From talking to witnesses all over campus, you can put together a pretty scary picture of what happened at Pitt on Thursday, September 24th. Tear gas released in the David Lawrence Bridge (for anyone unfamiliar with the campus - INDOORS) on students who were trapped by police on both sides; students threatened with mace in the lobby of their residence halls; students herded into the quad...which was then gassed.

But these are other angry letters for other people to write. I am going to focus on that aspect of Thursday night's chaos with which I am intimately familiar; that is, my arrest.

Somewhere between eleven p.m. and midnight on Thursday, I was returning to my residence hall (the Litchfield Towers) with several friends, having just walked a friend back to Sutherland. Last I had been on central campus, several windows along Forbes had been smashed by anarchists, and rioters and students had been given an order to disperse from Schenley Plaza, which had subsequently been gassed. Upon returning to the Towers (from the Fifth Avenue side, which was not yet overrun by riot police when we arrived) we saw that chaos had broken loose on Forbes Avenue and the majority of students were in a panic. But what disturbed me the most about what I saw was that the doors to the Litchfield Towers were locked so that, while students could exit the building, they could not get back in.

That shocked me. Lock people out of Litchfield Towers? But people LIVE there! I, for one, live there - and furthermore, police in the Quad and Forbes Avenue were demanding that students disperse, and Towers Lobby was the only place it was physically possible for them to disperse TO.

I honestly had no interest in getting too close to the protesters or the police, but I didn't believe the students who did go out to rubberneck - or who simply came home a little too late from hanging out with friends in other parts of campus - should be locked outside in the developing war zone. So when a nice guy inside the building responded to our frantic knocking and held open the door for us, I seized upon his gesture as the easiest and least controversial way of making myself useful in the midst of the chaos.

So I held the "out" door open. First I did it on the Forbes Side. I had a buddy - a stranger holding the door opposite me, motivated by similar ideas. I choked on some more tear gas, became unspeakably frustrated with Pitt students who were using our good-nature as an excuse to run OUT into the madness instead of IN to the lobby where it was safe, and spent a lot of time demanding news from bystanders. But when the police eventually advanced all the way up to the doors, we were able to usher every last Pitt student past us into the lobby before going in ourselves and shutting the door safely behind us, putting students on the inside and police on the outside - exactly what I had wanted to do.

Then we looked out at the other side and saw chaos on the patio, to the same effect - that police were performing some show of force, students were running out to gawk, and the door was locked so that once out, said students could not get in. Empowered by my success on the other side of the building, I crossed over and held the door open on the Fifth Avenue side of the patio as well. My heart goes out so very far to the stranger who joined me after I explained my purpose, because he was dragged off by police a split-second after I was and I never saw him again. If he's reading this, he has my sincerest thanks - and apologies.

I was never expecting to be arrested. First of all, I never heard an order to disperse on the Fifth Avenue side of the patio. Possibly I was on the other side when the order was given, or possibly an order was given by an individual officer, without the aid of the Scary Truck Voice (with hundreds of screaming students between the police and me, I never would have picked up on an order to disperse given physically by an officer.) Second of all, just a few moments earlier I had been allowed to hold the door for every stray Pitt student on the Forbes side of the patio before following them safely inside; police, although only feet away from me, had not interfered with me at all. I didn't see why they would want to. As far as I was concerned, I was helping people to disperse.

So even when the police rushed the patio, I wasn't initially afraid, because they had done the exact same thing on the Forbes Avenue side. I only became afraid when I realized - after seeing an officer grab and arrest a student who literally had one foot over the threshold - that unlike the police on the Forbes side, these guys didn't want to herd students into the lobby. They wanted to arrest people.

It was not until that instant that it crossed my mind that I could be arrested for what I was doing. I didn't have to worry about it for very long, though, because about a split-second later, I was thrown to the ground and handcuffed.

