Oakland PD getting a little trigger happy?

They need to have a good explanation for this. [Link]

A video clip is raising new questions about whether police used excessive force against Occupy Oakland participants during the fracas after last week's general strike.

The video by Scott Campbell, 30, of Oakland, shows a line of riot-gear-clad officers at Frank Ogawa Plaza's north end, near the foot of San Pablo Avenue. Campbell said the video was made shortly before 1 a.m. Thursday, around the time that police moved in after other protesters broke into and defaced a nearby building and erected and set fire to barricades in the street.

Campbell, holding the camera, moves slowly to his right, filming the line; Campbell is heard twice asking, "Is this OK?"

"When I was approaching the line, an officer told me to stop and step back, so I stepped back 5 or 10 feet and started filming, and I asked if that was OK," he explained Monday.

He said there was no reply until an officer raised a weapon and fired, striking him in the upper right thigh with a nonlethal projectile; the video ends with his crying out in pain.

"At first I was just stunned, and in an immense amount of pain," he said. "It was just shock. I was extremely shaken. And since then what I'm really wondering is what was going through that person's head that made him think it was OK to shoot another person with a less-than-lethal weapon for doing absolutely nothing wrong."

Oakland police and City Hall representatives didn't return emails seeking comment Monday.

Paul Chevigny, professor emeritus at the New York University School of Law, said it looks like "a violation of his First Amendment rights apart from being a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He has a right to take a film of what the police do -- we've been over this thousands of times -- unless he's interfering in some way.

"The basic problem of police retaliating against people who are trying to record what's going on is perennial," said Chevigny, adding this occurs all over the nation. "They (officers) consider it a kind of 'contempt of cop.' It's an expression of the fact that people do not trust the police. The police read it as a criticism of them. It's not even necessarily that they're trying to prevent people from seeing what they're doing.

"But this extreme version (of retaliation) is very unfamiliar to me," he added. "I can't imagine what they're going to say about shooting this guy. Sounds like the Oakland police need a little brush-up on their training."