UC Riverside Study Shows ‘Occupy’ Movement Caught Fire In California

The “Occupy” movements that started on Wall Street with a sit-in multiplied across the nation, but perhaps most notably in California, researchers said on Thursday.

University of California at Riverside’s Transnational Social Movements Research Working Group showed 150 “occupations” are now underway here.

Sociology Professor Christopher Chase-Dunn and graduate student Michaela Curran-Strange headed the study, which found that towns large and small in California have seen Occupy movements spring up in the last two months.

They published their findings in a report called “Diffusion of the Occupy Movement in California,” which identified 143 occupations, that are evenly divided between Northern and Southern California.

Chase-Dunn and Curran-Strange used social media, including Facebook and Twitter, to locate movements in the state. Some of them began within days of the original protest on Wall Street.

“When you think about the fact that Occupy Wall Street states on their website that they began on Sept. 17, that’s pretty impressive that West Coast towns — some of them medium and small — picked up on it almost immediately,” Curran-Strange said.

Occupy camps have cropped up in a number of Riverside County locations, including the city of Riverside, Temecula, Idyllwild and the Coachella Valley in the Palm Springs area.

Social media sites dedicated to the protests claim hundreds and sometimes thousands of subscribers.

In town of Arcata, a Northern California coastal community with 17,000 residents, the researchers found 3,000 of them were subscribers on a Facebook page established by occupiers and their supporters.

The researchers also noted that activists have a broad focus. — a hodgepodge of broad and narrow social concerns calling for bank reform, halting foreclosures, supporting organized labor and hiking taxes on the wealthy.

The growth of the occupations reflects the “depth of frustration that people feel about the recession and the austerity measures that have been taken by authorities,” the researchers said.