The police action taking place throughout the Occupy Wall St. protest movement has often been violent, over reactive, and sadly inevitable. If you take a long view at protests in America you'll see that any longstanding protest will be met with aggressive action by law enforcement. The police are not at fault in this regard, and neither are the protesters. The protesters are advocating peaceful protest, Their intention is peaceful protest. The police are maintaining peace, order, and safety, their intention is to maintain peace, order, and safety. Yet what happened in Oakland, happened. The questions are how, and why. The reason is a non-responsive government.

The Occupy Wall st. protests are not a result of one injustice but a culmination of hundreds of  misdeeds inflicted upon the general public for decades. These misdeeds were often hidden but their effects were not. When the financial crisis hit, it was not an iceberg across our bow, It was not a freak accident caused by neglect, it was the catastrophic failure of a poorly designed damn that drowned the American public.

As a result Americans are angry and frustrated. With good reason while they were out hard at work, someone blew up their life savings, and a good chunk of the equity they had in their homes. People had spent a long time pointing fingers looking for someone to blame, but eventually it matters less who caused the problem and more that nothing has been done to fix the problem. We are awash with problems and no one is fixing them. In fact some people seem to be making the problems worse.

So what is a democratic population to do? They’ve voted, twice now, and still no progress. Their voices have not been heard, so they’ve taken to the streets. it is what happens when the voices of the people are not heard, they congregate to amplify. Unfortunately this brings them smack into contact with the police.

What people need to realize is that any protest like this is essentially a Mexican stand off between the police and the protesters. It doesn’t matter how peaceful both sides would like to be guns are already drawn and all it takes is one asshole and everyone has to respond. Which is what I suspect happened in Oakland. This does not excuse the explosive response, I merely point out the inevitability of the event. When people take to the streets the government must respond, they can either respond with an effort to meet the desires of the disaffected or they can respond in violence, the former is the way of representative government, while the latter is of a tyrannical one. Failure to respond just builds tension and eventually spontaneous uncontrolled violence erupts.