Police Raid Home of Animal Rights Activists in Santa Cruz
Feb 25th, 2008 by Will Potter
From The Santa Cruz Sentinel:
Dozens of police cars surrounded a home on the 700 block of Riverside Avenue in Santa Cruz on Sunday night as a crowd of onlookers gathered to watch the events unfold.
According to Frank Male, the owner of the house, three UC Santa Cruz seniors live at the residence. Male said police contacted him earlier Sunday because they wanted to talk to the students about an ongoing investigation. Male said he later learned the students were animal rights activists.
Male said police told him they went to the house in the late afternoon to talk to the students, but the students slammed the door in their face and told them to get a search warrant…
Police on scene declined to say why they were there.
Santa Cruz has also been in the news for the recent tree sits.
I don’t have any more details on this right now. If you do, please post a comment…
Good on the kids for demanding the warraant. I wonder what’s up.
…or you don’t want more information? Sort of telling that you ignored the half of the article and instead inserted a statement that “police on the scene declined to say why they were there”. Particularly because the article doesn’t say that cops refused comment. Instead, the second half details exactly what the cops say and what the students are accused of: home invasion, assault, vandalism.
It’s pretty easy to find more information; it’s in the same article you chopped in half.
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_8359393
“Ignored half the article”? “Inserted a statement”? Not quite. You might have noticed, through the wonders of hyperlinks, that those are two different articles: I wrote this post before today’s article went up on their site. My bad. Thanks for noting it, but no need to be a jerk. -Will
The debate rages on over at Indybay about the alleged ‘home invasion’ that prompted the police raid.
Some commenters are already convicting the students of crossing a line and physically attacking a scientist during a ‘home visit.’
Others are claiming that a legel demo happened at the scientist’s house, and that the assault claims are bogus.
Others chose to take the middle ground assumption, that perhaps some of the activists crossed a line and began knocking on the door, and that the scientist or his wife came out and attacked the protestors. (The ‘victim’ claims minor hand injuries.)
‘Proof’ for any of these scenarios rests in the testimony of the homeowners and the activists. Those of us watching this incident unfold frombehind computer screens may never know what really happened.
Apparently there are not even photos of the legal demo, and this is something that has led people to accuse the activists of trying to hide something.
One commenter even tried to blame Peter Young for the whole fiasco, by pointing out that Young was one of the 20 or so people that arrived to witness the police raid, that Young had given a speech the night before and that Young’s taste in music (Vegan Reich) was proof that he wanted the animal rights movement to escalate it’s tactics.
Young responded by saying the commenter could either be a cop or a vivisector.
Local police have called in the FBI and as of yet no charges have been laid and according to the media, no suspects are being declared in the ‘home invasion.’
What I don’t see getting enough attention in all this is that regardless of whether an assault occured, the police and SWAT team came out in full force to raid the home of these activists because the suspects in the home invasion wore bandanas, and as we all know, protestors also were bandanas.
The media further vindicated the police action by noting that the 20 or so people who witnessed the raid were also wearing bandanas.
At the same time, ask yourself, when the police respond to a rape or a shooting on a native reservation, do they send that many cops? The answer is, they don’t often even bother to investigate crime on reservations.
Two weeks ago I was sleeping in a tree platform at a protest that everyone knew was peaceful and legal. I woke up to over 50 cops, some of them with assault rifles, some with dogs, and a team of climbers, ready to remove me from the tree. It’s been estimated that almost 300 cops took part in an operation to remove three of us from tree platforms.
I look at the pictures of the Santa Cruz raid and I see the same kind of overkill.
Some people still don’t believe we live in a police state.
Try standing up for the environment or animal rights and you’ll see otherwise.
Another case of dissent being squashed has begun to unfold in Santa Cruz, and in the coming weeks we will see people in our own movement seeking to discredit others who have not even been charged with a crime.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/02/25/18481563.php
Any idea why MTV, of all goddamn places, would have a video like that?
http://www.youtube.com/v/eRmuj4VU0lg&rel=1&border=0