by Various
I wasn’t the only one who’d gotten the word. By the time the ferry arrived, there were twenty or so of us in a little knot. Every time someone found something interesting—a video or a pic, a choice tweet—we’d all crowd in closer to watch. Just as the ferry pulled in and we shuffled onboard with the rest of the crowd, I found a link to a live feed from a quadcopter over the scene. The angle was a familiar one to me. Even with all the dropouts and jitter, the video was riveting. There was the crowd, big, writhing, like the inside of a beehive or an aerial view of a huge square dance, depending on your point of view and whether you thought of protests as joyous celebrations of free spirit or as mindless drones following all-powerful leaders.
Around the edges of the protest were dots with horizontal lines ahead of them. These were the Oakland PD, suited and booted in their riot gear, carrying their shields ahead of them. The drone video was sharp enough to pick out the baton each one carried, even on a little phone screen. These cops formed lines with buses behind them, unmoving and ruler-straight. The contrast couldn’t have been sharper: the milling, organic, disorganized movements of the protesters, and the slashing lines of the cops.
Then something happened. It wasn’t clear at the time, but when I watched it later, I could see where it started. A cop on the eastern perimeter stepped forward and slashed down with his baton. Down went a woman in a red head-kerchief, nothing else visible from the top-down view at first, then she was lying on the ground, and was a tangle of grey jeans and a white OAKLAND sweatshirt and white sneakers and brown skin.
Here’s what you see next, if you advance the video one frame at a time. The woman—her name was Trisha Jackson, and she was an Honor Roll sophomore at McClymonds High, and this was her first demonstration—goes down. Four other protesters go to her aid, bringing her away from the cops. One of them, another woman, gestures at the cop, who stands motionless. There’s sound, but it’s undifferentiated, a kind of crowd noise mixed with the wind hitting the mic and the whir of the drone’s propellers.
The cop continues to stand motionless. The camera is sharp enough to pick out the red stain spreading out on Trisha Jackson’s OAKLAND sweatshirt, the red blood staining the hands of the protesters who are trying to elevate her feet, turn her on her side into the recovery position, all the first aid stuff you learn in scouts or summer camp CPR.
Seen from overhead, the crowd seemed to ripple, like a wave had pushed through it. That was the general motion of people moving to see what the fuss was about. Many of them stopped around Trisha, forming a protective reef around her, and the remaining force of the wave was pushed around the reef, up toward the police. When I try to imagine what that looks like from the police’s point of view, it’s kind of scary. Imagine standing there, all armored up and armed to the teeth, facing thousands of people who are pissed as hell, and then, without any warning (at least if you missed the cop who lashed out at Trisha), they all start to push and shove and squirm toward you.
The police line rippled a couple of times, the cops all rocking their weight back into their back feet and then forward again, shifting to present their bodies side-on to the crowd, like fencers trying offer a smaller attack surface to their opponents. From above, the horizontal lines of the shields became diagonal slashes as they tightened the line. The crowd was still pushing around Trisha and her semicircular human shoal. Some of the people at the front of the wave were now practically on top of the police line, and, realizing this, they turned around and pushed backwards, against the tide of humanity. There’s about ten frames of video when you can actually see the crowd responding to the push-back, leaning back the way they’d come like seaweed in a current. Everything gets very compressed as the push from the back and the lesser push from the front meet, and then, very quickly, the crowd boils toward the police line.
But the police line isn’t a line anymore. It’s broken into a hundred individual policemen, each one with shield and club, shuffle-stepping forward, viciously pushing the protesters back toward the middle of the demonstration. When someone nearly tripped over the still-prone figure of Trisha Jackson, the people who’d been taking care of her seemed to look around and take stock of things, and a moment later she was up off the pavement, being held up above their heads crowd-surfing as the police pushed the line forward.
A few people couldn’t get out of the way of the advancing police skirmish in time. These people took hard baton hits that left them curled up on the ground behind the advancing squadron, to be zip-tied in plastic cuffs and hauled off by more officers behind the skirmish line. But the majority of protesters crushed back, and now the police line on the opposite side of the protest was advancing, too, forcing the body of the protest back toward the first line. Caught between the two lines, protesters were beaten and trampled, panicked and stampeded. Then, because the chaos wasn’t terrible enough, the police strapped on gas masks and a moment later, cannisters of tear-gas were lobbed into the crowd.
The first cannister caught a protester in the head and he went down like a sack of potatoes. Another protester, shirt pulled up over his face, bent down to drag the unconscious man away from the hissing, gassing cannister, but only made it five steps before collapsing in a coughing fit. A couple of times protesters caught up the cannisters and lobbed them back over the police lines. Most of the cannisters went straight into the crowd, though, and churned the existing chaos into full-blown panic. There was nowhere for the protesters to go now. The middle of the crowd was a hissing cauldron of toxic gas. The edges of the crowd were a vicious line of crashing batons wielded by masked and helmeted Oakland PD riot cops in full fury.
