OAKLAND: Riot police battled anti-Wall Street protesters in the streets of Oakland on Saturday after demonstrators tried to take over a shuttered convention centre. More than 100 people were arrested and three officers were injured, police said.
The confrontations erupted when the crowd began destroying construction equipment and tearing down fencing at the Henry J. Kaiser Convention Centre in downtown Oakland in the early afternoon, officials said.
"Officers were pelted with bottles, metal pipe, rocks, spray cans, improvised explosive devices and burning flares," the Oakland Police Department said in a statement. "Oakland Police Department deployed smoke and tear gas."
The scuffles marked the latest confrontation between police and Occupy activists seeking to regain lost momentum in their movement against economic inequality after authorities cleared protest camps across the country late last year.
Occupy Oakland organizers had vowed to take over the fenced-off convention centre to establish a headquarters for their movement and draw attention to homelessness. Authorities had blocked similar efforts before.
Police said 19 people were arrested near the convention centre and another 100 taken into custody after they were corralled by officers outside a YMCA in downtown Oakland.
"The 1 percent have all these empty buildings and meanwhile there are all these homeless people," protester Omar Yassin.
Near the convention centre, several dozen police officers declared an unlawful assembly and confronted the demonstrators at a fence, firing smoke and tear gas canisters into the crowd after telling protesters to disperse through loudspeakers.
Some activists, carrying shields made of plastic garbage cans and corrugated metal, tried to circumvent the police line, and surged toward police on another side of the building as more smoke canisters were fired.
"The city of Oakland welcomes peaceful forms of assembly and freedom of speech but acts of violence, property destruction and overnight lodging will not be tolerated," police said in a statement.
Later, hundreds of demonstrators regrouped and marched through downtown Oakland, where they were repeatedly confronted by police in riot gear. Police at several points fired flash-bang grenades into the crowd and swung batons at protesters.
Later a group of demonstrators made their way to City Hall, where they brought out a US flag and set it on fire before scattering ahead of advancing officers.
Protesters in Oakland loosely affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York last year have repeatedly clashed with police during a series of marches and demonstrations.
Elsewhere, the National Park Service said on Friday it would bar Occupy protesters in Washington, D.C., one of the few big cities where Occupy encampments survive, from camping in two parks where they have been living since October.
That order, which takes effect on Monday, was seen as a blow to one of the highest-profile chapters of the movement.
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