Agent Provocateur? 

At a police brutality protest in Oakland, CA on Wednesday, an undercover California Highway Patrol officer, who allegedly wore a bandanna over his face and encouraged protesters to engage in violence, pulled out his service weapon, after the angry crowd outed him and his partner as police officers, and aimed the pistol at demonstrators and a photographer who was covering the event for the San Francisco Chronicle.

On Wednesday, a police brutality protest spontaneously emerged in the Oakland, CA area in response to recent revelations that grand juries failed to indict the officers responsible for the controversial deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The demonstrators met on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley and marched throughout the streets of Oakland. According to KTVU, the group of around 150 to 200 protesters initially disrupted PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s talk at Berkeley before leaving campus and marching downtown. The crowd of demonstrators swelled in number as it moved through the city.

Later on, as the protest thinned down to around 30 to 50 people, protesters noticed two suspicious masked men, who, according to tweets by eyewitnesses, seen below and cited by SFGate, had allegedly been attempting to incite the crowd to commit acts of vandalism and banging on the windows of local businesses. The relative calm of the protests faded, and the demonstrations descended into chaos, as some among the crowd began looting and throwing rocks at shop windows. Angry demonstrators circled around the two masked men, believing them to be agent provocateurs sent by police to incite violence and discredit the protest. What happened next is in dispute and ended in a California Highway Patrol officer pulling out his service weapon on protesters and a photographer covering the protests for the San Francisco Chronicle. MOREHERE