As you may be aware, Free Keene provides the Keene Police Scanner 24/7 audio stream as one of our methods of serving the community. You can listen live anytime, and many people were tuned in during Pumpkin Fest. So many in fact, it caused issues for our server and it went down for a couple of hours during the night. We got those remedied and were streaming again around 11pm (the stream jumped to around 100 listeners right as soon as I reconnected it, and ultimately peaked at over 340 listeners at once!) Though those couple hours of down-time are missing from the audio, all the rest of the scanner audio from Pumpkin Fest and the morning-after are now compiled into two handy MP3 files for you!
The anonymous activist who provided the files has also done the work of removing all the blank spaces from the scanner audio – making them much easier to listen to. Here are the files:
Pumpkin Fest organizer Ruth Sterling made international headlines this weekend when during a live broadcast from her event on Cheshire TV by local newsman Jared Goodell, she stormed onto the set, grabbed at his microphone and threatened to take him off the air. With over 100,000 views and climbing, the original clip is one of the top five most popular videos of all time on the Free Keene youtube channel.
Sterling was interviewed this morning on WKBK by Dan Mitchell where she complained that the original viral clip did not show the context of what made her storm the set. If you recall from the clip, she alleged that Jared had been “inciting” people, “alarming” pumpkin fest attendees, and “self-promoting”. As you can see in this clip which shows what came before the original, he’s doing none of those things – he’s merely reporting what he’s heard and reading a statement from the president of Keene State College. All I’ve edited out of the following clip is the commercial break, which lasted for about 1 minute:
After I got off-the-air from my live Saturday radio program (on which we discussed the initial Pumpkin Fest 2014 riots), I headed back down to the college. At the time, there was a helicopter broadcasting a message to disperse or be arrested. I arrived at the gateway to Keene State College – Winchester St. to witness a huge throng of police marching down the street. I quickly pulled out my camera and began to record:
After walking around the nearest building on campus, in full view of the line of police, activists walked onto campus and right back over to Winchester St. We continued walking west on Winchester and no cops said anything to us there. However, we again went on campus and came back out on Madison St., on the west end of the college. Here there were several police standing around the intersection and one of them told me we couldn’t pass, despite college students walking down Winchester St. immediately behind them. (more…)
Rather than only arresting people who were causing violence and destruction, the police were targeting people crossing arbitrary lines and partying on private property. In this excellent ten-minute video, Alex is right there when cops create all kinds of unnecessary mayhem: (click links below to jump to that part if you are short on time)
They shoot pepperballs at party houses on Winchester St – completely unnecessary – those people were on private property and not in the road. It’s arguable that pepperballs are useful to clear a crowd who won’t leave a street and indeed, blocking streets is one of the reasons the “disorderly conduct” statute exists, but the people at these houses were just enjoying themselves. The use of pepperballs in this situation is just aggressive.
Guy walking down sidewalk is violently arrested by a throng of cops – This guy is literally just walking down the sidewalk. He’s hasn’t threatened anyone and is not blocking the street. The reason he can’t walk down the sidewalk is, well, because the men with guns say so. The reason the cops decide to jump him like he’s strapped with a bomb is, because they can.
It’s behavior like this from police that alienates them from average people. This is why Cop Block is so popular on campus. Here are the students’ sensible responses to the violence that was visited upon them by the police:
“We’re not terrorists. We love America. We just like to drink! Don’t shoot us!”
There’s a reason why the young ladies in the video think that the police are “pieces of shit” (more…)
Some of the best independent video of the Pumpkin Fest 2014 riots that I’ve seen thus far is on the newly created “Pumpkin Fest” channel, which shows the scale of the mobs of partiers on various streets around the college during the day. Late in the footage night has fallen as the cameraman appears to be on the second story of a home on Winchester St. as he records a throng of police tromping in formation eastbound. I’ll have more from that scene from my vantage point at the traffic circle in a later post:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIu8FNXx5aI
The Keene Sentinel’s Kaitlyn Coogan captures a mob of people on Winchester Street taking down signs. A line of armored police with pepperball guns light up the crowd and send them running down the street:
Jared Goodell is a Keene native and local independent journalist. Yesterday he was the host for EIGHT hours during Pumpkin Fest 2014 on Cheshire TV, the local public access channel. Jared also put thousands of dollars of his own money into producing the all-day event coverage. For this amazing effort to cover the yearly festival (it would not have been covered on CTV without him), he is rewarded with an evening visit by Pumpkin Fest organizer Ruth Sterling who behaves in a ridiculous manner:
Sterling attempts to grab his microphone multiple times, as well as block the camera’s view of Jared, accuses him of frightening the guests of the festival and demands he stop talking about the riots happening just a few blocks away in the college neighborhood.
Since Jared is a newsman at heart, he feels obligated to report on what is happening in-town, and tangentially related to Pumpkin Fest. He defends his right to be the media and she responds by telling him she’ll “pull the plug” (which she has no control over) and that he should behave because she gave him the physical location for the CTV remote studio. As though she somehow was doing him a favor – he’s the one who spent over $5,000 of his own money to make the coverage of her event happen!
At one point in the beginning of the video, Sterling accuses Jared of being a “Free Stater”, this is the new pejorative to describe anyone who stands up for their rights. It’s not Jared’s first time causing controversy for reporting the news. Earlier this year he stirred it up for reporting from the scene of this Summer’s suicide and on the resignation of a despised school principal. Jared is not afraid to break the official city narrative of Keene being a perfect, blemish-free New England town, and is willing to take the heat. Keep up the good work, Jared – we’re all Free Staters now!
Pumpkin Fest 2014: I’d heard there were police with riot gear breaking up a party so I headed down to the college neighborhood yesterday around 6pm after a successful afternoon of handing out Foundation for NH Independence fliers and Bitcoin fliers. Blake Street was packed with people when I arrived, but police were at about a block away in each direction. I asked one house if I could get up on their porch to get a better shot of the crowd and he was gracious enough to invite me up into his room to get a shot from the second story. In the few moments it took to get up there, the large crowd had split and bottles were being thrown. While I don’t think the police should be arresting people for victimless crimes, this was actual criminality. People were getting hurt, property was destroyed and littered upon. Of course, because they have no obligation to protect you, Keene Police decided to stay safely down the street. Here’s video from the middle of the bottle war:
More Pumpkinfest Riot coverage to come here at Free Keene.
