Seems like Berkley has been that way for many generations.
Saw a lot of that when I lived in Seattle. When WTO was in town, there were daily riots, with my office right in the middle of many of the marches. My coworkers got caught in a cloud of tear gas. They were in an open air parking garage next to our office and watching the "festivities" from above. Well, things got rowdy, a few people dressed in turtles tried to rush the line, they got floored, so on and so forth and then tear gas came out. I was still in my office, but I saw the white cloud rise and head to the garage. Next thing I see, my coworkers all scattering like they were in the crowd down below.

I was maybe 23-24 at the time. No interest in politics and stayed out of that stuff. Seattle had a big counter-culture thing starting and you would get people going down Broadway, asking if others wanted to head to downtown to protest. Didn't really matter what and seemed like mostly a reason to start shit, chaos, etc. Come to find out, much of these people travel from city to city, looking for stuff to "protest" and generally just start shit. In this case, many of the shit stirrers were arrested and many were from CA.
Seems like so many are easily spurned to protest this, protest that. Well, maybe many of those things are needed to be protested against, but the hypocrisy seems to obvious to people who seem to have even a little common sense. If many of these liberals/left/counter-culture folks spent as much time taking action to help things, maybe things would have a positive impact. Tell me how going about flipping cars and setting them on fire effects change? Doesn't make you a revolutionary or advocate for anything. Just makes you an asshole.