#OccupyOakland: video shows journalists, legal observers kettling themselves to seek safety, then they're arrested

[Video Link]

Susie Cagle, a journalist and cartoonist who has been covering Occupy Oakland in a manner I can only describe as fierce and tenacious, shot this video just before she was arrested, along with the other journalists and legal observers you see seeking safety. Among the protesters arrested that night (day, really, as it was 1am), 25 women and 78 men.

Susie has been live-tweeting the marches, the raids, the GAs, everything. Reading her Twitter stream has been an invaluable source of news. When she was arrested, her partner took over with details of the inappropriate and abusive treatment that she and other arrestees experienced.

Susie writes:

I was arrested while reporting on Occupy Oakland on Thursday at about 1 am, wearing my press pass. I was detained for 15 hours and ultimately charged with the same misdemeanor as other demonstrators and NLG legal observers: PC 409, failure to leave the scene of a riot. Our arraignment dates are a month from now, and we were explicitly warned against returning to the plaza in the meantime.
You know it’s bad when Occupy Veterans is sending you personal supportive messages. This is a crappy video that I took while trying to run to safety — instead I ran into the kettle.

In a New York Times piece, Oakland Police Chief Howard A. Jordan describes the people arrested on November 3 as “generally anarchists and provocateurs.” But the journalists and volunteer legal observers you see in this video, who were arrested right when Susie's camera shut off, were and are neither.

Susie's blog post about the ordeal is here.

You can buy her comics here, and she has a project under way to graphic-novelize what she has observed at Occupy Oakland.

Related: In case you missed, Quinn Norton (another journalist who has been doing excellent work at the Occupys) has a report of this week at Occupy Oakland.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Guest

to authority, journalists are either stenographers or provocateurs
- blendergasket
  
  That’s one of the better blog comments I’ve seen in my time on the internet.
  - Guest
    
    Thanks! I’ll be here all week.
disillusion

I feel like this will only be able to go on so long before it eventually erupts. It’s not like I’m saying the protestors should start acting violent, but with the continuous pressure from the police that violence is an inevitability, the only difference, as someone mentioned before, is unlike some other countries, we don’t have to raid the government’s weapons caches to get them.

Hopefully it won’t come down to it, but I’m not gonna hold my breath.
- EliZ
  
  This is my reaction as well. If the OPD manages to get rid of the media they’ll have created a ‘no other option’ scenario. With police violence and no one to reveal it the occupiers’ only option will be defensive violence, and that means they’ll get hurt. It’s a horrible situation.
- ffabian
  
  Do you really think having guns is something special and unique to the US? Have a look at most of the countries in Africa, Middle East (including Syria), Asia (former Soviet Union) – guns everywhere. Problem is: the guys in charge have the bigger ones and more of them and the guts to use them.
  
  What’s needed is unity of purpose and a population that supports the uprising (i.e. Libya). And that is whats missing in the US - a significant portion of the population thinks that those Occupiers are commies/hippies/dirty anarchists/terrorists and does not support them.
zebbart

Any theories about why Oakland seems to be going so differently than the rest of the Occupations? Are the police less disciplined or more poorly trained, or are they trying to accomplish something different from the police in other cities.? Or are the Occupiers behaving differently?
- http://www.openbuddha.com/ Al Billings
  
  Oakland is going differently probably because we have a decades long history of police violence here. Oakland PD is operating under a citizen oversight board because of the LAST time they were beating the shit out of protesters a few years back. Then there is the Roughriders thing of rogue cops from the 1990s, etc. etc.
  
  The fact that the city is 1/3 black and if you’re betweeen 18 and 35 and Black, your unemployment rate is actually around 40 or 50% has a role as well.
  
  The Bay Area as a whole is hugely class divided. I moved to Oakland from Seattle in 2006 and was shocked (truly) about how stratified things were here. Outright ghetto not a mile from posh palaces of dot com millionaires or old money. People here, in general, don’t seem to give a shit about anything outside of their own class. The Occupy Oakland movement is actually a nice shift from that as we have all races and most classes coming together in it but let’s not ignore the fact that minorities in Oakland have gotten the economic and literal stick for decades, usually at the hands of the local cops.
- Jake Wasserman
  
  Four factors in the perfect storm:
  1. A new mayor with divided loyalties between the business and activist communities
  2. A police department with a one-week old acting chief and a mix of jaded old guard officers and eager but green recent hires
  3. An vibrant, diverse and powerful activist community that has also been divided/compromised/infiltrated over black bloc/hooligans for years
  4. A wider community of people of color with lifelong experiences of abuse by the police and disconnection (or exploitation) from the city government
  
  So:
  First the mayor gave too much latitude to the police for the first raid (which shouldn’t have been a raid at all)
  Second, the police went in with overwhelming force which was inherently abusive and generated widespread outrage
  Third, the activist community swung into action to make the GAs call for a General Strike an amazing reality… and were so focused on the day that we (yep) made no significant preparation to control the black bloc/hooligans in the late evening
  Fourth, the black bloc/hooligans had plenty of outraged community members with minimal active protest training to incite into cathartic but self-defeating vandalism in the late evening… triggering another round of overwhelming response by the police.
  
