As rioting broke out in Ferguson, Missouri after a grand jury decided not to charge former police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in August, protests broke out all over California. Even though some of the protests were illegal and some were tense and violent, as of 10 p.m. Monday, most of the protests in the Golden State were angry but peaceful.
The San Francisco Chronicle said that there was some violence in Oakland, which is often a place where protests happen. Several storefronts were damaged, and protesters repeatedly blocked the westbound side of the 580 freeway.
Two people were arrested, and traffic slowly started moving again as police worked to get a lot of people off the road.
In Los Angeles, a small group of protesters blocked the 10 freeway for a short time, but they were soon gone. According to the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Police Department said that the small protests that were held around the city were peaceful. There will probably be marches in the coming days, but the city doesn’t seem to want to repeat the riots that happened after the Rodney King verdict more than 20 years ago.
A small group of protesters stopped cars near the Florin Mall in Sacramento. They waved signs and shouted, “What do we do when black youth are attacked? Stand up and fight! No justice–no peace!” A Sacramento Bee reporter was at the scene of the small, short-lived traffic jam and took a video of it.
The Bee said that Mayor Kevin Johnson got together with people from the area to watch the news about the decision.
Senior-at-Large Editor Joel B. Pollak is the editor-in-chief of Breitbart California and the author of the new Amazon Kindle ebook Wacko Birds: The Fall (and Rise) of the Tea Party.