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Indybay Feature

Hwy 17 Blocked for 4 Hours by UCSC Activists Protesting Tuition Hikes & Police Violence

by John Malkin
Yesterday 6 UCSC students blocked HWY 17 to protest University tuition hikes and police violence. 6 people were arrested.
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On Tuesday, March 3 2015 six students from the University of California Santa Cruz blocked a major highway for about four hours. The student activists told police that they were protesting tuition hikes and police violence. CHP, Santa Cruz Police Department, Santa Cruz County Sheriffs Department, Caltrans, and the Santa Cruz Fire Department all had employees on the scene. A helicopter landed at two different spots on Highway 17 during the incident. The CHP spokesperson said that the helicopter was used to bring in law enforcement officers who had special tactical training in dealing with civil disturbance and dismantling the type of objects that protestors had attached themselves to. Police said that protestors had arrived at about 9:30 AM in a U-Haul truck and had attached themselves to metal pipes that went through the center of metal garbage cans that been filled with cement and metal objects like rebar and chains.

Ethan Pezzow, Alexander Pearce, Sophia Dimatteo, Janine Caceres, Lori Nixon, and Sasha Petterson were each arrested on three misdemeanor charges of creating a public nuisance, failure to obey a lawful order, failure to obey an executive order from a peace officer and one felony charge of conspiracy to execute a crime.

Traffic jams throughout the Santa Cruz area affected thousands of people while police, Caltrans and Fire Department personnel used everything from sledge hammers to jack hammers to break apart the devices that were connecting the six protestors.
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Add Your Comments

Comments (Hide Comments)
by Far
Bravo!

My University of California, Santa Cruz, education only brought me "status envy" (even without grades). I developed a deep understanding of fascism in a course on the Holocaust. But after twenty years of getting not much beyond those things out of my formal studies, I say life experience is more important by far than education. The people I admire most in my life now are not college graduates.

Soak up the experience, folks, the struggle continues.
by scarbrough
at least the cops are doing something for all those tax dollars they steal from the public every day.true criminals.
by G
How planned and targeted a racket isn't widely known. Apparently the total student debt (in the USA) roared past one trillion dollars a few years ago. TRILLION. Often the waves of tuition hikes are for graft laden construction and executive raises (see also: Cooper Union, gutting of). Meanwhile austerity/outsourcing/offshoring/'economic zones' and hedge bailouts continue to bleed economies dry across the planet.

One would think Economics 101 would cover that scam, as well as the dangers that have accompanied such theft throughout history. Perhaps it's a lab thing.
by Grant
Thanks John Malkin,
For being there, for being a great journalist, for raising the issues you do, for your persistent engagement in the pursuit of truth.
+ Thanks to the "UCSC-6", for being willing to take multiple & serious risks (personal & financial) in your persuit of justice, a reasonable & accessible education.
I think Bruce Bratton (BrattonOnline.com) & MLK, put it most eloquently & in context...

From Bratton Online, March 9, 2015:
"3 CHEERS FOR THE HIGHWAY BLOCKADE. Last Tuesday’s (March 3) blocking of Highways 1 & 17 was a great example of the people responding to an unjust part of our community. That intersection has been blocked before by protestors, it’s even been blocked by trees and mudslides…it’s part nature. Highways get blocked all the time, and we live with it. Martin Luther King blocked the Pettus Bridge in Selma three times, and that worked and we respect that blocking. Where else in our County could the students have protested and received the much needed publicity for their deserved free or at least freeer education? As Martin Luther King said, “. “An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”, Martin Luther King Jr.

In solidarity.
From the "Santa Cruz Eleven"
(Occupy SC, 2011)
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