WHAT'S THE STRATEGY?: S.F. SHUT-DOWN!

I’m not sure if the PRIMARY goal of the protesters is to voluntarily get ARRESTED *OR* to SHUT DOWN San Francisco. Getting voluntarily arrested is using up our ‘soldiers’.

If the PRIMARY goal is to shut down S.F., the protesters shouldn’t necessarily be trying to shut down the intersections for long lengths of time, by doing things such as sitting down in the street, linking themselves together, tying themselves up, etc. This may snarl traffic at that point slightly longer, but it means that the people available to block traffic elsewhere get arrested and removed from the protest sooner. We use up ‘soldiers’ for later/continuous actions. The potential long-term effect is to make the protest SHORTER, and to impact other protests later in the day or even the next or later days. Again, it depends on what the primary goal is.

What we should do is move, in larger groups, into the middle of the major intersections but when police start arriving, run away and/or let the police themselves block the intersection, then approach the next target intersection, and regroup to repeat the process. The individual intersections may clear faster, but the process as a whole will go on longer and be more disruptive.

The one situation in which it might make sense to “sit down” in the intersections and submit to voluntary arrest would be if you felt you might only have a small number of participants and wanted to make sure that your small group blocked the intersections as effectively as possible. But with large groups, this strategy seems unnecessary.