Portland on Strike (footage from throughout the day)
Channel: Hayley Steele
Date: 2012-05-04

May 1, 2012 -- Sorry this video is so shaky in the beginning.  Moments before, a police officer had tried to pin me to the ground with a bicycle.  I managed to escape, but my hands were trembling for a while.  I had been marching with a group of about 100 people as part of the May Day Global Strike, when the police had shown up, blocked the march, and then started using their bikes to knock people over.  Then they pinned them to the ground and arrested them.  I started filming just as the arrestees were being led away.  

After filming the arrests, I began to follow the bike police as they followed the march.  The police tactic seemed to be to ride up in front of the march, push everyone onto the sidewalk, arrest a few people from the crowd, and then let everyone else go.  I kept thinking they were going to Kettle the march, which is when they mass-arrest everyone.  But instead, they only arrested a few people at a time.  The strikes were not intimidated by this, and as you can see, eventually 4,000 people joined us on the streets. 

There were about four major moments of police brutality that I witnessed during the day, but only captured one-and-a-half of them on film.  I discovered that it's actually pretty hard to keep one's hand steady when shit is hitting the fan.  At one point, I jumped up on a garbage can to film an incident in which police ran horses into the crowd, only to later discover that the camera wasn't even on.  I got better at keeping my wits together later in the day, though.

Even though there were frightening moments during the day, I think this video shows the resilience of the people of Portland: throughout arrests and police violence, there were still folks cracking jokes and doing tricks on their bikes. Also, the bicycle police were just hilarious! You can hear them yelling at each other, calling each other names, and, at one point, one of them actually trips over her own bicycle. 

It was such a strange day, but there were glorious moments. Like the strikers marching into the mall (2:22), and the guy reprimanding the bike police as they rode away (8:53), and the woman singing the Cascadia Anthem (9:45). I was taking things very seriously in the beginning, but as the day wore on, I just kept getting swept up by everyone's dorky optimism. And ya know, I think being silly is a great response to this kind of oppression: It's a way of refusing to be intimidated.

(Feel free to steal any part of this to mix into your own film.  It'd be cool if you included a link to this as well.)