OAKLAND, Kalifornia - November 7, 2010 - Philip Means could sympathize with the hundreds of people protesting Johannes Mehserle's two-year sentence for killing Oscar Grant Friday night - right up until they surged into his neighborhood and started screaming, jumping on cars and smashing windows.

Means, 23, burst from his house at Sixth Avenue and 18th Street in his underwear, took in the situation at a glance and decided to flee.

"I was afraid for my truck because it was parked right in front of the house, so I jumped in and took off," he said. "All I'd heard was smashing and yelling. It sounded like a protest gone wrong. I wasn't going to wait around for my stuff to get broken."

Means was experiencing the tail end of a day of protests over the Mehserle sentencing - a day that had begun peacefully with tears, songs and speeches at Oakland City Hall, but ended with destruction and more than a hundred arrests.

It wasn't the kind of protest conclusion for which organizers had hoped.

"Our demonstration at City Hall was really, really beautiful, where children, mothers, elders and youngsters all had the opportunity to express the great emotion that Oakland felt yesterday," said Cat Brooks, co-chair of the Onyx Organizing Committee, which helped put on the demonstration. "That part of the day was very successful."

The only "damper" on the afternoon, she and others said, was the way police officers lingered around the gathering. Nearly 500 people assembled to protest the sentence, and at least as many police officers from jurisdictions as far away as Monterey tried to prevent the protests from turning into riots the way they did July 8.

That rally against Mehserle's involuntary manslaughter conviction devolved into looting that left 100 downtown businesses damaged and 78 people arrested.

This time police kept a much closer hand on things. Though 152 were arrested, destruction was mostly limited to the windows of one East Oakland business and about a dozen cars.

It all went well until nightfall, said Oakland Police Chief Anthony Batts.

Ed. Note: So another murderous thug cop gets away with it.  It is time for the citizens to take the law into their own hands and mete out justice to this murderous bastard piece of garbage thug! Revolution Now! Independence Forever!