By David Edward Clark

After Mary Claire Erskine ’13 passed out, Grey Castro ’10 continued to talk about his part in the G-20 protests.  He was part of a group that had been watching Schenley Plaza from a distance and could see a more general picture of what was happening.

F+L: What are your overall reactions to the events?

G: To answer that fully, I’d have to tell you everything I did last night, which is a story not quite as long as that [Mary Claire’s story], but not short.  Do you want me to do that?

F+L: I’d like to get everything I can on all of this.

G:  Okay, cool.  Like Mary Claire has said, she had gone with Peter and some other folks after the permitted march ended.  I had gone back with the rest of the affinity group that I was in to Jess’s house, where we were staying.  We were discussing what we wanted to do that evening, whether or not we want to go to whatever it was that was going to be happening at Schenley Plaza.  It was a little ambiguous as to what it was going to be.  We heard at various times, from calling and texting different people, that it was going to be anarchist groups getting together to wreck shit, or alternately, UPitt students who were really mad about themselves and their friends being totally abused the night before, but just basically having a peaceful demonstration.

So there were several possibilities.  One might be going down, but because we knew that there might be property destruction and/or violence, we had between an hour and a half to a three-hour discussion about whether or not we wanted to go and why.  It was a really intense discussion, and it was really interesting.  We wound up deciding to go.  We all agreed that we were not down with breaking windows of businesses and stuff like that, because while it may demonstrate your anger at say, those corporations that run those chains, it also has a negative impact on the people who actually work at those stores.  I personally feel that you risk calling into question your commitment to bettering the lives of the working class when, in your acts of resistance and protest, you make a minimum wage janitor have to sweep up an entire store’s worth of plate glass windows.

Various people among us felt differently about what we did and did not want to do and what we did and did not want to be perceived as supporting. We didn’t actually want to do any property destruction, but we didn’t know really what the effect might be of us being around people that were–like would the cops round us up too?  Almost certainly, if we couldn’t get away.  Or, would our presence bolster the overall perception of the numbers of the group that was breaking stuff and thus make them look like they had more supporters than they did?  We talked about a lot of stuff, and we ended up deciding that we at least wanted to go to see what was happening and at least try to observe what went down.

We got there a little bit ahead of Mary Claire and the people she went with.  It was a group of five of us.  Some folks had stayed at Jess’s house.  We drove up, circled the Plaza once to see what was around…when we first drove in that circle around the Plaza, on two sides of the Plaza, there were a lot of cops–a whole group of cops in rows and columns facing the Plaza on one side of the street, and cops on the other side of the Plaza as well.  We decided to park the car several blocks away–in case it did get bad, we would be able to get back to the car and leave.  Then, we walked back to the Plaza and we stood caddy-corner to one corner of the Plaza to watch what was happening.

The street beside us was blockaded by cops.  More cops were coming to the Plaza.  They were bringing trucks full of cops in, and I’ll talk more about what they brought in in a minute.  We were standing there with a group primarily of Pitt students.  There were some other protesters there–we weren’t protesting, we were just watching what was going on in the Plaza. Also, in the Plaza, there were very few people. I didn’t get a good enough look to make any judgment on numbers, but what other folks were suggesting was like 200 at the absolute maximum–probably fewer.  We were standing outside, and what we had heard from some other protesters who were standing nearby us, and again were not protesting–just there to watch–was that there were so many cops, and so few people, that basically folks had decided to not have any kind of rally at all that night. That was only one small group of people who told us that. Like I said, I wasn’t on the Plaza, and so I don’t know what the folks there were thinking, but this group said that as far as they knew, there were so many cops that nobody was going to do anything.

