152 hotel workers and labor supporters were arrested in San Francisco on Thursday outside the Grand Hyatt hotel, part of a nationwide demonstration for higher wages and better working conditions in hotels. The AP reports the San Francisco demonstrators were arrested for refusing to obey police orders to leave. Scenes of the protest begin around 1:40 in the clip below.
A YouTube user has uploaded video that shows a San Francisco police officer throwing a resisting suspect to the ground, apparently knocking her unconscious. (at 1:10)
Police rushed to the Castro District after a shooting left one dead and two wounded at Pink Saturday, an annual party thrown the night before San Francisco's legendary Gay Pride Parade.
Members in the crowd uploaded their footage of what happened after the deadly incident:
iPhone lovers camping out at South Coast Plaza in Orange County, Calif., brought chairs and umbrellas (1:58) to protect themselves from the sun as they waited for hours to be one of the first to purchase the new iPhone G4. The lines were emblematic of what was happening at Apple Stores nationwide on the first day the company sold the phone to the general public. Some reported waiting as long as six hours to get to the register.
In several cities, shoppers took the opportunity to capture the length of the lines with two-minute-long pans using their cell phones.
User notes:I got to the Apple Store at South Coast Plaza this morning at 6:30 AM. Realized I wasn't getting my "reserved" iPhone anytime soon and left to get to work at 8 AM. I stopped back during lunch, hoping the line had died down. Yeah. Not so much.
User name:fuzzlogik Location: Columbus, Ohio Date uploaded: June 24 Views: 0 User notes: Here's video after I finally got my iPhones. The line is pretty long but is a half block shorter than where I started. 6 1/2 hours later, I had em both!!
User name:geoffshenk Location: San Francisco, Calif. Date uploaded: June 24 Views: 11 User notes: This is the line for the new iPhone4 that went on sale today. The sign said 7 to 9 hrs wait. This is a good sign for AAPL stock!
During his keynote on iPhone's new operating system at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Steve Jobs' was heckled when he tried to load the New York Times' site and it was slow to load. Jobs blamed the wireless network for the glitch.
Partner notes:Apple CEO Steve Jobs was thwarted Monday in his attempt to show off how clearly the newest iPhone displays Web pages, apparently because too many computers were clogging the wireless network at the conference where he was on stage. (June 7)
If activity on YouTube is any indication, the San Francisco public transportation system seems to be a hot bed for conflict, and the fact that the city's residents are a tech-savvy crowd means that incidents are regularly caught on camera. A quick search on YouTube turns up lots of results. A new video uploaded on Tuesday already has a whopping 1.6 million views at the time of this post.
Last fall, this video of two women fighting on the Stockton route of the San Francisco MUNI (the Bay Area's bus system) went viral practically overnight. It has 870,000 views to date.
Several altercations between the police officers and passengers of the Bay Area's underground railway system, BART, have also been video taped and uploaded to YouTube. Most recently, this violent scuffle between a rowdy BART rider and a BART policeman ended in the two shattering a glass window, badly cutting themselves. Most notoriously, the fatal shooting of a young man named Oscar Grant, whose death was captured on numerous cell phone cameras, spread quickly around the web and YouTube became a virtual town hall in which users expressed their anger and pain and shared their tributes to the fallen Grant.
The video posted yesterday shows two grown men -- one white, one black -- arguing in the back of a MUNI bus in Oakland, California. Things escalate and quickly turn physical while another passenger documents the whole thing on camera. Viewer discretion is advised as some strong language is used and violence breaks out towards the end.
Racial tension appears to have played a key role in this dispute, and many believe that the Oscar Grant shooting in Oakland also revealed racial prejudice; Grant was a young black man who was unarmed and appeared to be doing nothing wrong, and the officer who shot him was white. Many of the response videos uploaded to YouTube questioned whether racism was in play. The video that shows the two women - one Chinese, one black - attacking each other over a free bus seat also makes you cringe; there's so much anger bottled up that suddenly erupts.
Those who have ridden on a public bus as it transports people through the different neighborhoods of San Francisco may have experienced the unique mixing of cultures and classes on public transportation, perhaps unlike any other social forum. We continue to watch as members of the community decide over and over again to document these conflicts and upload them to YouTube so others can watch.
In San Francisco unique in the number of incidents and/or the frequency with which they are captured on camera? How often are racial tensions to blame? Do skirmishes like these happen on public transportation systems everywhere?
We're curious to hear from you.
Update: The older white man featured in the latest MUNI bus video is apparently the same man being tasered by the police in this YouTube video at an Oakland A's baseball game, reports the San Francisco Examiner.
Three pieces of infrastructure snapped on the Bay Bridge this evening, causing an emergency closure of the highly trafficked through-way between Oakland and San Francisco. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the pieces that snapped were two sturdy steel rods and a cross beam that had been installed during an emergency repair job to the bridge over Labor Day.
The closure of the bridge in the middle of rush hour caused massive traffic delays, and several commuters -- trapped in their cars for hours trying to get home -- captured the scene on camera.
CitizenTube is YouTube's News and Politics Blog. Here you'll find important breaking news videos from citizens; developing trends in the use of YouTube by news organizations, activists, politicians, and governments; and lots of other YouTube goodness. Hit us up on Twitter, @citizentube, if you see something worth posting here.
