Early Wednesday morning, 2 am PST,  hundreds of San Francisco police (SFPD) arrived at Justin Herman Plaza, the site of Occupy San Francisco.

Occupiers were asleep. They woke up to find they had five minutes to get their belongings and leave the Plaza. The city, like others, declared the encampment a “health hazard” and was using public safety and health as a pretext to shut down the occupation.

Five minutes was not enough time to clean up or collect personal items. It was not enough time to take down many of the tents and save them from being destroyed by dump trucks. And over the course of the next hour, according to an SF Appeal live blog, the situation escalated with motorcycles and additional police arriving to cordon off the area with yellow tape.

Surrounded, about twenty stood their ground and were arrested. Then, thirty more were arrested on Market Street after police asked them to get off the street and they didn’t. And, by 5 am, more had been arrested bringing the total number of arrests to about seventy (two were charged with aggravated assault).

Davey D reported fully functional bikes, entire backpacks with computers and the life savings of homeless people were all thrown away. Male officers searched peaceful female occupiers, which led to complaints of male officers feeling them up. The SFPD also rubbed one occupier’s face in the pavement, and on the UStream they could be seen sneering and laughing about the raid.

SFPD Chief Greg Suhr justified the raid in a media press conference. The decision to raid the encampment, according to KRON4, was made Tuesday afternoon when “negotiations broke down.” There were no longer emails going back and forth between the Department of Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru. [There is nothing currently posted from Occupy SF indicating a “breakdown” in “negotiations” with the city. The Dissenter is waiting for a comment from Occupy SF on this and will post it here when a comment is received.]

Suhr also stated, “This area was declared a public health hazard. It needs to be rehabilitated.”

Take a look at some of these photos? Now, ask yourself: If the police had given occupiers more time to leave, more notice of eviction, would there have been this much “debris” left behind for the city to clean up? (Photos via ericwagner)

Additionally, the Occupy SF raid was another raid where “hazmat-suit-clad DPW workers” arrived to dismantle the camp. Some police wore hazmat suits when they raided Occupy LA last week.

As Sarah Jaffe for AlterNet pointed out, the use of hazmat suits during raids goes along with the idea that occupy camps are breeding grounds for disease and contagion. She interviewed Center for Constitutional Rights’ Michael Ratner, co-author of Hell No! Your Right to Dissent in the 21st Century, who said he had never heard of demonstrations being busted by officers wearing hazmat suits. Ratner also addressed how the protestors were further treated as a “biohazard” by officers who “swabbed” arrestees for DNA. “What kind of business do they have taking DNA from people who were protesting a park? To build up a mug book for trespassers?” The swabbing is likely unconstitutional, Ratner added.

He concluded by noting how the suits make protest seem dirty:

What it does is it paints the protesters as a dangerous infection in america that has to be cut out, it’s like saying they’re a cancer or radioactive, that’s saying they’re not part of our country, not part of our tradition of protest.

In the case of Occupy SF, police were not wearing hazmat suits but the sanitation workers were wearing the suits. It is probably not standard procedure to wear hazmat suits when on the job so the city had them wear the suits because they really believed there could be hazardous disease or contagions in the park. Or, they just wanted to smear Occupy SF with imagery of apocalyptic-looking men in hazmat suits moving in to help “clean” the plaza.

Occupy SF has a rally planned for 12 pm PST at 101 Market Street. Then at 6 pm PST they will rally at Justin Herman Plaza and decide how to move forward.

*Footage from the raid this morning