Wampum

KCSB.org is covering the student strike protesting the war, and a few minutes ago the CHP and SBCS began suiting up in offensive gear, so I expect that they will get orders any minute now to start using force and start making arrests.

Update: One student was arrested 15 minutes ago while asking questions of some officers, and the students now have offered to return to the UCSB campus line and into one of the campus halls if he is released. The response has been CHP+SBCS preparing to use tasers and gas as well as batons on the students now sitting down off campus.

MB was in the neighborhood, so she's over there now, and just called in with the following:

MB: There are police mustered outside Chito Cheadle Hall, which is occupied students may have tried to occupy by students , so apparently the retreat I mentioned above from the KCSB reporter call-in has taken place. The police on campus are not campus police.

MB's now inside outside Cheadle Hall along with 200+ others. Two people have been arrested, one a professor of Women's Studies. The names of the arrested are Michelle Mireille Miller-Young and Jesse Carreare (sp?). The students are asking that the people arrested are released.

Update: Mirielle Miller-Young and Jesse Carreare have now been released. MB will post corrections later.

MB here: I spoke with people who had been at the protest from early morning. They started with a few dozen in the mid-morning, and the protest grew to upwards of 1000 by its peak in the early afternoon, when it spilled over onto the nearby "highway". I spoke with a staff member from the Women's Center, who said that the state police wanted protestors arrested "en masse", but that the Santa Barbara County Sheriff's Department rejected that action, asserting it did not have the resources to detain upwards of a thousand protestors. When I arrived, I saw less than a dozen SBC officers, and they were all apparently trying to stay out of sight, as best as possible.

Once the protestors began to return to campus, administrators and police assumed they would occupy Cheadle Hass, as it had been so occupied during protests of the first Gulf War, back in 1991 (so I was informed by staff there at the time.) The building was evacuated and locked, preventing an occupation today. Some protesting staff were not pleased that occupants agreed to evacuate.

It was an interesting experience. I used to get arrested at protests - now I live blog them.