[kj] ot - land of the free

[Phillipps Marc]

>but only if  you don't wear face paint in public or express your 
>opinion......

Welcome to the police state . . 

Good article I read the other day about what's going on in New York:

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/03/protest/print.html

Anti-Bush protesters were tough and resilient all week. But in the end
it was the NYPD and City Hall with the upper hand.

- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Michelle Goldberg

Sept. 3, 2004  |  NEW YORK --  On Thursday evening, during the waning
hours of the Republican National Convention, 61-year-old Tom Roderick
stood outside the Criminal Courts building in lower Manhattan, keeping
vigil for his missing teenage daughters. Anne Marie, 16, and Emma Rose,
19, had been arrested 46 hours earlier during a roundup of protesters
marching with the War Resisters League. It was about 24 hours before
Roderick and his wife even got a phone call, and as far as he knew on
Thursday, his daughters still hadn't spoken to a lawyer. Emma Rose has
asthma but the police wouldn't let Roderick deliver her medical
supplies.


  "The Republican National Convention has trumped the Constitution, the
laws of New York state and common decency," said Roderick, a thin
Manhattanite with graying temples, dressed in khakis and a dark blue
polo shirt. "This is not supposed to happen in the United States."

  As Republicans inside Madison Square Garden praised the NYPD for
keeping order, grim stories of preemptive, arbitrary arrests, filthy
jail conditions and long detentions without access to attorneys
circulated among protesters, lawyers and quite a few ordinary New
Yorkers who were arrested for being in the wrong place at the wrong
time.

  In order to thwart a few demonstrators who promised to torment
delegates and cause chaos, the police adopted a zero-tolerance policy
toward un-permitted action most of the week. Whenever groups of
activists gathered, row upon row of riot cops would surround them with
orange plastic netting and often arrest everyone inside, including
journalists and bystanders. Police then defied state law by holding
many people well over 24 hours without access to attorneys.

  During the four days of the convention, a few dozen protesters managed
to make it into Madison Square Garden, including two who interrupted
Bush's speech before being dragged away by Secret Service.

  Outside, though, the police largely kept control, much to the relief
of city officials and Republican delegates. Protesters succeeded in
dogging the visiting Republicans almost everywhere they went and in
staging impromptu marches and street parties, but the cops were often
right behind them, ready to swoop in and shut them down. "The police
were fantastic," enthused Jennie Motheral, a delegate's wife from Texas
who compared the protesters to spoiled children.

  Friday, the New York Civil Liberties Union acknowledged in a press
release that he police generally treated demonstrators at permitted
rallies and marches very well. "Even with regard to some of the
spontaneous or non-permitted demonstrations, the police responded with
the necessary flexibility and cooperation that is essential to free
expression," the NYCLU said.

  But Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU's executive director, said that on
several occasions, the police overreacted and civil liberties were
undermined. "We're deeply distressed at the number of sweeps that have
gone on, especially on Tuesday, when hundreds were snared and arrested
for doing nothing wrong," she said. During the convention, the NYCLU
operated a storefront in midtown. "People would come in and ask, 'Where
can I go to protest lawfully and not get arrested?'" said Lieberman.
"We had to say to them that those are two different issues. You can
protest anywhere lawfully on the sidewalks of Manhattan, as long as you
don't block the sidewalks or use amplified sound, but that's no
guarantee against arrest."

  The mainstream media rarely takes protesters' complaints about police
mistreatment seriously, in part because activists are notorious for
crying wolf. Besides, many protesters announced their plans to break
the law ahead of time, which left the city feeling justified in locking
them up. Kevin Sheekey, president of the RNC host committee, was quoted
in the New York Times praising the NYPD for proving that "New York City
had the only police force to deal with a modern anarchist threat."

  In dealing with that "threat," though, police also came down hard on
many nonviolent people, including some who weren't breaking the law.
Several journalists saw this firsthand when they were caught,
literally, in the NYPD's net. Many reporters, including ones from Slate
and Newsday, were detained during the demonstrations. At least one
journalist was detained inside Madison Square Garden, apparently on
suspicion of opposition to Bush.

