Occupy Oakland demonstrators in California Sunday complied with police demands to vacate a lot they had seized in defiance of city orders, officials said.
About 1,000 protesters had marched through downtown Oakland Saturday evening in the rain, then pushed down a chain-link fence surrounding the soggy dirt lot where they declared their intent to stay put despite the miserable Bay Area weather and a lack of shelter.
Sunday morning, dozens of police clad in riot gear massed outside the new encampment in the Uptown neighborhood and told the protesters to clean out the site and get rid of their tents and belongings, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The demonstrators broke camp quickly as police came forward.
After leaving the lot, some of the protesters gathered nearby and debated whether to return to Frank Ogawa Plaza outside City Hall, where officers had previously raided and evicted them.
At the Uptown lot Saturday, a group of residents was outside to protest the protesters, the Oakland (Calif.) Tribune said.
Martin Meeker, a University of California, Berkeley historian, told the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times he and his neighbors wanted Occupy Oakland to remain downtown. "This is a mixed residential-commercial neighborhood with two schools in the vicinity," he said. "I can guarantee you none of the people around here are in the 1 percent."
No arrests were reported during the march even though the city had declared no overnight camping would be allowed.
The march came on the same day 11 Occupy D.C. protesters were arrested in Washington after they staged a sit-in at the Franklin School, a city-owned historical site. Police moved in after three hours to break up the protest, The Washington Post said.