National Brown Berets stand at attention at July 21 anti-police demonstration in front of Anaheim City Hall.

National Brown Berets stand at attention at July 21 anti-police demonstration in front of Anaheim City Hall.

I endured the long march of anti-police demonstrators through downtown Anaheim on Sunday, and my chronicle of what I saw is forthcoming.

The OC Register, the Voice of OC and the OC Weekly all published accounts of the protest, and Adam Elmahrek’s article provides – by far — the best account of the event:

Sunday’s protest was organized by Answer LA, a Los Angeles-based activist group that demonstrates against war and police brutality throughout the state. Many of the protesters were not from Anaheim, and some even had to depart early to catch a bus back to Oakland.

For two hours, friends and relatives of police shooting victims from cities up and down the state gathered outside the Police Department headquarters on South Harbor Boulevard and told stories of young men who had been gunned down by police.

The rally brought together a range of progressive interests and included members of leftist groups some of which have been around for decades.

Members of the Brown Berets, founded in the 1960s, formed a line equipped with riot shields. Occupy Santa Ana protesters milled through the crowd. Many protesters covered their faces with bandanas. One man passed around socialist literature. Speakers talked about a police state that was set up to protect the interests of an elite class bent on dominating the poor.

Manila Ryce, speaking through loudspeakers from atop a truck bed outside City Hall, called for the “strengthening of militant movements, which are desperately needed to protect ourselves from the aggression of this empire.”

“We will show the ruling elite …[that] working class people have only gotten justice through militant action,” Ryce said.

I’ve been critical of much of Adam’s coverage of Anaheim politics and government, and from my perspective his article still understates how thoroughly the protest was suffused with a Marxist worldview; still, he’s the only media reporter who reported the radical nature of the march.

The OC Register’s anti-septic coverage conveyed to readers little of the radical nature of the protest’s organizers, participants and message.

Gabriel San Roman devoted his OC Weekly article to writing about how he and Anaheim resident and green party activist Duane Robert’s drove around looking to see where the Anaheim police were positioned, and infer the APD was there to protect and serve Disneyland (which, by an amazing coincidence, was the propaganda line promoted by the Party for Socialism and Liberation).