  Author Irene Dische was covering the Bush speech for the German paper
Die Zeit. Dische said she was sitting in the press stands with the
artist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman when police removed them
both from the press stands and questioned them about their T-shirts.
Spiegelman's T-shirt said "Pray for a secular society"; Dische's
featured the word "Bush" and Chinese characters. She convinced police
it said, "I love Bush" (it meant shit on Bush and flush him away) and
was allowed to return to her seat. On her way back, an usher handed her
an American flag and told her to wave it. When she refused to take it,
she "immediately felt a hand on my shoulders," she said, and police
quickly ushered her off the convention floor and into a station set up
inside the Garden. They called immigration officials to check on her
American status and questioned her for over an hour. She also convinced
them to Google her on the Internet to prove that she was a legitimate
writer. When she called her daughter, Emily, and spoke to her in
German, one detective barked, "You don't speak in a language we can't
understand here." Finally she was escorted to the street, with the
police, Dische said, "trying to make nice the whole way."

  Writing on the Christian Science Monitor's convention blog, journalist
Tom Regan seemed shocked by what he'd witnessed at a midtown protest on
Tuesday, the day organizers called for direct action and civil
disobedience through the city.

  "These protesters, while certainly noisy, had obeyed police
instructions down the entire length of the street," he wrote. "Now they
were being treated as if they had gotten wildly out of control, but
they hadn't ... At some point the police would just start picking
people out of the crowd and arresting them. From what I saw, there was
often no rhyme or reason behind who they picked to arrest."

  Indeed, some people were arrested on the mere suspicion that they
might be protesters. Ever since thousands of protesters on bicycles
snarled traffic last Friday, bike riders have reported being singled
out by the cops. On Wednesday, Kenneth Scott Kohanowski, a lawyer, was
riding home on Fifth Avenue from his office to his neighborhood in
Chelsea when he was arrested for reasons still unclear to him.

  "I stopped and asked the officer why we couldn't go down Fifth
Avenue," he wrote in an e-mail. "He told me to keep on moving and I
insisted on knowing why I couldn't proceed toward my apartment. At that
point, he shoved me ... then threw me against a magazine kiosk. A dozen
other officers then jumped on top of me. They then arrested me and
booked me for disorderly conduct ... I have never been arrested before.
The police in this city are out of control with the RNC in town."

  On Thursday evening, a freed protester would walk out of the Criminal
Courts building every few minutes to cheers from a crowd of several
hundred supporters. Many of those released were caked with grime; their
reports from inside did little to calm worried parents. Protesters,
they said, were being held for up to 24 hours in pens at Pier 57, a
parking garage on the Hudson River. The floors were covered with dirt
and motor oil. Several arrestees said they sustained chemical burns
from sitting or lying on the floor.

  Julia Gross, a turquoise-haired 20-year-old from Philadelphia, had
been held for 29 hours, 13 of them in a small pen at Pier 57 with 40
other women. Because there was only one bench, most of them sat on the
floor when they grew tired of standing. "I was lying on the ground and
I started getting welts," Gross said. "The next day they started
erupting and pussing out." There are two sores on her arm. One is
largely scabbed over. When she pulls back the bandage on the other,
it's leaking blood and some hideous yellow fluid. She was wearing a
miniskirt when she was arrested and there are more sores on her legs.
"Imagine that one but huge and bubbling," she said.

  Asked about conditions at Pier 57, Jason Post, an NYPD spokesperson,
insisted that protesters were spreading misinformation. "It's not the
kind of place you want to go for a week of vacation but the conditions
were fine," he said. On Wednesday, he acknowledged, the police
installed carpeting, suggesting that there was a problem with the
floors earlier in the week. But, Post said, "Conditions were adequate
prior to that." So where did the protesters' oozing sores come from?
"You'd have to ask them," he said.

  On Thursday, worried friends and relatives demanding the release of
their loved ones weren't calmed by police assurances. Eva Buchmuller, a
Hungarian-born East Villager, held a yellow handwritten sign saying,
"Free My Daughter Rebeka." Rebeka, she said, had been detained for more
than 48 hours. Elspeth Schell was waiting for her 22-year-old daughter
Phoebe, who'd also been arrested with the War Resisters.

