re: #594 sattv4u2

At one point yesterday, a speaker from Washington, DC, told protesters how to break out of zip ties and handcuffs in case they get collared.

The protest vet, Ryan Clayton, 30, demonstrated how use a bobby pin to spring the cuffs open — while claiming he was “not encouraging people to break out of restraints.”

Plausible deniability!

I was once arrested at a demo, and they flex-cuffed us before putting us in the paddywagon. Since we were mostly middle-aged ladies, and nuns, they didn’t flex-cuff us very carefully; it was extremely pro-forma. (If one of us had made a run for it, they would have been grateful. They didn’t want to make the arrests to begin with.)

Anyway, as they were driving us to the station, one of the ladies discovered that she could slip her hands out of the cuffs, so she showed everyone. “Pam!” someone else said. “Put those back on! We are supposed to be cooperating!” So she did.

(At the station, they told everyone to take them off if they’d come off, and otherwise to let the guy with the snips remove them. One side of mine was actually tight enough, so I had to get help from snips man. This led to one of the funniest moments of my arrest, when the friend who was with me explained to me that she thought you could UNzip them, and tried to show me how she thought this worked.)