Occupy livestreamers detained at gunpoint by twelve Chicago police cars

Occupy Wall Street livestreamers Tim Pool, Luke Rudkowski, and Jeoff Shively, along with two other friends, were driving back to their apartment around midnight on Satuirday, after a long day covering the anti-NATO protests in Chicago when they were suddenly surrounded by twelve police cars and told to come out with their hands raised.

"Get your hands up! Hands! Fuckin' hands!" the officers yelled at them.

The police never explained why the men were being detained but handcuffed and interrogated them, searched their car, repeatedly slammed one of their computer hard drives against the car floor, and attempted to delete their footage of the incident before it could be archived at Ustream.

According to Firedoglake, Pool tweeted a couple of hours later that "the police were still following them on the police scanner around 2 am. They allegedly wanted the targeted journalists to announce where they were staying for the night so they could raid where the journalists were staying."

A few hours after that, however, Pool posted at Facebook, "We are at a safe place."

Firedoglake also recounts a similar incident involving other livestreamers and concludes, "In each of these instances, the police did not inform those detained why they were being detained. The police stopped them to find criminal activity that they could then use against the journalists to make arrests. And so far they have not been able to find any justification for arresting any of these people, but they have been able to briefly frighten and infuriate these journalists and also to impound a vehicle."

This video was uploaded by We Are Change to YouTube on May 20, 2012.