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COMRADE EMERGENCY! Ken Ehrlich Arrested @ UC Riverside

Click to DONATE to Ken’s legal defense / bail fund
Ken’s Bail cost $2,000 (non-fundable) on $25,000 bail. This amount was charged to a credit card. Enough donations have come in to cover the amount. Any additional monies raised will go to Ken’s legal expenses, which are likely to be quite high. Ken has been released from the Riverside County Jail. He has a lawyer. He and his family greatly appreciate your support.

Occupy Everything editor and UC Riverside lecturer Ken Ehrlich was arrested for felony “assault with a deadly weapon” and is being held on $25,000 bail. The Press-Enterprise reports “Two protestors, identified as Kenneth Ehrlich, 39, of Los Angeles, and Humberto Rivera, 25, of Corona, were booked for felony assault on a police officer — one for hitting an officer with a handheld sign, another for hitting an officer with a metal barricade.” Witnesses say Ken was holding “a shield in the shape of a book (a la book bloc)” at the time of his arrest. Ken’s been released on bail and awaits trail.

Yesterday, during the Regents meeting held on UC Riverside campus, Regents Meeting police attacked student protestors with chemical weapons and projectiles.
The cease-fire against California students appears to be over.

Via Daily Kos
“Students from UC Riverside, protesting today’s Board of Regents meeting, were confronted by riot police, with multiple reports indicating they were fired upon with paint-filled bullets and other projectiles that injured several at the scene.

The students, many of whom are associated with Occupy UC Riverside, today protested and (ultimately) shut down a Board of Regents meeting where tuition hikes were planned to be discussed.

The meeting was adjourned when students who managed to get inside refused to be silent in the face of skyrocketing tuition costs. After the meeting was closed, the board members were escorted off of campus amidst what were, for most of the day, incredibly peaceful and nonviolent protests.

Here is a report from ABC’s local affiliate on what transpired before police began attacking protesters:

While things remained peaceful in the early afternoon, after the board members were escorted from campus, students amassed to continue their protest and were confronted by riot police – reportedly a mix of campus police and officers from the municipality – who forced them to disperse using fired projectiles that injured several protesters.”

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Communiqués

Statement of Solidarity with UCSD/UCR Faculty

We strongly condemn the investigations of faculty members Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, Brett Stalbaum, Amy Sara Carroll and Ken Ehrlich by the University of California. These “investigations” represent an alarming violation of academic, intellectual and artistic freedom. They function as a smokescreen – distracting from the actual problems addressed by Dominquez, Cardenas and Ehrlich’s work. UC administrators would do better to listen to the messages contained in the work and begin acting to address them appropriately. Such repression of basic freedoms will only exacerbate the existing problems within the UC and radically escalate the public response.

–Occupy Everything Collective