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absolutely under no illusions that my experience yesterday getting arrested, as a white woman matters in ~any way~, I’m honestly embrassed that my body was taken out of being useful to the protests so early on, but here are some things of note in general about yesterday:
The cops 100% set that car on fire themselves so that they could start being violent. It happened very suddenly, in a spot where they absolutely would’ve seen someone do it, and it was an old car. Also all the other cars were parked there on purpose so they’d get smashed.
They started with the batons and rubber bullets almost immediately, this was probably about 2:30pm at the latest. No one was being violent towards them. When anyone threw a water bottle or something, everyone shouted back to stop throwing shit
They were the only ones doing any sort of violence, it was completely peaceful. When they went insane with the rubber bullets people fell back & into the Trader Joe’s lot. They came in and set up a line, ready to hurt
Someone said “this is public property” and the cop said “not anymore.” Again, no one was doing a single thing. There was a long stand off. The cops were smirking and laughing at us.
Someone throw a plastic water bottle, a cop caught it and threw it down, and the guns were immediately up. They pointed guns at the people on the roofs across the street.
When they got the order to move us back again, that’s when the cop immediately said “this is your last chance before I hurt you” then he said that I cleary wanted to be arrested, put me in the zip ties and took me across the street
They detained us for hours, I can’t be sure how long because I couldn’t look at my phone for the time obviously, but it was hours & hours, with no answers to when we’d be taken somewhere. No one could pee or drink water. People’s zip ties were way too tight.
We saw all these other cops being brought in on trucks but we couldn’t tell what was going on from there. I couldnt put a hoodie on because they couldn’t take off my ties for a second and replace them because they wanted to be able to put them on as many people as possible later
