protest

This week is San Luis Obispo Pride, a celebration of the Central Coast LGBTQ+ community. Over the weekend there will be parties, drag performances and Pride in the Plaza, a free festival for the public with live entertainment. Some will also be using the opportunity to raise awareness about issues that continue to impact all communities—including the queer community—such as deportation, racism and gentrification.

Students and members of local activists groups gathered outside Cal Poly’s Winter Career Fair Thursday in San Luis Obispo. They were protesting the campus presence of U.S. defense contractors—like Raytheon—who recruit at the fair. The demonstrators shouted, sang, and held signs that read “Peace Over Profit" and "Divest From War."

But at previous career fairs, a much smaller group of students went inside to protest the same companies. They sat on the ground and sang songs. This handful of students was later investigated for disrupting university activities. The investigation was later dropped, and no one got in trouble. But it raised questions about what is and is not free speech at Cal Poly.

A handful of protesters gathered outside the California Men’s Colony prison in San Luis Obispo Thursday. The wives and loved ones of inmates say they are worried about a new policy change coming to the facility, and prisons statewide. It’s a program that merges two different populations of inmates; effectively ending the country's largest protective custody program.

On the same day Americans demonstrated across the country to protest migrant family separations, hundreds of protesters gathered in a Santa Maria industrial area, about a block away from a residential neighborhood. The group was chanting and singing in front of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility opened in the summer of 2015.

San Luis Obispo’s California Polytechnic State University, more commonly known as Cal Poly, has recently entered into a debate over "disruption." The university is heralded for its science, technology, engineering and math programs, as well as its "Learn By Doing" approach to education. Disruption is a term often tied to innovation and technological advancement in recent years, but the disruption campus officials are currently investigating is tied to how the First Amendment is being interpreted on campus.

In April, a small group of students held a demonstration at a university career fair at San Luis Obispo’s Cal Poly. Most of the students involved have discovered they are under investigation by the university for the protest. Cal Poly administration says they broke career fair rules; the students say it was free speech.

Hundreds of Cal Poly University students are protesting at this hour, frustrated at what they say is a lack of action on the part of university officials to deal with perceived racism on the campus. 

Over the weekend, hundreds of thousands of people across the country took to the streets to protest gun violence in communities and schools. Local March For Our Lives events coincided with a national rally in Washington, DC.

Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County was no exception. 

Demonstrators temporarily shut down a San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors meeting Tuesday, calling for the resignation of the county sheriff and reform of county jail operations and policies.

Students at Cal Poly and University of California, Santa Barbara marched out of classes and through their campus in the rain today in response to Donald Trump's inauguration as U.S. president.