Photos/video: Andrew Goff

UPDATE:

• (PHOTOS) Too Many Photos From Saturday’s ‘No Kings’ Protest in Eureka

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UPDATE, 2:10 p.m.: Fifth Street has just reopened at the courthouse, as the scheduled end time for the massive anti-Trump “No Kings” protest in downtown Eureka this morning has passed.

We’ll make a very rough guess and say that perhaps 2,000 people came out for the demonstration. At the beginning, they were divided between Madaket Plaza, where there were a series of speeches, and downtown at the Courthouse near the corner of Fifth and I.

Things got a little tricky when some of the people from the Madaket marched to the courthouse down the middle of Fifth Street. For a while they were blocking traffic, and the people at the Courthouse took that as a cue to escape from the confines of the crowded sidewalk onto the streets. At that point, the Eureka police made the decision to close the street to traffic.

Shortly after this, an officer parked with his cruiser across the street started to receive some abuse from a couple of protesters. They shouted at him to clear the streets so that traffic could come through, theorizing that the police were trying to keep people from seeing the demonstration.

A woman within earshot protested that she wanted to follow the law.

The vast majority of the demonstrators seemed to be on the woman’s side. Though Fifth Street had been officially closed and the block in front of the courthouse was now open ground for pedestrians, they seemed willing to follow the cops’ lead when it came to safety issues.

A couple of blocks away, Eureka Police Chief Brian Stephens said that once there were a mass of pedestrians in the street alongside traffic, they had to shut down the road for safety purposes. He said that protest marshals were doing what they could, but had temporarily lost control. 

Meanwhile, a breakaway group of perhaps 100 people continued to march around the Old Town area in the middle of the streets, followed by a police retinue. They paused in front of the police station at Sixth and C for a while to chant insults at the cops. Later they marched up and down I Street.

At 2 p.m., most of the protesters went home, or elsewhere, and the road was reopened shortly thereafter.

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ORIGINAL POST:

Downtown Eureka’s Fifth Street is currently closed near the Humboldt County Courthouse as well over a thousand people showed up for today’s “No Kings” protest.

We’ll have more from the scene soon, but you may want to take side streets if you’re just passing through.