  However!
  Although there were plenty of failures by the police, many of them did an admirable job of following their instructions for the night, which were apparently to carefully separate the protest/building invasion/vandalism around 16th Street from the Occupy encampment outside city hall, and keep their and the mayor’s commitment to let the encampment continue (for now).
http://marjaerwin.livejournal.com/ Marja Erwin

“Oakland Police Chief Howard A. Jordan describes the people arrested on November 3 as “generally anarchists and provocateurs.””

So they arrested some for their political views, and they arrested others who were police agents?
- http://twitter.com/twichy twichy
  
  provocateur1922, shortened form of agent provocateur “person hired to make trouble” (1877), from Fr. provocateur, from L. provocator “challenger,” from provocare (see provoke). Originally in ref. to strike-breakers.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OFGXCFFTRWJI2WEIHNPU2D5C44 R

Sounds like Oakland PD doesn’t want anymore coverage… Arresting press and telling them they can’t return until their arraignment. Too bad cell phones exist…
- Guest
  
  Too bad the constitution still exists.
  - Kommkast
    
    Constitution hasn’t mattered for several decades.
    - Lobster
      
      That’s why I put my points into Charisma.
      - Finnagain
        
        You fool! It’s all about dex!
      - Lobster
        
        Dexterity won’t help you against my Pickup Line of Smoothness +3. Make a saving throw against studliness or take 5 swooning damage!
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_OAUXAA362EXWLYVMPJOKLFB5JQ Incipient Madness

What is up with Oakland? Didn’t they learn that this kind of thing is making them look bad and costing the city money? And what end are they achieving? It’s like they want things to get out of control.

They really do need to go take some lessons from police in other cities where they understand that the people’s rights to speech and assembly don’t have to conflict with maintaining public safety and order.

Thanks again HPD. Your performance in the Houston Divestment March yesterday was exampliary
http://www.facebook.com/mollyclendon Margaret Louise Clarke

Was any other Occupation in a position to and decide to close a port? Seen as a ramping up?
- Guest
  
  The port closed itself about 3 hours before they got there. Opened the next morning.
Vnend

“arrested that night (day, really, as it was 1am)”

Night, really. Unless you are talking about the day of the week or the date, ‘day’ vs ‘night’ depends on the sun. And Oakland isn’t far enough north for it to be ‘day’ at 1am.

As for what is happening in Oakland, yeah, the City looked bad there for a while. Then earlier this week the ‘black masks’ stole the spotlight with vandalism and violence. So now the police are back and it sounds like they aren’t taking any chances. Just arrest ‘em all and let the courts sort it out.

It’s a no-win situation for Oakland’s government; first they over-react and get the bad press they deserve for that, then they aren’t ready/don’t react fast enough when someone stops protesting and starts being violent, and now they have swung back to the other extreme, trampling on people’s rights in an attempt to prevent Wednesday from happening again. Now they will get all the appropriately bad press again, and either the cycle will repeat or they will take one of the really stupid options.

What should they do? Maintain a presence, and *ask* the occupy folks to help identify and stop people trying to co-opt the movement with violence. The last I heard, Occupy was supposed to be peaceful. The Occupy folks should turn those cell phones and other cameras on the folks breaking windows and such. They work great when the cops are the ones who are being violent; they’ll work just as well when recording people, provocateurs or random screw-ups.
- http://insight.pinkonbrown.org/ Dr P Fenderson
  
  They don’t need the Occupy people helping them single out the violent “anarchists and provocateurs”. They have enough undercover cops in the crowd to do that on their own.
  
  Proof: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrvMzqopHH0
millie fink

“arrested that night (day, really, as it was 1am)”

Night, really. Unless you are talking about the day of the week or the date, ‘day’ vs ‘night’ depends on the sun. And Oakland isn’t far enough north for it to be ‘day’ at 1am.

Any time it’s dark out is “nighttime,” far as I’m concerned. And more to the point, I suspect the OPD act when it’s dark in order to avoid clear video footage of abuse.
- http://twitter.com/twichy twichy
  
  Any time it’s dark out is “nighttime”…
  
  December 20th, 7:30 in the am, nighttime?
  - millie fink
    
    Hmm. Touche.
  - awjt
    
    Yes.
    
