More video:
From the videographer's point of view:
I eventually turned my camera off, but just as I did so the police went after several people with pepper spray. This caused mass chaos....and I immediately left the area and headed north on the beach. I honestly believe if the police left the scene after the arrest and did not use the pepper spray the situation would not have escalated to what we know is called the "PB Riot". All I know is that after I left the scene even more chaos erupted and what I see on the news is so shocking. I honestly believe both the disrespectful drunks who chose to piss off the cops are to blame, as well as the police who appeared to enrage the crowd even more by using pepper spray.
Other witness quotes:
From what I saw, no one could call the entire episode anything other than a minor disturabce effectively contained by the SDPD -- and certianly not a riot by any stretch of the imagination.- SH
I was randomly right there in the water next to the guy who started pushing the ATV. It looked to me like the ATV was semi deep in the water and slowing moving even deeper. Some kid got behind it and put a ton of effort into pushing it out of the water and calmly rolled it up to the cops. A few seconds after he [brought] them the ATV, they arrested him. It looked like at first people were walking up to the cops trying to explain to them the kid was helping them but I guess they didn't listen. I know the cops knew he was trying to help because they were watching him as he was pushing it up the beach to them. When they didn't let the kid go people started booing, a few empty beer cans were thrown at the cops, mostly just a bunch of sand being thrown. Then out of no where one of the cops charged at us in the water and started spraying mace, thats when people started throwing more stuff and it really got out of hand. -KG
The slipping slide people had had their slipping slide out for about 4 hours, which I didn't think was really that big of a deal. It got a little rowdy over there at one point in time (about 30 minutes before the cops showed up) when a bunch of people were sliding down it and a big group of guys was chanting "we want boobs". I went over there and checked it out for a little bit, no big deal. About 30 minutes later an office rolled up in his quad and went over to talk to those guys, probably to tell them they couldn't have the slide. While he was over there, some joker ran over and pushed the quad toward the water about 5 ft. The quad was already too close to the water, so the waves started washing up underneath and moving it around a bit (this was happening about 20 ft in front of me while I was sitting in my beach chair) Another guy who was just walking by, saw the officers quad in the water, he didn't know the first guy who originally touched it as far as I could tell. He decided to be a good citizen and grabbed the back of the quad and pushed it up out of the water onto dry sand. I don't know if the cop didn't see any of this or what, but he came over right as the guy had finished pushing his quad up to the high tide line. As the office walked up, to our surprise, he grabbed the guy who had pushed the quad out of the water and twisted his arm behind his back and cuffed him. By this time a large number of people were watching. Everyone started booing and yelling that this was a wrongful arrest, and the guy had done nothing wrong. This is when things started getting carried away, sand and beer cans started flying into the center where the officer was standing, at this point it was getting hard to see so I stood up to watch, there was another cop in the middle of the crowd at this time as well.-VL
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