After Giants’ World Series Win, San Francisco Erupts in Riots

mashable.com

2 11 2010

San Francisco is spotted with fires, vandalism and violence tonight; and the social web is showing us every gruesome detail.

Thanks to a few live streams and some citizen journalism, we’re finding out a lot more about the current state of San Francisco than traditional media would usually afford us.

The city’s baseball team, the Giants, won the World Series earlier this evening; it’s taken almost no time for the city’s ordinarily peaceful citizens to erupt in wild, rowdy and ultimately dangerous celebration.

While some people on the web are joking about hashtags and Foursquare () “SFRiot” checkins, others are listening to a live stream of the city’s police scanner. If you’d like to tune in, click this link, which will allow you to download a playlist containing the stream.

So far, we’ve heard unbelievable but nonetheless true stories: There aren’t (yet) enough police to control the crowds, and available officers are improvising as best they can while calling other agencies in for support.

Still, crowds are surrounding and attacking police (at least one one officer may be down), store windows are being broken, citizens are found unconscious, cars and at least one bus have been set on fire. From the scanner alone, we are being shown a picture of utter mayhem.

UPDATE: A squad car containing assault rifles was just broken into, according to the police scanner.

UPDATE 2: Six shots were just fired in the Bayview at Third and Hollister. Simultaneously, officers from San Mateo are being sent back home and the scanner activity is becoming less frenetic; it seems San Francisco police are beginning to get things more under control at around one in the morning.

But a more literal picture is appearing as people on the scene send in snapshots to Twitter. Twitter users are also sending in mobile videos such as this one shot at AT&T Park and this one from an unknown location.
You can see tweets reporting various acts of vandalism, police actions and more in this interactive map. Or you can simply follow the hashtags #SFRiots and #SFRiot on Twitter.com.

Here’s some video recently captured from 22nd and Mission, one of the hardest-hit areas:

And here’s footage from 21st and Mission, where a car drove into a crowd; the driver subsequently had his tires slashed and windshield broken and was assaulted briefly by the crowd before police were able to intervene.

Giants Stomp San Francisco, The Media Misses The Riot

letstalkmore.co.uk

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

By Manfred Lozano

One thing that you can’t fault the increasingly social nature of the internet for is its ability to bring people closer to the news and spread the word about what’s going on from the ‘man on the street’. That’s what’s been happening in the last few hours in the city of San Francisco, as riots have erupted on the streets following their baseball team’s victory in the World Series.

Following initially peaceful but rowdy celebrations following the Giants’ win, reports started flooding in on Twitter as well as numerous police radio scanner sites of violent outbreaks. Reports stated that there weren’t enough police on scene to suppress the crowds and other agencies were being called in for support.

Crowds were stated to be surrounding and attacking police, destroying shop windows, setting cars and buses on fire and civilians are being found unconscious. Updates from the scanners are stating that a police car which contained assault rifles was broken into and later on, shots were fired. Whether the firearms were actually taken from the car and/ or whether the shots came from these assault rifles is still unclear.

One thing that is really differentiating this riot from others in the past – the LA ones, for example – is the amount of accessible, on the street coverage through the social media mediums. The advent of the smartphone has given everyone the ability to spread the word of the events in their lives, large and mundane, and some users are even heralding this event as the ‘death of traditional media’ due to the way they have been using the platform to track the rioting city with the hashtag #sfriot. Foursquare users have also been ‘Checking In’ to the riot as well.

Although it’s hard to argue that reporting in this manner is unbiased, this kind of information from the people on the ground is certainly something that continues to grow with the evolution of the internet. Whether or not this is indicative of a larger paradigm shift in the way news will be reported remains to be seen, but right now we’re all hoping that the city of San Francisco heals itself soon and that there are no major injuries.

At the time of posting, there had still been no official coverage of the riot on major news outlets such as CNN, MSNBC or Fox News.

Giants win sparks high-tech ‘riots’ in San Francisco

CNN

November 2, 2010

San Francisco, California (CNN) — What do you do if your favorite baseball team is crowned national champion, sweeping much of the city into an alcohol-fueled frenzy?

For nearly 300 San Francisco residents Monday night, their first instinct was to check in on Foursquare.

The San Francisco Bay Area has long provided a suitable petri dish for online services that enable over-sharing. It’s recently been the breeding ground for Blippy, a social network that automatically publishes what you charge to a credit card, and Foursquare, a fast-growing mobile-location service for telling friends where you are.

The latter lit up when residents poured into the streets after the San Francisco Giants’ first-ever World Series title, over the Texas Rangers. (The Giants have won previous World Series, but as the New York Giants.)

Smartphone-toting techies created a few separate pins on the map to organize the chaos. The most popular was a makeshift venue called « Giants Riot On Polk St!!!« 

People on that page chimed in with tips, a staple feature of the site. Some gave a virtual wag of the finger, while others egged the demonstrators on. « Pick up cars! » wrote someone who goes by Sarah W. « Set things on fire! »

That they did. A live video stream from the scene of one of the intersections where people had congregated provided a window to an impromptu bonfire. The video, hosted on Ustream’s website, attracted a consistent audience of more than 400 after midnight Monday.

Many more followed along using an online audio stream scanning police communications.

