jonny (good kind)Students for divestment at #UCIrvine have taken a building and riot cops are staging
https://ktla.com/news/local-news/pro-palestinian-protesters-occupy-building-at-u-c-irvine/
edit: unclear whether riot cops have live ammo or just rubber bullets
that sure looks like a rifle to me: https://x.com/LADimeStore/status/1790874462755410302
They're streaming here: https://www.instagram.com/ucidivest/live/17858444778123347
arrests have started
i'm fucking scared for them, the crowd is not ready and the people in the building have not had any time to set up barricades or exit routes
Another stream: https://www.instagram.com/sjp.uci/live/17959628564765275
ktla is live in a chopper: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/pro-palestinian-protesters-occupy-building-at-u-c-irvine/
they have enough cops there to kettle the whole area, this is going to be disgusting.
cops dismantling the few barricades that do exist, only about a dozen people holding a line thats already been broken, insta just cut the live streams
cops are cutting off the occupied building from the plaza outside it, most people are in the plaza, so a dozen are now totally on their own and people seem to be barricading them in from the back to they can't fall back and rejoin the others. ugh i am so scared for these students
cops have reached the building and are entering the second floor
looks like some people in the building left out the first floor and rejoined the crowd while the cops went up the second floor. smart. take building, cops respond, if you can't hold it escape, take another building, repeat.
another chopper stream, KTLA left to refuel.
edit: nvm this got cut, not sure if there is an active chopper stream
edit2: ktla is back: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/pro-palestinian-protesters-occupy-building-at-u-c-irvine/
edit3: they finally cut back to the anchors and are now cycling back through old footage
i've heard people say that UC Irvine's campus was laid out to prevent demonstrations and occupations and it sure looks like it right now. the camp area is not an easily defensible space at all, all sorts of irregular cutouts for trees so hard to make a line at a chokepoint.
Robert Cassidy@jonny the campus was laid out years prior to the Vietnam war movement, so anything anti-protest is pretty accidental. I mean there’s an enormous park in the middle of campus we used to ask encampments to move to in the past to not block campus activities. Not sure what led to this location - it’s never been used for encampments before but has a bit better pedestrian flow than near admin which is the natural place to set up.