The officer who arrested me did not tell me to stop what I was doing. He did not tell me to get inside. He did not say "come with me; you are under arrest." I can swear, and I hope you'll believe me, that if he had told me I was under arrest, I'd have put up less fight than the storefront windows along Forbes Avenue. But without saying a word, the officer grabbed me by the arm and forced me down onto the pavement, skinning both my knees but thankfully not my face, and twisted my arm behind my back.

I remember my primary thought as I was flung on the ground being: I hope he doesn't start hitting me with a stick. He didn't, which makes me one of the fortunate ones.

I was marched onto the street corner across the street from the patio, outside the Frick Center for International Studies, where forty-some riot police were detaining twenty-some of my peers, and immediately started blubbering like a baby. Cliche as it sounds, I couldn't believe I had been arrested. My roommate, who has been my best friend for more than thirteen years, was still in her dorm, and last she'd heard from me, I was holding the door on the Forbes side and encouraging her to stay inside where it was safe. For all I knew it could be the next morning before she knew what happened to me. Was I going to have to post bail? When was I going to get my phone call? My parents were going to KILL me. Thankfully, two other freshman girls, friends who had been arrested trying to get home from a party, were level-headed and very sweet, and who calmed me down. Even better, I was eventually asked my name by a legal observer from the National Lawyer's Guild. I gave him my roommate's phone number and instructions for what to tell my parents, and he promised he would call her.

We were held on that street corner for about an hour. We were searched intimately by an overcompensating female officer whose first words to me were, "If you have anything that's going to poke me or prick me you'd better tell me now, because if I get stuck by something your head goes off the wall," and I was photographed with my arresting officer, who, an instant before they took the picture, smiled and told me, "Don't look beat up, or I'll get in trouble."

That joke marked my transition from panic to fury, as I realized, in a way that I had not quite realized before, that I had been knocked down, pinned to the Towers Patio, and arrested, for HOLDING OPEN A DOOR. I fumed. "Don't look beat up"? Are you kidding me? Photograph my skinned knees, asshole, because you threw me on the ground! I weigh ninety-nine pounds in heavy shoes and I'm wearing a goddamn sundress. I must look AWFULLY freaking dangerous to you with your riot gear and two-hundred pounds of muscle. What the hell.

(I did not actually say this, because, despite the stereotype of people who get themselves arrested by riot police during the G20, I am not a complete moron.)

To make things even better, when my arresting officer (who, by the way, was totally unidentifiable - no name, no badge number, nothing but the word Harrisburg) was asked to describe to his superior the circumstances of my arrest, this, literally was the statement: "Well, we ran onto the patio, and we were arresting everyone who was out there, and....she was out there."

I was loaded into a police wagon with three other girls and four dudes. Most of us were Pitt students. Exactly one person in the van was an actual rioter. As for the rest of us, three were being held on charges of trying-to-get-back-to-one's-dorm; one was accused of taking-a-picture; one (yours truly) was slapped with first-degree holding-a-door-open, and one was prepared to plead guilty to not-running-fast-enough. We were driven around in what felt like a giant, bumpy circle for probably half an hour - zip-tied, unseatbelted and toppling into each other at every turn or stop. Then we were parked in some facility and left in the wagon for another thirty minutes.

When we had been in the wagon for long enough to merit serious concern that we would shortly run out of oxygen, the other girls and I were led into a holding facility, where I was delivered into the custody of an officer who immediately looked me up and down, wrinkled his nose, and derisively said "You look like you're dressed for church, not some fucking protest." (This was the only time I couldn't restrain myself from snapping at the police: "I am NOT a protester.") I was transferred from zip-ties to metal handcuffs, which was merciful because metal handcuffs don't hurt if you have thin wrists and I was no longer cuffed behind my back. They searched me again, asked me for my information for a third or fourth time, and then took about a hundred years to fingerprint me, because apparently my fingers were too cold and sweaty to register. While they were printing me, they kept up a running snide commentary about the fidgeting of one of the girls who had been in the wagon with me - she had had to go to the bathroom since before the arrest, which by now was two hours ago.

By the time I was shuffled over to the woman with the health questionnaire, I was just shy of angry enough of bite somebody's legs off.