More than 15,000 people listened in on the stream, with about 1,500 tuning in at any given time Monday night, said a spokesman for SomaFM.com, the website that hosts the scanner. That link quickly made its way around Twitter.

The Twitter chatter was organized using what’s called « hashtags. » Tweets documenting what people heard on the police scanner, saw out their windows or witnessed on the streets included the tag « #sfscanner » or « #sfriot. »

Those two terms were the most popular topics in Twitter’s San Francisco network around midnight Monday. « #Sfriot » was the second-highest trending topic in the U.S. and third worldwide during the same period.

« This is why we can’t have nice things, SF, » wrote Mike Monteiro in a popular tweet.

With practically every upturned garbage can or broken car window documented, police could rummage through Twitter to piece together what happened. Photos uploaded from the event are laid out neatly on a search engine called PicFog.

Tech blog Mashable, a CNN.com content partner, published a photo of what looked like a man setting a city bus on fire.

Six people were arrested Monday night, the Los Angeles Times reports. Police officials didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

An incriminating tweet or check-in could potentially be used against people who were arrested. But it’s unlikely that police would dig up evidence online to go after more people, said Robert Talbot, who runs the Internet and Intellectual Property Justice Clinic at the University of San Francisco School of Law.

« These days, I think reasonable expectation of privacy is shifting because of social media, » Talbot said. « If people go on social networks without taking privacy precautions, it seems to me that they’re vulnerable. »

Disturbios en celebración de los Gigantes

diez.hn

02/11/2010

La violencia se apoderó de las calles nocturnas de San Francisco después de que los Gigantes vencieran a los Vigilantes de Texas para coronarse campeones de la Serie Mundial de las Grandes Ligas.

Los sucesos han tardado en llegar a los principales medios de comunicación estadounidenses, pero las redes sociales como Twitter, sirvieron de vía para informar a la ciudadanía de lo que ocurría.

En poco tiempo comenzaron a aparecer las fotografías y vídeos en YouTube de los actos vandálicos a comercios y carros, y de fogatas que aparecieron en varias calles de San Francisco.

SON LOS CAMPEONES

Los Gigantes que comenzaron este torneo sin muchas esperanzas por parte de sus seguidores, ya que no cuentan con las grandes estrellas de antes como Barry Bonds, lograron imponerse paso a paso con ayuda de varios jugadores latinos.

El héroe del partido final en el estadio de los Rangers de Texas fue sin duda el colombiano Edgar Rentería, que logró conectar cuadrangular que valió tres carreras.

El gran pitcheo de Tim Lincecum contribuyó a silenciar los bates de los Rangers, que llegaron como favoritos a esta Serie Mundial.
El marcador final fue Gigantes 3, Rangers 1.

Informations

The San Francisco Giants are a Major League Baseball (MLB) team based in San Francisco, California, which currently plays in the National League West Division. They are the current World Series champions, having won the 2010 World Series four games to one. As one of the older baseball teams, the Giants have won the most games of any team in the history of American baseball, and any North American professional sports team.^[2] They have won 21 National League pennants and appeared in 18 World Series championships, both tied with rivals Los Angeles Dodgers for most in the league. The Giants have been invited to the World Series an NL record 19 times, but boycotted the event in 1904.

The Giants played in New York City until the close of 1957 season, after which they moved west to California to become the San Francisco Giants. As the New York Giants, they won 14 pennants and 5 World Championships, from the era of John McGraw and Christy Mathewson to that of Bobby Thomson and Willie Mays. The Giants have won four pennants and the 2010 World Series since arriving in San Francisco.

Los San Francisco Giants (en español Gigantes de San Francisco) son un equipo de Béisbol con sede en San Francisco (California), que actualmente juega en la División Oeste de la Liga Nacional de Béisbol (MLB). Siendo uno de los equipos más antiguos del béisbol, los Giants han ganado más partidos que cualquier otro equipo en la historia del béisbol.

Los Giants jugaron en Nueva York hasta la temporada de 1957, tras la cual se desplazaron hacia el oeste, a California, para convertirse en los San Francisco Giants. Bajo el nombre de New York Giants, ganaron 17 Ligas Nacionales y 5 World Series, desde la época de John McGraw y Christy Mathewson a la de Bobby Thomson y Willie Mays. Los Giants no habían ganado una World Series entre los años de 1954 y 2009 , convirtiéndose así en la tercera mayor sequía de títulos en la MLB, tras Chicago Cubs y Cleveland Indians (quienes, irónicamente, fueron derrotados por los Giants en 1954). Los Giants han ganado 3 Ligas Nacionales en San Francisco. El 7º partido de las World Series de 1962 terminó de una manera dramática en los últimos instantes, al ser detenido un gran golpe ganador de Willie McCovey. Más recientemente, un equipo de los Giants liderado por Barry Bonds perdieron unas World Series contra Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim en 2002.

Los San Francisco Giants son los actuales campeones de las Grandes Ligas, tras ganar la Serie Mundial de 2010 ante los Texas Rangers en 5 juegos y coronándose por vez primera tras mudarse a San Francisco en 1958.

~ par Alain Bertho sur 3 novembre 2010.

Publié dans émeutes, disturbios, riots