    “Last night I was out all freaking night, and I didn’t get to bed till 8am when it was still dark out. Man, what a night.”
mark

Am I alone in not seeing any of that in the video?
- tylerkaraszewski
  
  Well it depends, is standing in a doorway “kettling”? It does seem they were being arrested at the end.
  - pimlottc
    
    Yeah, I’m confused, how does one kettle themselves?
    - BarBarSeven
      
      They were running for shelter, cornered in a doorway, the police ignored the fact that the majority of them were reporters & legal observers, did not make any effort to move them out of that doorway to clear them, and instead arrested them all.
      
      And Oakland is going so badly the same way (might seem like a stretch, but I believe it’s apt) that Syria & Libya have been going badly in the mid-east “Arab Spring.” Authorities in some areas are so used to cracking heads as the baseline level of control they have completely forgotten that in some cases it makes the situation worse & spiral out of control.
      
      Also @boingboing-49369ec618863ebb662b41c7ea1b6dd1:disqus read up on Oakland’s police problems here:
      http://www.policeone.com/police-products/communications/crisis-communications/articles/1688502-Oakland-Calif-brass-We-cant-arrest-our-way-out-of-crime-problems/
      - Keisar Betancourt
        
        anything is probably cause and everyone is always committing a crime. you just have to be a cop to see it that way.
Teller

The longer it goes on, the shorter it will last. Mayor Quan’s going to order it closed.
Apres Jean, le deluge.
tylerkaraszewski

I am skeptical of anything said by someone who thinks 1am (in November in California) is during the day.
ridestowe

the fact that he used the word ‘generally’ to describe how they went about choosing who to arrest makes my head hurt. 2 people throw rocks? better arrest the other 98 people near them
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_T7KQANDZOYXO4ULKKYM7VAX5CM jim b

you will notice again with the flash bang grenades. The Journalists were provocative because they were taking pictures and observing the actions of the police. Letting people know that others are fighting back is a serious danger to the country and to the city of Oakland. The mayor of Oakland knows well enough that if people know how the police are carrying out her orders, then she will have to spend a great deal more money to get re-elected. Again with the flash bang grenades!!!
EliZ

How the hell can this happen in modern America? Label a protest a riot and try to black out the coverage? How can scum like this have a place in public ‘service’?

They should all be sacked, then tarred and feathered.
flagler23

The abuses by police in one city, dealing with an ever changing group of people that is hard to predict has nothing at all to do with the issues and grievances that the Occupy movement has coalesced around. The conflict in Oakland is now an animal of its own, nothing at all to do with ideology, and only distracts from the message. It’s a disservice to the credibility and rationale of the movement to conflate the over-stepping of a city trying to maintain physical order (a very idiosyncratic phenomenon consciously organized) with the inequities of an institutional structure that is shaped by undirected collective interests of the wealthy. The two are not the same. As much as you’d like to believe that Oakland is a battleground for the movement, that couldn’t be farther from truth.
- artaxerxes
  
  I have to disagree with your assertion that the situation in Oakland “has nothing at all to do with the issues and grievances that the Occupy movement has coalesced around.” On the contrary, the situation in Oakland is so tense and violent because its been suffering for decades from many of the inequities and injustices that Occupy is addressing. It’s a perfect illustration of the result of the many corrupt and unjust practices that the Occupy Movement seeks to change.
  
  Al Billing perfectly described the roots of the situation in Oakland, so I won’t attempt to improve on his eloquent and accurate description. Instead, here are some examples of how many of the grievances of the Occupy Movement have made the situation in Oakland so tense so quickly.
  
  Manufacturing and military jobs disappeared or were re-located over a few decades. The same period saw the decimation of social programs. The once-thriving black population was hardest hit by these economic changes.
  
  Police brutality has been a fact of life for all black and brown people, particularly young men, since before I experienced it first-hand in the early 80s.
  
  The “War on Drugs” has disproportionately targeted and disenfranchised the same population, generating revenue for the government and keeping the for-profit prison industry fat and healthy. Minor drug charges result in unusually harsh sentences which trap the offenders in the Justice system from which it is practically impossible to escape.
  
  The courts have a long history of denying justice to specific populations in Oakland, particularly in respect to police brutality. Decades of beatings and murders by police officers have gone unpunished. People call for change and nothing ever happens. The paid vacations and slaps on the wrist as punishment for murder have become so well-known throughout the country that they’ve become internet memes.
  
