The first few riots here I missed completely -- I'd be playing cards in the evenings with friends in the Milano, and I'd emerge into the night on Telegraph Avenue and notice that, gosh, there'd been another riot.... I'd feel a little stupid, looking at the glass-strewn streets, and I'd occasionally wonder how I could miss the sounds of rioting only a few hundred yards from the cafe, but hey, this is Berkeley, we have riots here all the time, and a certain studied nonchalance is probably the best attitude anyway. Another day, another riot.. and besides, most of the riots to date had been little more than drunken frat-boy binges or nihilist and pathetically dissolute punk protests.

This time it was different. It was the season for serious protest now -- UC Berkeley wanted People's Park back, and the people of People's Park didn't want to let them have it back. This was People's Park, this was history -- Berkeley History -- a fairly potent symbol of the 60's and later struggles against the University and authority in general, and by now a haven for the homeless and various political groups.

So this time I decided to play photo journalist -- something I've never done before or since -- and walk or cycle around Berkeley with my camera taking photos of whatever happened. I knew almost nothing about how to take these sorts of photos, and I had no press acreditation. But I did know the issues, I did recognize many of the key players, and it was all happening on my home territory (at the time I lived in downtown Berkeley, and I sold jewellery, T-shirts and photos part-time for other people on Telegraph).

After several confusing nights of trying to dodge police, actually see the rioters, and follow the protestors, it became clear that the real story wasn't the riots, it was the week-long occupation of (Berkeley) Southside by some 600 police, and how it felt to live in this occupation, being forced to show IDs when walking down your own street, or having to justify to some faceless out-of-town cop your decision to shop on Telegraph Avenue. At one stage some twenty or thirty police were on every block of Telegraph, just watching you walk or talk, or sometimes edgily harrassing random passers-by. The atmosphere was tense and bitter; this was our city, boarded up and invaded, and both the rioters (a very small minority of the People's Park brigade) and the police were either outsiders or generally unwelcome.

The other story, of course, was that while the riots were the big news on all the TV newscasts and made great front-page headlines in the papers, it was the peaceful but often chaotic demonstrations that were really significant (no surprises here). The riots depressed most of us; the occupation was even more depressing.

This thread is a small selection of the photos I took that week, with a bit of commentary where necessary. This is not a story about People's Park as such; just about The Occupation of Berkeley in August 1991. The choices below reflect the way I saw the whole event -- The Police, The People, and Events.

Many of the smaller images in The Occupation can be clicked on to produce a much larger JPEG version; this is true whether there's an explicit blue border or not.