged shiny gun-looking object is in the now-infamous youtube video.
It is much more believable that Harding, assuming he had a gun and fired on officers in the first place, instinctively hurled the gun forward once he had already been shot...by the police.
Even if you take the "self-inflicted" wound theory seriously, you still have to be concerned that two cops fired 9 or so shots on a busy street, and only one hit the intended target in the leg.
That's the incompetent version of the wild wild west.
Over a $2 transit pass.
Eyewitnesses from the neighorhood claim that Harding was shot 5 times in the back of the neck. I am assuming that this includes people who were close enough to hear, and possibly see, the impact of multiple bullets, but that is only an assumption.

3) The woman in Seattle that Harding is being accused of mudering was not pregnant as previously reported. Hmmm. Who said she was pregnant, and why?

SF Police Chief booed out of Bayview

SF Police Chief Greg Suhr turned tail and ran while being booed out of a community gathering organized in the Bayview neighborhood to address concerns over the police murder of 19 year-old Kenneth Harding (who was stopped by police as he exited a MUNI train without proof of fare on Saturday afternoon). Unlike Harding, Suhr was not shot in the back as he fled.
An hour and a half into the meeting at the Bayview Opera House, Suhr, who has only been on the job for three months, was "evacuated" by at least 20 officers and his command staff. There was an estimated 300 people in attendance.

“That’s right, walk away,” screamed one man, as the crowd surged around the officers. “You walking out ‘cause you know you not ready to deal with the reality,” a woman shouted into the microphone.

The anger in the predominantly black crowd revealed divisions within the community, with many younger community activists protesting the “establishment” approach of the older religious leaders. They claimed the leaders worked too much with police.
-Bay Citizen

It was the elders whom had organized the community gathering, largely to let the police explain themselves/obfuscate/slander the victim.
Harding ran away from the officers who had detained him, and according to several eyewitnesses, he was doing so at full speed without looking back at the officers. He was clearly running for his life. Media reports have called him a parolee, and have accused him of being linked to a recent violent crime in the Seattle area.
Multiple cell phone videos captured the immediate aftermath of the police shooting on Saturday, and Harding can be seen laying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, hopelessly fighting for his life as multiple officers stand over him with their guns pointed at him. An angry crowd forms, and the officers turn their attention to crowd control rather than providing assistance to the dying victim.

One particular video was used by police as "evidence" that a witness picked up an alleged gun that Harding allegedly fired at the officers during the chase. However, the witness in question clearly points to a flat rectangular object on the ground and can clearly be heard asking, "Is that your phone?" The man picks up the phone and disappears off screen.
Earlier in the video, another shiny object had come into view for less than a second, and police allege that the shiny object is Harding's gun. However, the alleged gun is several yards beyond where Harding lay dying, in the direction that he had been running (i.e. he would have had to have thrown, not dropped, the gun forward before he was shot, which, admittedly, is not exactly implausible). The shiny object is also several feet away from the cell phone that is picked up by the witness in the video. The witness does not look in the direction of, point to, or in any other way signal that he has noticed a gun lying on the sidewalk several feet away. Also, the person shooting the video does not notice the alleged gun, even though he/she appears to walk right next to it.
That didn't stop the police from lying and saying, through their media accomplices, that a video had been posted on youtube which showed a witness picking up Harding's gun. This was their excuse for not being able to find the gun for 6 hours, despite combing the entire area, including nearby rooftops, for the alleged weapon.

On Tuesday, 3 days after the shooting (and just before a protest that resulted in 43 arrests), the SFPD announced that they had found gunshot residue on Harding's right hand. The funny thing is, they still haven't announced that they have found any slugs or shell casings at the scene, and they haven't found Harding's fingerprints on the alleged gun. All they have is a video of a man picking up a cell phone off the ground, a dead man's police record, and alleged evidence of "gunshot residue" on the victim's hand (which is the easiest evidence to fake, since the police had three days to put that residue there after the fact - not to mention the fact that the presence of residue on someone's hand does not prove when or where a gun may have been fired by that hand).

In the end, whether or not Harding was an innocent saint, a pimp, a parolee, or even a man who shot at police while running away from them at full speed, he was clearly not a threat to the two police officers who shot at him, resulting in his death. It could easily be argued that shooting at a running suspect on a busy street in broad daylight was the most dangerous thing that happened that afternoon, and that type of police work should not be tolerated in any community.
Further, not possessing a $2 transit pass should not cost any human being their life, no matter what they may or may not have done in the past.