  The police protect the interests of corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the population. In fact, the police financially enrich these entities by providing the raw materials that the for-profit prison industry and the state need in order to assure continuing profits and maintain the political and economic status quo.
  
  These are exactly the problems that Occupy is addressing. You are correct in your assertion that these grievances do not constitute the entire program of the Occupy Movement, but they are most certainly critical issues for Occupy. Oakland’s boiling right now because the soup’s been simmering for years. And it’s a great example of what many of our cities will look like if we refuse to address the inequities that create these problems.
  - occamvanrijn
    
    Not to offend, but I find flagler23′s explanation a lot clearer and more parsimonious than yours. I can name any number of urban centers that have recently lost manufacturing jobs, contain large impoverished minority groups, have less than stellar police records, and are hard-hit by the war on drugs–New York springs to mind. Protests haven’t been particularly hard-hit in other places, but Oakland has been pretty brutal.
    
    If the police are the lapdog of wealthy interests and are putting down the protests to silence these dangerous ideologues, why would they restrict their crackdown to Oakland? Why not hit a larger protest in a more symbolic location? Or could it be that police regard the protests as a general nuisance and–in cities where they’re given too much leeway or are staffed by known offenders–try some fairly idiotic and underhanded tactics to get them out of their way?
lavardera

Nice – journalists arrested and declared criminals. Another one to check off our death of democracy bucket list.
Cowicide

Oakland Police Chief Howard A. Jordan is generally a liar.
Daemonworks

Er… I’m pretty sure that Oakland isn’t far enough from the equator to be “day” at 1am.
D Wyatt

I KNOW EXACTLY WHY OAKLAND IS GOING SO POORLY.

Its an argument I keep having with people. Some people think police are great and there to help, others see them as egotistical self indulging scoundrels who would rather escalate situations than make them better. It boils down to LOCATION. Good areas have mostly decent police, bad areas have mostly bad police, its a fact and thats why people have such varying ideas on what duty police perform these days.

So in conclusion, Oakland has a history of bad cops and its a bad area so this is exactly what someone should expect from them. Its not right, but its a fact and it needs correcting in ALL inner cities and downtrodden areas.
MrWednesday7

Ooh, this puts me into a plus. Seriously, uncontactble Disqus why did I have 2 likes and -5 comments. No help from BB either.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  You’ve got at least a dozen comments since we switched to Disqus. What happened when you tried to contact them?
  - MrWednesday7
    
    Zilch, uncontactable, unless there’s a way that you know.
    - MrWednesday7
      
      Or you could PM me with a solution, ta.
      - Antinous / Moderator
        
        I’ll see if I can get in touch with the embassy.
- geekandwife
  
  I have a similar issue here on boingboing, i show 0 comments and 0 likes, but have clearly commented
  - MrWednesday7
    
    Let’s see if the Moderators can sort this. No way to contact Disqus that I know of.
    - geekandwife
      
      I dont think the issue is on Disqus’s end. When i view my profile on their site, it shows my comments, its just on boingboing it shows as 0.
- awjt
  
  Whenever I see a post from you, I unlike it. That explains why you are in a deficit.
  - MrWednesday7
    
    Thanks that’s really helpful.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_K4OD3PGPBPOBYNP5HSJYFH7RBY FreedomOrDeath

I think it’s safe to say they weren’t Provocateurs, but how do you know none of them are anarchists? Did you ask them? Or did you just fall for the Big Lie that the corporate media keeps selling claiming that all the Bad Protestors ™ – and only the Bad Protesters – are Anarchists?

Anarchists are everywhere. We are community gardeners and food not bombs activists who feed the homeless, we are school teachers and office workers and manual laborers and college professors and students and immigrants and more and the vast majority of use are not in the habit of breaking things for fun. At #OWS you’re more likely to meet anarchists talking to the facilitators or stack keepers or kitchen volunteers or the cleanup crew then you are by talking to the crusty punks who wear anarchy patches for fashion but have no idea who Proudhon or Kropotkin or Goldman or Malatesta were.

You may think you’re helping the movement but by repeating this nonsense you’re reinforcing the state by implying first that since these folks weren’t smashing things they obviously must not be anarchists and then tacitly agreeing to the police chiefs implication that if they WERE Anarchists they’d deserve to be arrested. Shame on you.
TokenCapitalist

Yeah, the guy with the shield was using it for peaceful protests….
- http://www.angrycrank.com woland
  
  Yeah! It’s not like anyone protesting in Oakland got shot in the head or anything!
Finnagain

In Tulsa, they would have just pepper sprayed them for good measure.

http://normantranscript.com/headlines/x1194246882/Tulsa-police-arrest-protesters

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njjQ_nitC2Y

This is State terrorism, pure and simple.
Leafworth

The Oakland Occupy Movement could try and get themselves all arrested, swamp the local legal system, and gather legitimately at the courthouse? It seems the Oakland PD is all too willing to help with such a tactic if they wanted to try it. I wouldn’t want to be the guy or gal at the mayor’s office that gets the bills for all this crap.
dataninja

There’s a difference between reporting something and being part of it.

