By Liam O'Donoghue

The days leading up to the mass arrest at the Reclaim the Streets party at Fifth and Market Streets June 8 – in which I and more than 100 others were taken to jail – must have been frustrating and a bit dull for the San Francisco Police Department.

As the many helicopters flying overhead and the hundreds of cops on the ground could attest, the June 5 antiwar rally remained peaceful. The next day, the flying fruit at the genetically modified food fight in the Marina District Safeway parking lot was broken up without so much as the firing of a single tear-gas canister. And nobody offered the police free back rubs, couscous, or pretty flowers at the "Really Free Market" in Union Square.

At the attempted shutdown of the BIO 2004 biotechnology conference on the morning of June 8, cops outnumbered protesters, and although some conventioneers were heckled and a few potted plants blocked traffic at Fourth and Howard Streets, these troopers on overtime mostly ended up just standing around in their riot gear, blocking traffic.

Maybe they decided to shut down the mobile street party during rush hour at one of the city's busiest intersections that afternoon to justify their presence by overstating the nuisance of a small group of protesters. Maybe they want even more than the 5 percent budget increase Mayor Gavin Newsom has offered the department. Or maybe their overreaction was a calculated act of intimidation and harassment designed to send a message that even in San Francisco, only so much freedom of expression will be tolerated before even a minor gesture of resistance against corporate culture will be squashed.

Who knows? Frankly, I don't understand it.

• • •

Although there were Black Bloc anarchists and anti-biotech and anti-G8 protesters mixed in with the crowd of 150 or so who converged on United Nations Plaza around 5 p.m., the mood was more festive than confrontational. As people wearing mutant ninja costumes milled about, waiting for the sound system to start kicking music, a couple DJs passed out flyers stating the event's purpose: "to take back public space – the street – from cars, corporations, and the police state and return it to the public for socialization, bicycling, art, food, dancing, music, theatre, dialogue, community, and creativity."

I had awoken at sunrise to cover the biotech protests, so I was a little tired when I joined the Reclaim the Streets crowd. But as soon as I saw my buddy Chuck McNally, a local labor activist, bearing a huge grin and a bullhorn, I knew sleep could wait another few hours. "Newsom's meeting with the biotech execs right now," he said, getting on his bike. "Let's go tell them what we think about corporate tax breaks and gentrification."

As a journalist, I naturally followed the action and joined the small pack of bikers circling Civic Center Plaza. The platoon of motorcycle cops and paddy wagons who were tailing us must not have appreciated McNally's amplified taunts of the mayor, because as soon as we were on the opposite side of the plaza from City Hall, they stopped a young woman who was trying to catch up and issued her a ticket for running a red light. Within five minutes, McNally and another biker who challenged the validity of the citation on her behalf were handcuffed in the back of the wagon.

After seeing the cops arrest my friend for pointing out that several of them were not openly displaying their badge numbers as required (actual charge: failure to show identification), I knew that even though all the overtime pay should have made them happy, the police were pissed at the protesters.

• • •

As soon as I heard the booming of the mobile sound system, I locked my bike to a parking meter and danced my way into the jubilant, banner-waving crowd that had poured onto Market Street heading east. Amid the smiles, fist-pumping, and chants of "Our streets!" I almost forgot about the heavily armed swarms that were scrambling to enclose us.

I guess I didn't really think we were breaking the law, or maybe it was just that the wailing sirens matched up with the techno beat. But their presence became difficult to ignore when a barricade of motorcycles halted us at Fifth Street and a loudspeaker announcement, barely audible over the cheering and music, notified us that the police had just arrested everyone. If we were given a chance to disperse, nobody that I was dancing with heard it.

Had we been allowed to continue, or even if we were herded onto the sidewalk, the party probably would've marched straight down Market to Justin Herman Plaza, where we would've danced for an hour or two and then gone home. Instead of a major intersection being shut down for three hours and the cash-strapped city spending wads of money on police overtime so that a hundred kids (and a few elderly folks) could be arrested, one by one, and issued citations that will probably have been dropped by the time this article comes out, a few cars and buses would've been delayed for a few minutes. Instead of a crowd of thousands watching as droves of police confiscated a cart from Food Not Bombs activists who were throwing bagels into the circle of arrestees, a few tourists would've taken pictures of a happy crowd of young San Franciscans dancing through the street.

As the sun went down and we waited to be handcuffed and hauled away, the cops passed around boxes of king-size Snickers bars to each other. Officer Gala (who arrested another Bay Guardian journalist at an antiwar protest last year; see "On the Bus," 3/21/03) laughed at me when I identified myself as a journalist, while a guy in a riot helmet tied my hands behind my back, searched my pockets, and taunted that he was "going to spend all this overtime pay on a Prada purse" for his wife. But we taunted back on the bus ride to the Hall of Justice, singing, "The pigs on the bus go, 'Oink, oink, oink.' " Jail wasn't even too bad; a bunch of attractive young women in the holding pen next to mine played tag.

The worst part of this systematic repression was knowing that the cops would be praised for "keeping order," while we would be scolded for "disturbing the peace." Before my cell phone was taken from me, I was calling in live reports to Enemy Combatant Radio. This Web radio station's signal was being transmitted and rebroadcast to low-power and Independent Media Center FM stations all over the West Coast and, through the Internet, across the world. People needed to hear our side of the story.

Liam O'Donoghue, whose journalism internship with the Bay Guardian ended June 11, also writes for Fault Lines, the newspaper of the S.F. Bay Area Independent Media Center.