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.
