Dozens of anti-police protesters arrested in Oakland

Hundreds of US protesters in Oakland, California, blocked the city’s police headquarters and nearby streets on Monday to denounce racial injustice and police violence across the United States.

Officers from the Oakland Police Department (OPD) arrested dozens of protesters who were demonstrating against recent grand jury decisions not to indict two white officers for killing two unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City.

A group of protesters had chained themselves to the front door of the police headquarters in order to block entrance to the building. Another group of protesters blocked traffic at a nearby intersection.

Demonstrators blocking the doors of the police building held a banner reading “End the war on Black People” with the Twitter hashtag “#Asians4BlackLives.” Others held banners reading “Black and Breathing” and “Complacency is Consent” while chanting “I believe that we will win” and “No justice, no peace, no racist police.”

The protest began at around 7:30 a.m. By 9:00 a.m., the amount of protesters had swelled to about 200.

“The path to the liberation of all of our communities, to justice for all of our communities, travels through the liberation of black people in America,” said Gopal Dayaneni, 45, who was among those arrested. “And so for us, the struggle for black lives is the struggle of our time, and we stand with those folks in those communities.”

“The OPD, like every other police department in this country, is actually an army at war with black folks in America,” he added.

Nationwide demonstrations erupted last month when a St. Louis grand jury declined to indict a former Ferguson policeman who shot dead Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager. The protests intensified earlier this month after a grand jury in New York decided not to indict a white policeman for the chokehold death of Eric Garner.