We sat, handcuffed, in what was essentially a waiting room for three more hours, exchanging names and "offenses." None of us had been told what we were charged with, but I had been able to catch a glimpse of one of the forms they filled out, and saw that my charge was "failure to disperse." From talking to other detainees who had been able to see their forms, I gathered that "failure to disperse" was both the most common charge and the one most likely to result from having done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

My fellow-outlaws were a sad lot, and not a particularly dangerous-looking one. The vast majority were Pitt students, and although I was unable to totally let go of my righteous indignation at being knocked down on the patio, I realized that I was one of the lucky ones. The girl next to me had been slammed against the wall; her over-shirt had ripped, and she had been so close to the canister of tear gas or pepper spray or whatever-it-was when it exploded that she had gotten large quantities on her skin, which sported burning red patches. The guy next to me, (the paddy wagon buddy arrested for taking a picture) who had been severely beaten, was bruised and bloody in the face, and his thumb was broken - but he was independent media, so apparently this happens to him all the time, and he was a total sport about it. A guy a few chairs down had an enormous welt on his back from a rubber bullet, and nearly every guy in the waiting room had bruised and bloody faces. It was a good day to be a girl - as far as I could tell, my skinned knees made me a minority among the female detainees, but I had no doubt that a guy in my position would most likely have had the crap beaten out of him. Several had, and for doing just as much nothing. I can only pray that the guy I talked into holding the other door was taken with a minimum of force.

Attempted conversation with the police was maddening. "What's the charge?" "You'll find out when you go before a judge." (Hours later: "Am I going to see a judge?" "Maybe." In actuality I never did, but that turned out to be a good thing.) "What's the punishment for failure to disperse?" "I have no idea." "When are we going to see a judge?" "I have no idea." "How long can we be kept here?" "I have no idea." Does the Pittsburgh police department require or even encourage you to know ANYTHING about your job?

Time elapsed, as slowly as it does in any waiting room, while I grew steadily more angry and apprehensive. The people in authority were no longer even pretending to know or care what was going to happen to us and when, and I had absolutely no certainty of my rights - I had a vague idea that I couldn't be detained without charge for longer than forty-eight hours, but prior to Thursday night I'd had a vague idea that holding open a door was not a punishable offense. Additionally, the police had told us that we would NOT be provided with a ride home, a prospect which had me PANICKING. I am a freshman in college! I do not have a car, nor do I know anyone here with a car; I had little to no idea where I was or what buses went from there to Oakland, I had no cab fair, and my parents live near Philadelphia. I had been arrested for virtually nothing, and with excessive force, and I was bored and stiff and thirsty and handcuffed and it was nearly five in the morning and I had a recitation at ten, because it takes more than a little martial law to shut classes down at the University of Pittsburgh.

I was released almost precisely at five a.m. along with all of the other failure-to-disperse charges, without my charge, a summons, or an explanation. Contrary to what the police had said, we were, thank God, given transportation in the form of a Port Authority bus. I was held for a total of five hours - two in zipties, three in handcuffs - searched twice, and read my rights zero times.

As of today, I have two skinned knees, a bruise on my head, and the dubious sort of instant celebrity that occurs when you get pinned to the Towers Patio in front of hundreds of your peers. Thanks to some amateur filmmakers shooting from a dorm window, it was about six hours before I went from The Girl Who Got Arrested to The Girl Who Got Arrested On Youtube, but mercifully the camera doesn't focus on me until after I've stood up and recovered some of my dignity. I have absolutely no idea if I'm going to be tried for anything, and I've heard more than one rumor that I'm going to be expelled.

I am waiting on a statement from the University of Pittsburgh. Considering that students were gassed in residence halls, blocked from getting to their dorms, beaten, maced, and chased down the patio with unmuzzled dogs, I can only assume that the University does not plan on pretending nothing happened. To what extent was the action of the riot police sanctioned by the University? Do they condemn the show of force? Do they condone it? University of Pittsburgh, what do you have to say about all this?