Belatedly, a growing number of embarrassed Occupy Oakland protesters are starting to vent against the violence and vandalism of the thugs who've hitchhiked on to their cause and have come near to dominating it.

In a cheap novel, the real provocateurs in last Saturday's riots would turn out (in the final chapters) to be a cadre of infiltrators hired by Wall Street or some shadowy right wing cabal to discredit the Occupy movement.

That's a stretch even for a novel, but the real events amount to nearly the same thing.

The potential for mischief was always there in a movement with no clearly defined leadership, no distinct goals and thus no real accountability.

Last Saturday in Oakland, hundreds joined a march to take over the shuttered Kaiser Convention Center without knowing where they were being led or who was leading them.

When they were stopped, the vandals blamed the ensuing damage on the cops: the police were responsible for trashing the City Hall lobby, the burning of the American flag, the invasion of the YMCA. And as usual, the media reported it all in the conventional he-said-she-said manner.

No doubt the cops weren't all blameless. It's hard to imagine how a severely understaffed, overstressed and demoralized police force could become a model of efficient and humane crowd control and law enforcement.

Indeed it's hard to imagine how in the present circumstances anyone would want to be a cop in Oakland at all. Even as the cops were struggling to control the anarchy on the streets, a federal judge was threatening to put the whole OPD in the hands of a receiver for failure to correct misdeeds done years ago. But there are lots of signs that the pied pipers of this march were spoiling for a fight – had prepared for it with shields, Mace and other weapons – and welcomed it.

Forty years ago, during a Vietnam War protest march in New York City, a bunch of hard hat construction workers beat up demonstrators, many of them college students, whom they considered privileged spoiled brats who didn't know how lucky they were. On the streets of Oakland last week, it was hard not to detect at least a similar whiff of class resentment.

Underlying it all is a question dating back to the start of the Oakland demonstrations last fall: Why Oakland, with its high crime rate? Why single out a struggling working class community that's 28 percent African American, 26 percent white, 25 percent Latino, and 18 percent Asian and thus a model of California's diversity? Oakland, whose unemployment rate is among the highest in the state, is hardly an exemplary residence of the richest 1 percent. Is it just because downtown Oakland is at the hub of the Bay Area's major public transit system, convenient to the street people of Berkeley and the middle class suburbanites of the East Bay?

Why close the port, one of the city's few major sources of income and a source of jobs to hundreds of truckers, dockers and countless other blue-collar workers? Why trash little downtown shops and eateries as some did last fall? These surely are not the 1 percent symbolized by Wall Street. Why shut down the airport, as some are now threatening to do? What message is being conveyed there? How is Oakland preferable to Piedmont or Newport Beach where the rich actually live?

It may be true that Occupy Wall Street has generated attention, as never before, to the nation's intolerable economic inequality – a gap in both wealth and opportunity that's been growing for some forty years. It may be that suddenly many more of us are talking about economic class, downward mobility and poverty rather than deficits. It's hard to understand how that's been missed by so many, including the media, for so long.

But in Oakland – and maybe elsewhere – Occupy, lacking a defined agenda, has become more about itself than about the nation's paralyzing economic inefficiency and injustice. It's thus made itself an inviting target for the hijacking. Meanwhile the city has been left even more than usual to the mercy of the ordinary thugs who regularly prey on it. Oakland is not the enemy. Nor is it the cops, or city hall, or Jean Quan, Oakland's fumbling mayor. Ironically, it may be the cops, collecting thousands in overtime, who may be the biggest beneficiaries of the mayhem.

The demonstrators' anger is understandable, but the more intense it is, the more carefully it has to be directed. It's encouraging that a growing number of Occupy supporters are now expressing their dismay with what's been done in their name. Anarchy and mayhem are not what they signed up for.

But if they're still committed to the real cause, they'll have to recapture it from the hoodlums who now control it. Nice, liberal do-your-own-thing tolerance won't do.

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Peter Schrag, a retired editorial page editor of The Bee, writes frequently on California issues.

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