As we watched this from the ferry, we found ourselves shouting and moaning with the protesters. The phone’s speaker was playing horrible screams now, sounds that we could pick out over the other noises. They must have been loud. The sun was bright and hot, but the wind was cold, and it found its way into the gaps between my clothes, slithering over my skin and bringing up goose pimples. I was breathing hard through my nose, every breath a bouquet of salt air and diesel from the groaning ferry engines.
Ange was in that crowd.
The police lines continued to force their way in. This was a kettle, a compressed blocking-in of the protest, and as the lines tightened, we saw people slipping away at the gaps between them. Then the lines joined up and solidified. The kettle was complete. The protesters were fenced in. They didn’t look like a square dance anymore. There wasn’t enough room for that kind of random motion. Now they were crammed together so closely that no one could take more than half a step in any direction. The only breaks in the crowd were the injured and those who were caring for them.
Someone else had been reading tweets from those on the ground—the ones in the kettle and the ones who’d gotten away.
“The police are using a loudspeaker to tell them that they’ll all be searched and have their IDs run before they’re allowed to go.”
I groaned. I knew this drill. Every phone would be cloned, all the IDs run, and anyone with any prior offenses or outstanding warrants would be brought to jail. Technically, Ange had a prior offense—she’d been arrested by the DHS and held in their illegal camp on Treasure Island during the Xnet days. The prosecutor had dropped the charges eventually, but I was sure the OPD would still be able to find that arrest in their records. Who the hell knew what her sheet looked like? Maybe it just said “Arrested by federal agents for terrorism-related offenses” and nothing else—nothing about how she’d been unconditionally discharged, and all the charges dropped. That’d be just great.
I’d been speed-dialling her over and over again through all of this, but she hadn’t answered. Maybe her phone was broken, or out of battery, or smashed. Or maybe she was one of the unconscious ones. Or maybe she’d been arrested and her phone had been confiscated. If that’s what it had come to, they were in for a surprise. Ange’s phone would wipe itself after three unsuccessful password attempts, and its memory was encrypted. It was a standard Androi
d build we’d cooked up at Occupy Seneca and helped everyone get running on their phones, except for the people who were stuck in Apple jail, with iPhones that were illegal to load your own software onto.
The ferry finished the crossing and the sailors did their thing with the ropes, tossing them and tying them off and all of that nautical stuff that so many of us had gotten used to while the Bay Bridge was being rebuilt. The gangplank crashed down with a clang that I felt through the soles of my boots. It was only then that I looked around. And froze.
There was a—a what, a squadron? A platoon? Something military, anyway—of armored Oakland PD riot cops standing at the end of the gangplank. They were shoulder to shoulder, visors down, batons in hand. The girl whose phone I’d been staring into, watching the drone feed, hit her video-camera button and swung the phone up to record the cops. A second later, there were dozens of cameras pointing at the officers.
Nobody moved to get off the boat. The cops hadn’t told us we weren’t allowed to, but they didn’t need to. A baton in a gloved hand sends a powerful message.
I became aware of a voice behind me. “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me.” It was an old woman, Chinese, pulling an old man along behind her by the hand. She gave me a prod in the ribs. “Excuse me.” She followed up by giving me a filthy look, the kind of look I usually give to dopes who stop at the tops of moving escalators while the people pile up behind them.
She took one look at the cops and clucked her tongue impatiently. “Well?” she said. “Come on, some of us have places to be. Out of the way.”
The riot visors were dark and reflected back most of the bright afternoon sunlight, but I swear I saw the front line of cops grin. I was grinning too. A second before, it felt like these guys were about to charge, batons high. Now they were visibly relaxing.
The cops shifted their weight back, then as a group shuffled backward to open up a space in their line. Now they almost looked like a hedge, or an honor guard. The old lady shuffled down the gangplank, dragging her husband, who’d started muttering irritably, and we followed them, along with the rest of the passengers. The phones were still rolling, still shooting video. A bunch of them would be streaming that video to safe online repositories so that it wouldn’t matter if someone seized the camera and erased its memory.
We set off for Occupy.
We couldn’t get very close. Long before we reached the horrible “smooth transition,” we knew from the tweets and the overhead feeds—there were six drones in the sky now, circling, plus all the news-drones that were going out to cable TV—that there was no way to reach the kettle. The cops had established a kind of demilitarized zone between the rest of Oakland and the kettle. Only cops and emergency services types could get past the sawhorses and temporary fences.
But there was something else we knew before we got to the kettle: we’d become an army. Occupy Seneca had stood for more than a month, and we’d had thousands and thousands of visitors in that time. I didn’t know how many, but one of the Occupy data scientists who hung out around the camp had ballparked it at about 40,000 people. There were at least that many in the streets that night, all headed for the kettle. The word of the demonstration had raced around the network of occupiers, supporters, rebuilders and well-wishers around Oakland and the whole Bay Area,.
