Several reporters at the scene described being shoved and manhandled by hostile police.
But he seemed to miss the point that the city's minority communities were in a state of chronic fear about careless or hostile police tactics.
Amid fears of violence in the neighborhood, police officials ordered the officers out of the mosque and apologized to the mosque's leaders, who said they believed they were being invaded by a hostile police force.
Then the monsoon started…' Forty years ago today, 700 men and women braved hostile police and the missile-throwing public to tell the world they were not ashamed to be gay.
The issue has been posed most starkly in Oakland, where a militant faction is openly courting conflict with a hostile police department, undermining public support and leading to sharp ideological divides.
His last sentence to the crowd before he swung out on the first Selma march, in defiance of a court injunction and in the teeth of a hostile police force, was this: "I would rather die today on the highways of Alabama than make a butchery of my own conscience".
The reporting challenges ranged from hostile police officers to the difficulty of convincing first-rate translators to join me in a setting rife with malaria and TB to the fact that many slum-dwellers had never spoken of their lives in detail, even to members of their families.
He told Margaret Thatcher in October 1981 that the Brixton riots that summer were "not pre-planned but the spontaneous welling-up of the feelings of angry young men, most of whom were black, against what they saw as a hostile police force".
However, if I had discovered the body of my murdered flatmate, then been badgered for hours by hostile police insisting they could prove I had been there, and wanting to know who was this Lumumba whom I'd texted "See you later" – well, I'm not certain I would have resisted the temptation to confirm what they wished to hear, then retract it hours later.
He blames land enclosures, hunters and hostile police.
