Kris Martinez was one of the 700 men and women arrested Saturday evening as the Occupy Wall Street protests spread to the Brooklyn Bridge.
At just 24 years old, Kris has not only taken part in #OccupyWallStreet to capture the moments through his camera lens, but he is also marching for something he so deeply believes in.
The purpose of this movement is something that Kris lives every day.
We were lucky enough to chat with him after his eventful Saturday evening to discuss his experience, as well as get his insight onto what is currently going on.
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Why did you decide to protest?
There’s two layers to it. First, I decided that I wanted to cover a piece of time that I thought was going to be historically important.
The youth mobilizing the way I felt that they were on the 17th, the first day I went down there, I thought it was inspiring. So I wanted to keep coming back with my camera and get that message out.
I’m 24, I was a freshman in high school during 9/11 and the world I feel has just flipped upside down since that time and we’re all feeling it.
I graduated [college] in 2009 and it was the worst time to get into the job market and it’s just these little things that are adding up and you just feel the frustration.
The working class, the people that need it the most, are the ones that are bailing out these guys that are still doing alright, so I just don’t think it’s fair.
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Many young people are just struggling so much right now.
Young people are struggling and it’s really tough because tuition prices keep going up and so you’ve built yourself further and further in debt and when you graduate and you’ve done all the things you’ve been told your whole life that you’re supposed to be doing; go to school, get good grades, you’ll get a great job, you’ll have a nice little picket fence and a happy family, what happens when that’s pulled out from underneath you?
I think that’s what’s happening with the young people here. I think that’s just one of the main facets of the discussion that’s being held right now — this idea of the America Dream, is it real or is it just a dream?
A lot of people are starting to ask themselves that and starting to see what kind of reality they’d like to have.
How much time have you spent down there protesting?
I’ve been there since day one, September 17th. I’ve been trying to spend as much time as possible down there. I’ve been doing some filming. I really want to capture the moment objectively, I try not to delve too far into the actual organization, as much as I do try to just be an observer and just take in the cultural significance of what I think is happening right now. I think it’s extremely significant.
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Do you see this ending anytime soon, what kind of outcome do you feel there will be?
In terms of time, I’m not sure. I got there the first day and there was 1,000 people and the second day there was only a couple hundred and then Saturday (October 1) there were thousands marching with us and I just got word that the transit workers union is going to be marching and they’re 38,000 strong.
I don’t know exactly where this is going to go, but in terms of an end result — people are talking about goals and demands and I think that’s important. But I think what people are failing to realize is that for so long, people have been quiet about these issues and very complacent and I think this is showing the rest of America that people do have these concerns and they’re with you.
People want to be vocal and people are now going to start realizing, ‘Hey, through action, organization and discussion maybe we can come to these conclusions and to these solutions that are going to be for the betterment of the country.’
More than anything, I think this is a great forum for discussion.
It’s getting people talking, which inevitably is going to make people learn. I think this is the beginning of something much larger.
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What happened on Saturday when you were arrested?
Every Saturday there has been a big march, so this was the third one.
I anticipated going into it and just seeing what was going on. I had no idea where the march was going to go.
Every time I go on a march it goes somewhere else. We started heading towards the Brooklyn Bridge and I was in the front with the media.
I initially went up the pedestrian end and as time progressed, there was a fork and a bunch of people started going into the street.
At the time, I didn’t see any cops stopping them, I just saw cops walking alongside us like they always walk alongside us during the marches.
People started jumping over [to the street side] so I made my way over and I started to film. The cops kept letting us go, they were walking by us and they weren’t saying anything, weren’t trying to stop anybody, and then finally I was walking backwards taking pictures. I bumped into a cop and I looked back and there was a wall of policemen behind me and they barricaded everybody and they said that we’d failed to comply with orders and that we were going to all be arrested.
So at that time they had us blocked off with a police barricade with men, and then on the other side they had these orange fences and they corralled us all in together and they started taking people out one-by-one.
Everybody was complying with the officers, I didn’t see anybody get nasty, I didn’t see anybody get aggressive, I didn’t see anybody get physical. On the contrary I saw one officer, not all the officers, I have to say all the officers handled themselves with great respect, except for one officer, he had a white shirt so he was higher up, he started grabbing people and being kind of forceful in the beginning. It set a bad tone and everyone was really worried and not sure quite what was going on and then one-by-one, they started locking us all up.
I got arrested, I was sent to the 90th precinct in Williamsburgh and I spent eight hours there.
I got arrested around 6pm and I was there until 2:30am. I ended up getting three citations, two for disorderly conduct and one for blocking a road or something along those lines.
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Do you agree with that, do you feel you were being disorderly in any way?
I think that it’s confusing. We’ve been marching every day for two weeks and when the cops set a tone that ‘we’re walking beside you and as long as we’re walking beside you within those confines then everything is peachy keen and we’re all good,’ then I think it’s a little unfair, even if they did have someone upfront saying ‘you can’t be walking here.’
If they can make a wall of people to stop people from progressing any further along the bridge, then how come they couldn’t have had that at the beginning?
It feels almost as if they were just trying to create an example of ‘let’s get them out a little bit, let’s corral them all in’ and then make an example and say ‘we don’t want this to happen anymore, let’s make these kids look bad and we’ll say they were acting all crazy.’
Were we wrong? I’m not sure, but I will say I feel that they led us to believe that this was the norm and this is how things have been going.
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When all is said and done, what is the message? What do people need to know?
I speak for me only. I find inspiration in the fact that for the first time in a very long time, young people are mobilizing together and not for something silly or trivial, but for something of substance and for something that is selfless.
700 of us got arrested on Saturday for providing a better future for all of America, for the 99 percent of America [that doesn’t own the wealth], the cops that arrested us, the people that trash talk us, the people that don’t understand us and the people that are with us, it’s for our children, our grandchildren.
We were selfless enough to take that step, and I think it’s been a long time in American history since young people were at the forefront of that and I think that’s inspiring.
I don’t think we should get caught up with the ideas of demands and goals. I think we’re a generation that is used to the hyperlink and clicking through. Why have one set of goals, when we know so much about so many things? We should be focusing all those things that we know a little bit about and together coming up with ways to learn more about those subjects, things that we feel are oppressing us.
It is our duty to learn more. Let’s talk to each other and make this a forum for change. Let’s improve things from the ground up and not the top down.
