WP: Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized

[kskiska]

Many in N.Y. Released Without Facing Charges

Monday, September 20, 2004; Page A01

NEW YORK -- One late August evening, Alexander Pincus pedaled his bicycle to the Second Avenue Deli to buy matzo ball soup, a pastrami-on-rye and potato latkes for his sweetheart, who was sick with a cold.

He would not return for 28 hours. As Pincus and a friend left the deli, they inadvertently walked into a police blockade and sweep of bicycle-riding protesters two days before the Republican National Convention began. "I asked an officer how I could get home," Pincus recalled. "He said, 'Follow me,' and we went a few feet and cops grabbed us. They handcuffed us and made us kneel for an hour."

Police carted Pincus to a holding cell topped with razor wire and held him for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. The floor was a soup of oil and soot, he said, and the cell had so few portable toilets that some people relieved themselves in the corner. Pincus said a shoulder was dislocated as police pulled back his arms to handcuff him. "Cops kept saying to us, 'This is what you get for protesting,' "said Pincus, whose account of his arrest is supported in part by deli workers and a time-stamped food receipt.

Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York's was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34245-2004Sep19.html

[the Kelly Gang]

1. sue , sue, and sue the bastards

[The Backlash Cometh]

4. Let the people know.

This will only be the beginning if Bush gets re-elected. Remember, it's their due to destroy this country for profit.

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. This is gonna cost the NYPD more than just money

[primavera]

8. We hope it will

Frankly, what I find most alarming about the unlawful actions of enforcement officials against protestors exercising their constitutional rights is that no one seems to be doing anything about it. At the anti-inaugural protest in DC in 2000, I personally with my very own eyes witnessed police bludgeon to the ground peaceful protestors who offered no provocation whatsoever, right in front of a monitor from the ACLU no less, and as far as I'm aware, there has never been a suit filed or an officer charged for those illegal assaults. I continue to hear stories like this from across the country, yet what I never hear is any officer ever being charged with any crime, or even of any civil suits being filed. It just astonishes me that we live in a country where police can brutalize peaceful, law abiding citizens for no reason, in front of countless witnesses, and never be held accountable for it. We joke about John Ashcroft and his gestapo thugs coming to get us in the middle of the night to drag us off, but really how far removed are we from such a conspiracy theory when said thugs can without cause beat the crap out of innocent people in broad daylight with impugnity? What the hell does it take? Do they have to shoot somebody before we'll finally hold the police accountable? What am I saying? The police are already shooting people every day and still nobody seems to give a shit.

[Algomas]

9. Orwell speaks...

Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed-would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper-the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. "Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night-the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl:

theyll shoot me, i dont care theyll shoot me in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck i dont care down with big brother-

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down his pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at his door."

[faithnotgreed]

3. at least this is on page 1. late but at least its there

[TriMetFan]

7. It's on page 1 cause it's going to cost the city of New York big bucks.

[redstateblues]

5. Fascism Is On The March

[54anickel]

6. 'This is what you get for protesting' WTF? It is now illegal to

protest? And he wasn't even part of the protest? Guilt by association now? :wtf: