chriscantwell:

Occupy Protester Arrested on Lynching Charges

According to LAist, an Occupy protester has been arrested on lynching charges. It sounds worse than it is—a lynching charge is a felony attempt to remove someone from police custody during a riot. 

But how absolutely ridiculous is this? This protest was on my street last Thursday. Indeed, I kind of made a joke about it being really loud, because it seemed mostly harmless. Now I’m not laughing. This was a relatively small, very quick, and peaceful protest. They came down Spring Street, stopped in the middle of the road, and chanted and drummed for about three minutes, if that. From our window, we counted maybe four cars that couldn’t get down the street in that amount of time. Four. The protesters marched back up Spring Street as police came and ordered them onto the sidewalks. Now, there were a lot of protesters, so it might have been a little difficult for them all to get on the sidewalk immediately, especially considering all the people down here for Art Walk at the time. I’d like to also point out that people are in the street all the time on Spring and Main during Art Walk. This isn’t an uncommon thing that the cops aren’t used to.

We watched this happen, and from where we were we thought it was over. Demonstration disbursed by its own accord. But the cops took it upon themselves to respond as if this were a riot? Where was the riot? It wasn’t on Spring Street. And now this UCLA masters student who is working on getting an urban teaching degree—who works as a substitute teacher in LA—is booked on a felony charge of lynching, facing 50K bail. 

So stupid.