The noon walkout and rally was reportedly attended by 5,000 people.
I arrived later, in time for the Initial Statement of Occupy Cal.
UC Administration apparently made no attempt to communicate with the Occupy Cal General Assembly in the afternoon. It was entirely peaceful and non-violent until police forcefully removed the initial encampment.
Three videos below show violent police action in afternoon [1, 2, 3].
I left around 5pm (dead battery), but things heated up again at night, drawing in thousands.
UPDATE — It’s still going on: livestream here. And here. ABC-TV aerial .
10:30pm What I’m hearing over the stream is that the Vice Chancellor came to speak and the tents have been removed, which was the administration’s objective. Protesters are free to stay overnight, just no tents.
1am: State-wide (or Everywhere?) Education Strike has been approved for next Tuesday 11/15.
Daily Cal reports at least seven arrested. More recently tweeted (12am): 39 arrested (Verified by Daily Cal, via UCPD Lt. Alex Yao.)
“Berkeley Students Clash With Police in Iconic Sproul Plaza,” The Atlantic
The first encampment at Sproul Plaza, before police moved in to remove it (see video below). Immediately after police left, Occupy Cal replaced it with new tents.
Police beating students (by Miles Mathews):
A couple tweets by Hard Knock Radio‘s Davey D
Watching students at Cal protest massive fee hikes.. 53% w/ a proposed 81% on top of that.. Police clubbing students left & right-
#fail
and a longer piece by Davey, “A Tale of Two Colleges…Unrest at UC Berkeley & Penn State & Misplaced Priorities”
UPDATE (11/11/11)
SF Chronicle: “UC cops’ use of batons on Occupy camp questioned,” 11/11/11
“But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers’ tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction. . .
“Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has served as a consultant to the Oakland Police Department, said he thought the campus response was ‘unprovoked’ and ‘completely unnecessary.’ . . .
“‘The way they were using it, you’re very likely to hit the groin or kidney,’ he said. ‘I think it is an excessive action and totally unwarranted in the circumstances we see on the video.’
(Note the similarity between this and what was reported 4 days ago in the SJ Merc about OPD shooting the videographer on the night of the General Strike last week, “Experts in police use of force shocked by Oakland video,” 11/7/11)
Update 2 (11/11/11)
The Colbert Report on Occupy Cal, hilarious:
AP: "officers pulling people from the steps and nudging others with batons" (click to watch)
UPDATE: 11/21/11
UC Berkeley poetry professor and former National Poet Laureate Robert Haas, who was among those beaten by UCPD, has an opinion piece in NY Times:
“Poet-Bashing Police,” 11/19/11
asians art museum's samurai blog 
UPDATE — It’s still going on: livestream here.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/11/09/1034915/-Occupy-Cal-Livestream
Video of police beating students at Occupy Cal
ABCTV aerial feed:http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/livenow?id=8425222(off the air 11:30pm)Global Revolution’s feed:
http://www.livestream.com/globalrevolution
[…] movement, and attendant police violence, has spread to the UC Berkeley campus. asiansart.org has a great on-the-ground description of the demo yesterday, including videos of UC police beating on peaceful student protestors. GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", […]
A couple tweets by Hard Knock Radio’s Davey D
“Watching kids at Penn State riot & over turn media truck as they protest firing of child molestor enabler Joe Paterno-No police beatings..”
“Watching students at Cal protest massive fee hikes.. 53% w/ a proposed 81% on top of that.. Police clubbing students left & right-#fail”
and a longer piece “A Tale of Two Colleges…Unrest at UC Berkeley & Penn State & Misplaced Priorities”
http://hiphopandpolitics.com/2011/11/10/a-tale-of-two-colleges-unrest-at-uc-berekey-penn-state-misplaced-priorities/
SF Chronicle: “UC cops’ use of batons on Occupy camp questioned,” 11/11/11
“But many law enforcement experts said Thursday that the officers’ tactics appeared to be a severe overreaction. . .
“Sam Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha who has served as a consultant to the Oakland Police Department, said he thought the campus response was ‘unprovoked’ and ‘completely unnecessary.’ . . .
“‘The way they were using it, you’re very likely to hit the groin or kidney,’ he said. ‘I think it is an excessive action and totally unwarranted in the circumstances we see on the video.’
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/10/MNH21LTC4D.DTL#ixzz1dPfkX6jJ
(Note the similarity between this and what was reported 4 days ago in the SJ Merc about OPD shooting the videographer on the night of the General Strike last week, “Experts in police use of force shocked by Oakland video,” 11/7/11)
http://www.mercurynews.com/news/ci_19284774
https://asiansart.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/opd-arrested-journalists-and-brutalized-another-veteran-city-hall-struggles/#comments
The Colbert Report on Occupy Cal, hilarious:
http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/402024/november-10-2011/occupy-u-c–berkeley?xrs=share_copy
UC Berkeley poetry professor and former National Poet Laureate Robert Haas, who was beaten by UCPD, has an opinion piece in NY Times:
“Poet-Bashing Police,” 11/19/11
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html
“My wife was speaking to the young deputies about the importance of nonviolence and explaining why they should be at home reading to their children, when one of the deputies reached out, shoved my wife in the chest and knocked her down. . .
“My wife bounced nimbly to her feet. I tripped and almost fell over her trying to help her up, and at that moment the deputies in the cordon surged forward and, using their clubs as battering rams, began to hammer at the bodies of the line of students. It was stunning to see. They swung hard into their chests and bellies. Particularly shocking to me — it must be a generational reaction — was that they assaulted both the young men and the young women with the same indiscriminate force. If the students turned away, they pounded their ribs. If they turned further away to escape, they hit them on their spines.
“NONE of the police officers invited us to disperse or gave any warning. We couldn’t have dispersed if we’d wanted to because the crowd behind us was pushing forward to see what was going on. The descriptor for what I tried to do is “remonstrate.” I screamed at the deputy who had knocked down my wife, “You just knocked down my wife, for Christ’s sake!” A couple of students had pushed forward in the excitement and the deputies grabbed them, pulled them to the ground and cudgeled them, raising the clubs above their heads and swinging. The line surged. I got whacked hard in the ribs twice and once across the forearm. . .
“. . .They had hit me hard enough so that I was sore for days, but not hard enough to leave much of a mark. I wasn’t so badly off. One of my colleagues, also a poet, Geoffrey O’Brien, had a broken rib. Another colleague, Celeste Langan, a Wordsworth scholar, got dragged across the grass by her hair when she presented herself for arrest.
“I won’t recite the statistics, but the entire university system in California is under great stress and the State Legislature is paralyzed by a minority of legislators whose only idea is that they don’t want to pay one more cent in taxes. Meanwhile, students at Berkeley are graduating with an average indebtedness of something like $16,000. It is no wonder that the real estate industry started inventing loans for people who couldn’t pay them back.
“Whose university?” the students had chanted. Well, it is theirs, and it ought to be everyone else’s in California. It also belongs to the future, and to the dead who paid taxes to build one of the greatest systems of public education in the world. . .”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/at-occupy-berkeley-beat-poets-has-new-meaning.html