Extra

Flash: Campus Cops Raid Tree-In

By Richard Brenneman
Friday January 12, 2007

Less than a day after an Oakland judge refused to order the eviction of protesters at the Memorial Stadium tree-in, UC Berkeley police staged a pre-dawn raid Friday, evicting supporters of the tree-dwellers and leveling their encampment. 

There were no arrests. 

Shortly after 6 a.m., “about 10” uniformed officers swooped in, backed up by two front-end loaders, a stake-bed truck a dump truck and campus building and grounds workers. 

Giving the protesters less than three minutes to move out, officers surrounded the scene with crime scene tape and the protesters made frantic calls to supporters. 

“It’s a public safety issue,” said Mitch Celaya, the department’s assistant chief. “We’re trying to get things back to normal before students return.” 

As campus workers in yellow vests gathered up scattered belongings and leveled the shelters which had housed the ground support volunteers who were helping the six protesters camped out in the branches overhead a growing crowd of demonstrators briefly broke into a chant:  

“Thieves! Thieves! Thieves in the Night. 

“The trees aren’t going down without a fight.” 

Another supporter called out, “Hang in there, tree people.” 

Another passer-by was less supportive, saying, “Get out of the trees, guys. Oak trees are everywhere in California.” 

At least six volunteers were camped out on the ground when the police staged their predawn raid, including Richard Goodreau, who was asleep under a plastic tarp and missed by the officers on their initial search. 

“I heard yelling and I peeked out, and they had already driven everybody else out. So I gathered all my stuff and quietly stuffed my sleeping bag into my pack and ran down the hill,” he said. 

Others weren’t so lucky, including one volunteer who lost a personal computer and another who said he lost prescription medications. 

An officer told them their possessions could be reclaimed later after they’d been booked into evidence—as long as they could prove they owned them. 

Celaya said the material was being taken into evidence, but the material wasn’t tagged or marked as is usually the case at crime scenes, nor was any effort made to keep items separate. 

The raid came on the year’s coldest morning and on the day of the sixth week since former mayoral candidate Zachary Running Wolf began the protest by climbing into the branches of a redwood before dawn on Big Game Saturday. 

After sitting out a seven-day stay-away order Running Wolf was back in the redwood Friday—the day after a judge refused to give campus attorneys permission to chop it down. 

Doug Buckwald, who is coordinating support for the protesters, said a rally is scheduled for 2 p.m. Friday (today) at the site. 

The tree-in is being staged to protest university plans to chop down a grove of California Live Oaks, the redwood and other trees to make way for a four-story, $125 million gym complex along the stadium’s western wall. 

Four lawsuits have been filed by the city and private organizations challenging university development plans in the area, and another suit is being planned—this one alleging civil rights violations in the Friday morning raid, said Buckwald.  

 

Photograph by Richard Brenneman. 

Two UC Berkeley workers dump the remains of the shelter that once housed protesters at the stadium grove into a front-end loader after campus police raded the site before dawn Friday, evicting protestors and destroying their encampment.