  On Tuesday, the War Resisters had planned to march from Ground Zero to
Madison Square Garden, where they were going to lie down in the middle
of the street in a symbolic "die in." They planned to get arrested,
just not before they broke the law. Instead, they were rounded up near
Ground Zero as they marched two abreast down the sidewalk.

  It was preemptive. "I was at the march on Sunday and thought the
police were pretty restrained," Schell said. "But this is looking more
and more like a South American Republic."

  That may be an exaggeration. But the kind of mass arrests and long
detentions protesters were subjected to this week aren't supposed to
happen in New York. In 1991, a state court of appeals ruled that
prisoners in New York must be processed within 24 hours or released. On
Thursday, State Supreme Court Judge John Cataldo ordered the release of
550 protesters who had been held too long without seeing a judge. When
the Police Department failed to let them go, he issued fines to the
city -- $1,000 per protester still held by 5 p.m.

  The NYPD said that it was simply overwhelmed with the number of
convention-related arrests -- around 1,200 on Tuesday alone, and about
1,700 in all. That excuse struck protesters' attorneys as preposterous,
given how long the department had been preparing for the
demonstrations. "We believe the city of New York improperly and
illegally detained protesters," said civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel
Thursday night. "We believe the city's plan is to keep protesters
detained until George Bush leaves the city tonight. Some people have
been held more than 60 hours."

  Ordinarily, Siegel said, people arrested during demonstrations take
less then 10 hours to go through the system, and sometimes as little as
two hours. But he claimed the city has developed a pattern of holding
people for prolonged periods during multi-day protests in order to keep
them off the streets. As to the city's contention that the large number
of arrests on Tuesday created a backlog, Siegel pointed out that people
arrested for civil disobedience during the previous five days were also
subject to extended detention, even though there weren't enough of them
to jam up the system.

  Siegel is currently representing 33 people in a lawsuit against the
city stemming from the demonstrations against the World Economic Forum
in February 2002. Then, as now, protesters were detained for 40 or 50
hours. "We allege in that lawsuit that the purpose was to detain people
so they couldn't come back to demonstrate," he said.

  When he started getting calls about the RNC arrests, the parallels
struck him as obvious. He got involved, he said, when the mother of a
17-year-old Trinity High School student named Richard Prins called him
at midnight on Tuesday, saying she couldn't find her son and feared
he'd been arrested. The next day Prins' mother called central booking
to find out when her son would be released. According to Siegel, "she
was told that all the detainees are going to stay until President Bush
leaves."

  Thanks in part to Siegel's intervention, almost everyone ended up
being released by Thursday night. And in the end, the arrests didn't
stop thousands from marching from Union Square to Madison Square Garden
on Thursday to show, once again, their opposition to the president and
his agenda. "I'm still here," said Angela Coppola, a 25-year-old
anti-RNC organizer who was arrested Tuesday during an impromptu street
party in Union Square and held for 28 hours. "None of us inside had any
intention of going home after being released."

  Still, standing outside the courthouse, Coppola admitted to a certain
sadness about how everything had turned out. "The true tragedy of the
RNC," she said, "is that people were arrested for just contemplating
saying how much they hate Bush -- while the Republicans are in my city
celebrating how successfully they've robbed us."

  - - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Michelle Goldberg is a senior writer for Salon based in New York.




This communication may contain information that is confidential and legally
privileged. It is for the exclusive use of the intended recipient(s). If you
are not the intended recipient(s), please note that any form of
distribution, copying or use of this communication or the information within
is strictly prohibited and may be unlawful. If you have received this
communication in error, please return it to the sender, then delete and
destroy any copies of it. The Health Informatics Service disclaims any
liability for action taken reliant on the content of this message. This
communication is from the Health Informatics Service serving Barnet Enfield
& Haringey Health Communities.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://four.pairlist.net/pipermail/gathering/attachments/20040908/f53c9eb4/attachment.html