So we stood on the corner and the cop presence increased and increased and increased and increased.  Like I said, they were bringing in trucks full of cops.  They had squad cars and K-9 units in their SUVs.  Every cop I remember seeing was in riot gear.  There were bike cops around, but their presence was minimal compared to that of cops in full riot gear.  I’m not 100% certain, I was kind of far away from it, but it looked like they had mounted on the back of one of the hummers that was there what was called an LRAD or Long Range Acoustic Device. It’s a weapon that, as somebody said–I haven’t checked this for myself–that up until Pittsburgh, up until this protest, had never been used outside of Iraq.  Basically what it does is it produces a beam of sound that is so incredibly loud that you cannot stand to be there. Apparently, if you’re too close to it and directly in it’s path, what I heard is that it can break your eardrums and permanently damage your hearing. I don’t know whether or not it was used last night.  It was used on Thursday, as I heard. I don’t have hard, fast evidence of that, but that’s what I heard.

Anyway, they had what I think was one of those on a Hummer on one corner of the Plaza. It got to a point where the riot cop presence was utterly enormous.  They had the Plaza surrounded hugely on all sides that I could see. I don’t know what it looked like on the far side of the Plaza, but at least from where we were, every side of the Plaza was utterly, totally, completely surrounded with numbers so high and equipment of such a high level that there was no way to do anything to question them.

The UPitt students didn’t really seem to have much concept of the fact that the cops really hadn’t been showing much regard for their safety, whether or not they were part of the protests on the night before.  The UPitt students who were there last night really didn’t seem to know what the cops had been doing the night before that, Thursday night.  They were posing in front of the cops and having their friends take pictures.  They were saying that they were just there to watch.  At least, I think they were saying that. The few that we talked to really seemed to have no concept of what happened one night previous.

You can look up what riot cops did to UPitt students. There’s videos of forcing a group of students up a stairwell, tear gassing the bottom of the stairwell.  This was filmed by a UPitt student who had a camera on him, and then they walk up the stairwell to get away from the gas, because they’re choking and kept trying to cover their faces with their shirts.  There are two more riot cops higher up the stairwell who order them back down the stairwell, and they basically have a landing’s worth of space between riot cops and tear gas, and riot cops ordering them down the stairs. One of the girls was bleeding from her neck, asking for help and the cops just do nothing. I don’t remember if that was Thursday night or Friday night when that video was shot.

Anyway, the UPitt students had no idea of the fact that basically the cops would not treat them lightly because they weren’t involved.  We were standing a little bit back from the main group that was standing on the corner across from the Plaza.  Suddenly a bunch of people took off running out from that group towards us, beyond us actually, and so we started running as well.  I was really surprised by that.  There wasn’t even a moment’s thought.  It’s totally an instinct thing I hadn’t expected.  We just took off running with them.  We got halfway across the block–we were where the UPitt student union is, a sort of grassy area surrounding the building.  We got halfway down the property and we came to a stop and were like, “Wait, why are we running?”  We slowed down, because there were people still up on the corner who hadn’t run away. They said to us that the cops had assumed a ready position with their batons like they were ready to charge us, but nothing came of it right then, so we slowly moved back down to the corner. That happened again.  I don’t know what incited the running the second time, but we took off running again. We were a bit more measured about it. We went again away from the corner where the Plaza was, away from the corner we had been watching from.

At that time, we kept on moving away from it, because it looked like the situation was escalating.  We came to the next street, and when we walked a little bit down that street, still on the same block of the student union, we could see tear gas drifting over the student union.  They had gassed the area we had been just beforehand.  So we went down the street a little bit in the general direction of where our car was parked, and through standing on three different corners around the same intersection for different amounts of time, we saw that basically what the cops were doing was pushing everybody out of the blocks immediately surrounding the Plaza so that whatever they were going to do to the people they had trapped in the Plaza, there wouldn’t be anyone around to see it.

They used tear gas, threats of force and maybe force.  I don’t know whether they actually beat anybody that night in that area or not, but they at least used teargas and the threat of force to drive folks away from the blocks surrounding the Plaza.  We hadn’t been doing anything that remotely resembled a demonstration.  We were watching, we were standing on a corner watching, looking across the street at what they were doing and they drove us out with threats of arrest or force.  We saw them doing the same thing to the adjacent block.

We started heading down the street back towards our car.  Then we looked up that road and realized that halfway up the block that we were going down, the intersection was completely full of teargas.  So we came back.  From that point, we went what I think is North, past a Soldiers and Sailors Monument.  We had to cut through that property around a police blockade, and we both went up three blocks, trying to get back to the car.  We met up with some other Oberlin students–they took one route, we took another.  We tried to cut back down towards where the car would be, and it was really strange.