We’d had experience with kettles in the Bay Area before, the big ones they’d thrown up around the debt-relief demonstrations at the Civic Center. The storm of bad publicity from those times still lingered, and no one at City Hall in San Francisco wanted to preside over any more kettles for the foreseeable future. But this was Oakland, which played by its own rules. Oakland was a city that had been at war with its police force since the previous century, and no one seemed to think that peace was coming anytime soon.
By the time we hit the police barricades, we were all tuned into Sukey, the mobile app that mapped kettles by taking in photos, tweets, texts, and other input from protesters on the ground and gave advice on how and where to escape them. The cool thing about Sukey was that it didn’t require everyone to be tuned into it in order for it to work—so long as there was someone shouting “Go west, there’s no cops that way,” within earshot, the whole crowd could benefit from it.
Of course, Sukey was only as good as the input it got. The Sukey volunteers out on the wide Internet did their best to classify the stuff that came in from the field, but sometimes it went a bit wrong—mostly in the form of false alarms. So every now and again, the rumors would race through the part of the crowd I was in, and we’d crush one way and then the other, trying to get away from a kettle that never appeared. Of course, it was possible that the reason the kettles never appeared is that whenever the cops moved to flank us, we changed shape so that they couldn’t make it stick. No way to tell.
I’ve spent a lot of time in big crowds over the years, and on a tension scale of one to ten, this one was probably about an eight. The voices were tight and strained, and there was angry shouting now and again, especially from those right up against the barricades. Drones kept taking off and landing from the crowd as their tiny battery packs were drained dry and swapped out, and from them, we got a good look at the action inside the kettle. Things had gotten sweaty in there, with exhausted people sitting or lying around, crushed together with the wounded. People called out to the drones for water, but water is heavy (“a pint is a pound, the whole world ‘round,” as my mom said when she helped me with my science homework), and no one could figure out how to lift substantial amounts of liquid into the kettle, though there were people on both sides of the kettle who were amusing themselves by lifting in chewing gum, love-notes, copies of the Bill of Rights, Guy Fawkes masks, medical marijuana, non-medical marijuana, and misc. Lots of misc.
I would have been right there with them, field testing the lifting limits of a quadcopter and playing kettle absurdism, but I was half-frantic with worry about Ange. I’d already ducked calls from both my parents and her mom, because I didn’t want to freak them out, and also because I didn’t want to admit that if I couldn’t make contact with Ange in that chaos was that she was hurt and/or busted.
I found myself pulling my phone out of my pocket every couple of seconds to scour the drone feeds and look for her face. Meanwhile, I’d be that guy standing at the top of a BART escalator, the people around me squashing to get past. This was stupid.
So I did what I should have done from the start. I found a curb to sit on a little way from the action, pulled out my laptop and tethered it to my phone, and used the crappy network connection to slurp up all the pics and videos that looked like they were being sent from inside the kettle. I ran every frame through a free photo-processing library that cut out anything that appeared to be a face, then fed that to a facial recognition program that checked to see if that face was anything like Ange’s. It was very dirty programming, and used about a hundred times more resources on the virtual machines I was renting than it needed to. But that still only came out to a couple bucks’ worth of compute time.
At first, the program wasn’t finding anything. So I loosened up the parameters and got too much: manhole covers, car grilles, faces in posters and ads, anything remotely face-like. I played goldilocks with the face-chopping system until it was getting actual live human faces 95% of the time. Then I did the same thing with the recognizer until it was saving the faces of women who looked at least vaguely like Ange. (It helped that I had a huge library of pictures of Ange’s face to use as a training set.) Thereafter, I sat on that curb and clicked through an endless stream of blurrycam pictures of women who looked vaguely like the love of my life, which was more than a little creepy.
But screw it. It was something, and something was better than nothing, at least right then. I click, click, clicked, hands shaking a little, trying not to think of what I’d do if I found Ange and she was one of the protesters stretched out on the ground. Hell, for that matter, what would I do if she was one of the protesters walking around inside the kettle, locked
up tight behind the police lines with no medical attention, no toilets, no water, no food and no shelter?
Click, click, click. Some of the faces were familiar because they really did look like Ange—the algorithm was moderately clever and good at its job—and some of them were familiar because they were women (and sometimes men—the algorithm wasn’t that clever) I knew from the Occupy camp. None of them were Ange. Every now and again, my phone would buzz with a call from my parents or Ange’s mom. Less often, a shadow would cross over my screen as someone tried to snoop on what I was doing, but I had one of those polarized plastic sheets over the screen, so anyone not looking straight on would only see blackness.
One of the shadows lingered and shifted, as its owner ostentatiously tried to find a viewing angle that would reveal my activity. I turned around, ready to say something sarcastic like, “Can I help you?” And there, standing above me, was….
Ange.
“You seem busy,” she said.
I slammed my lid shut, clamped my laptop under my arm and leaped to my feet. “Ange!” I said, and grabbed her and squeezed her like a drowning man clutching a life preserver. She oofed, and squeezed me back, reaching up to get her arms around my neck.
We kissed. Kissed again. Would have kissed again, but my phone buzzed. It was Ange’s mom. I answered it and passed the phone to Ange.