Took me about 2 seconds to look at her tweet log and see she’s not reporting but being a part of it.

If you’re going to argue she’s just reporting, look at the detail she’s tweeting and the information about future meetings she’s tweeting. That’s hardly passive reporting, that’s spreading information about where people can go and what they can do. She’s orginazing plain and simple.
m0nkyman

The nerve of a reporter spreading information. Unheard of.

You realize that is their job. It’s also why they get shot by dictatorial regimes.

The idea that reporting is passive is wrong.
- occamvanrijn
  
  It looks more like she was arrested for still being at the protests; the cops seem to think her presence at what they had declared a riot area was the real problem. It’s always a shame when a reporter is prevented from doing their job, but this doesn’t seem like a calculated attempt to suppress journalism.
Vnend

The other day I commented on the Anonymous vs Zetas thread. When I checked back later, Disqus had me with 0 comments and 924 likes. Yes, I got a screen shot (“silent_but_likable”).

Disqus is showing up at a lot of sites. I hope they are paying you for testing their beta-ware for them.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Apparently, it’s a known problem which has to be hand-fixed for now.
Cowicide

One blessing for boing boing readers is that threads like these just make me shut the hell up and click the crap out of that “Like” button.

I’m proud and honored to see so many brilliant people on the side of OWS who not only think critically, but also balance their thinking with their heart and conscience.

I wish there was this following option on Boing Boing!
http://www.kmoser.com kmoser

I guess the message here is to never put yourself in a position where you can’t get away from the police before they attempt to arrest you. Of course, if you manage to evade the police attempting to arrest you they’ll charge you with…wait for it…evading arrest. So you’re screwed either way.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_HXAIYHQKEUZERAIHKULT7GKU64 Gold Man-Sacks

Thank goodness the tea baggers weren’t kettling themselves.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Thank goodness the tea baggers weren’t kettling themselves.
  
  They got tired of listening to the whistling and people yelling ‘Hey, sugar’.
kichigaijin

I wonder what would happen if all other Occupy groups across the nation all converged on Oakland in an ultimate showing of solidarity.
elix

Waiting for the police apologists to come out in THIS thread, since they’ve been visiting the others frequently.

…anyone? Well? Come on, we don’t have tasers in here, it’s only the Internet.
http://twitter.com/frederikvdz Frederik

Doesn’t anybody ever join the police to HELP and PROTECT people anymore? Rather then “hey, lets opress and abuse people, that’ll be fun!”
http://twitter.com/brian_only bb

@occamvanrijn It also may help that Oakland has already birthed a populist movement in the past that was deemed extremely dangerous and summarily decimated, read Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. They may be a tad jumpy.Also the building of the Bay Bridges and post war industry drew and supported an affluent minority population that was uncommon elsewhere.
gijoel

Some how I can’t help but think of the “ideas are bullet proof” scene from V for vendetta.
- http://www.nathanhornby.com/ Nathan Hornby
  
  I’m just waiting for the media to turn on the protesters and label them as terrorists and ultimately paint them as the bad guys while the police and government use violence to crack down on citizens expressing their civil rights. Then of course the police will make a mistake, go too far, and attack a member of the public that causes universal outrage.
  
  Oh, wait… that happened already? I hope someone’s keeping an eye on the Houses of Parliament.
Manny

I just looked at a bunch of pictures from Watts in 1965. Repaint some civilians white and cover them with a haze of gasses, and they would look a lot like Oakland now.

http://ocprogressive.com/?p=667

http://ziegfeldgirl.multiply.com/photos/photo/46/87

When I was a kid, my parents had an edition of the official report on the Watts riot and the section titled “Gang Violence” had this picture on the section’s cover page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wattsriots-policearrest-loc.jpg . I see only one gang in that picture.
- Teller
  
  Hardly. 34 dead, hundreds injured, gunfire, looting, arson, National Guard. I fail to see the comparison btw a demonstration in Oakland and a riot beginning in Watts, other than a photo of police physically restraining a man, of which there are thousands and thousands of pictures of cops doing that. Watts was some serious, deadly mayhem. Oakland ain’t that. But maybe I’m missing the thought.