This random dude came out of his house and started screaming at us to go back from the way we came, that we weren’t welcome in Pittsburgh.  At first I thought he was a cop.  He had a white polo shirt on with some sort of insignia on the chest, and he had a fanny pack on.  I didn’t really know what it was.  As it turned out, as far as I could tell, he was just some dude, and he was yelling at both of us, who by looking at us might look like protesters potentially, but also at this group of girls who had come back from partying, who were walking down the other side of the street, screaming like we weren’t welcome in Pittsburgh.  We were like, “We were trying to get back to our car.  This is the only way we can leave.”  Eventually, he went back to his house.

We starting going back down and then realized that we were headed back toward the direction of the intersection we had seen full of teargas earlier.  So we started heading back up the road we had just come down.  At that point, the people in our group got a text.  I haven’t actually checked out to see if this was verified or not, but we received a text from someone else from Oberlin–I don’t know who exactly–that martial law had been declared. (Erica shook her head) It didn’t actually happen? It did actually happen?

Erica: No it did not.

G: Then it was pretty irresponsible for someone to text that to us, because it really freaked out some of the folks in our group.  But as far as we knew, martial law might have been declared, and the cops were acting pretty much without regard for anything but their own interests.  When I say their own interests, I mean, what they were interested in, not their own best interests or well-being, because their well-being was not in question.

We headed back, and as far as we could tell at that point, where our car was parked was totally under police control and we could not get back to it.  So operating under the assumption that martial law had been declared, and that we were at the mercy of any cops or national guard who might encounter us, we hid behind some bushes in front of an abandoned high school, and called Jess’s parents–she lives in Pittsburgh–and eventually convinced them to come pick us up.  By the time they did, the cops had cleared out from where our car was parked, and some of us went back to our car, some of us went back in Jess’s parent’s car.

A few things that I missed: There were at least two helicopters over the Plaza while we were there.  Cops were coming in in Budget Rent-A-Vans, I assume because they didn’t have enough vehicles to transport them.  As I understand it, there were 8,000 cops/National Guard in Pittsburgh for the protest brought up from all around the country, which, depending on what estimates of how many protesters there were, they had us matched one-to-one for numbers.  So cops were coming in, and they seriously had the logo “Budget Rent-a-Van” on the side.

The thing in the moment that was most evident and most revolting was the fact that they were clearing all the witnesses, or all potential witnesses, out of the blocks surrounding the Plaza before they started doing whatever they were going to do to the Plaza itself.  They surrounded the Plaza and then cleared everybody who was going to see what they were going to do out before they took any further action.  As you heard from Mary Claire, it [their clearing of the Plaza] was relatively non-violent compared to at least what they had done at other times.  They used the threat of force, tear gas and the threat of arrest to vacate witnesses who were not doing anything remotely resembling protesting or demonstrating of any sort.  It was mostly, like I said, UPitt students who were watching from across the street from the Plaza, and they drove everyone out.  There was no way to question what they were doing at all.  They had complete control over an area of multiple blocks.  They could have done whatever they wanted, and no one would have been able to stop them.

I have come away from it feeling completely and wholly that we do live in a police state.  They’re simply selective with where and when they choose to apply that level of force. There is no way to contest or question the absolute power that they have if they want to use it like that.  You ask them questions, they don’t answer.  You tell them, “We’re trying to get out of here.  Where do we go?” and they don’t answer, or they say, “You go back that way,” and then you run into another line of cops that tell you to go back to the first line of cops, and they gradually close you in where you’ll be shot with rubber bullets, gassed, beaten, arrested,pl depending on what they want to do.

I have utterly no faith in, respect for, or anything else remotely positive for the concept of riot cops.  I really like the idea of a good, respectful, well-functioning police force, but this was nothing of the sort.  This was a fucking atrocity, an absolute travesty of justice. There was nothing about law enforcing that was going on there.

This is the link to the video to which Grey referred.

The first part of the interview is here, with Grey and Mary Claire.