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Title: Police Squeeze Author: L.A. Kauffman Date: May 2000 Language: en Topics: police, political repression, New York City, Free Radical Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20021017050128/http://www.free-radical.org/issue7.shtml Notes: Issue #7 of Free Radical
I've been walking around in a white-hot rage for many days now, ever
since the New York Police Department collared 19 people from the Black
Bloc on May Day.
Apparently, it's now against the law to be an anarchist in New York
City - or rather, to look like one, or fraternize with people who do.
The day's main event was a march calling for an unconditional amnesty
for undocumented immigrants, organized by the Coalition for the Human
Rights of Immigrants and other groups. Upwards of 5000 people attended,
mainly folks from Mexico, but also from Colombia, China, and a dozen
other places.
It was a family-oriented crowd, with as many baby strollers as protest
placards. There was also a strong showing of support by U.S. citizens,
including anti-sweatshop organizers, religious progressives, and
puppet-wielding anti-capitalists from the Direct Action Network and
other groups.
All around Union Square, the starting point for the march, the police
amassed, literally by the thousands. Rows upon rows of cops in riot gear
stood in military formation everywhere you looked. Some were carrying
the suddenly ubiquitous canisters of pepper spray and tear gas; most had
big bundles of plastic handcuffs hanging from their belts, as a
none-too-subtle threat.
This obscenely excessive show of force was intimidating enough to
someone born in the United States (one lifetime radical visiting from
the West Coast told me it was the most militarized demo he had ever
seen); imagine the effect on undocumented immigrants who attended the
May Day march.
I found myself thinking about the appalling irony of it all. Thousands
of people had come to this legally permitted march to show their desire
to become U.S. citizens, to live under the protections of the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights. And all around them were the
trappings of a police state, in which dissent is dealt with through
force.
Suddenly, while we were all milling about and waiting for things to
begin, dozens of cops rushed the crowd and hauled off 19 people whom
they believed to be anarchists.
There was no provocation, and the authorities couldn't simply arrest
people for wearing black (they would incarcerate most of Manhattan that
way). So they went all the way back to 1845 to find a legal pretext for
sweeping anarchists off the streets: a law, originally used to squelch
the Ku Klux Klan, that forbids the wearing of masks in public.
Mind you, only some of the 19 were even wearing bandannas over their
faces. The rest were charged with loitering, on the grounds - I'm not
making this up -- that they were standing in the proximity of people
wearing bandannas over their faces.
Preposterous? Of course. But the NYPD doesn't care. They can keep you
for 30 hours or more in a filthy, crowded, airless underground cell
before you even get to see a judge or lawyer. They win, even if your
case is thrown out at arraignment.
This incident is part of a larger, disturbing pattern, which has
received very little public attention. In just the three last months,
there's been a sharp increase in the use of police power to stifle
speech and curb First Amendment rights.
One D.C.-based organizer of the April 16 protests against the World Bank
and International Monetary Fund had police show up at his door to
threaten him on a night when he and others were going postering, which
is legal in Washington, D.C.
Just the other day, I had to go to court with five other people, having
been caught putting up posters in Greenwich Village that advertised A16
and other events (this in a city whose streetscapes are increasingly
cluttered with huge corporate ads, many of them erected in violation of
local zoning laws). Our case was dismissed, but our time had quite
effectively been wasted.
Many people - even some progressives - lauded the Washington, D.C.
police department for its supposed restraint at the IMF/World Bank
actions. True, the crowds of protesters weren't indiscriminately gassed.
The authorities were more shrewd in their abuse.
In the days leading up to the D.C. protests, the police repeatedly
deprived us of our right to assemble, in ways that clearly hindered our
ability to express our views.
First, the police raided the Convergence Center on Saturday morning, a
day before the actions, evicting everyone on some flimsy fire-code
pretext and not allowing us back until the protesting was well over.
That meant no central point for information, no meeting spaces, nowhere
to create protest props or distribute zines and broadsheets.
Then, when people regrouped in a nearby park, motorcycle cops descended
on a legal training and threatened everyone with arrest if they didn't
disperse. All day long, vans filled with police in riot gear menacingly
circled the park, squad cars and motorcycles crisscrossed it, and
helicopters hovered overhead. If you can't meet, you can't organize -
and the police were doing all they could to stop us from gathering.
Finally, on the eve of A16, the police surrounded 679 people who were
heading home from a protest (against the prison-industrial complex, no
less). All were whisked away to jail in what even high-ranking officials
admitted was preventive detention - that is, designed to keep them from
the actions on the following day.
Organizers were resilient enough to deal with most of these
disruptions - finding a nearby church to meet in, and a union hall for
building puppets, and so on - but it amounted to a huge diversion of
activist energies.
It was also unnerving, and intended to be. Late on Saturday night, a
group of 15 or so organizers held a tactical meeting at an Ethiopian
restaurant for the Rebel Alliance (a cluster of affinity groups from New
York, Seattle, Florida, and numerous other places).
We'd all heard already about the 679 arrests, and as midnight came and
went, more disturbing news kept filtering in: One of our meeting spots
for the morning was swarming with cops; the National Guard had
commandeered a school building halfway between there and the other main
place where people were to meet.
By the time we wrapped up, we were all convinced we were walking into a
big and possibly bloody trap. We figured we wouldn't be able to assemble
at all, but would be clobbered before we got there. It was too late to
change the locations: We'd told many hundreds of people where to meet,
and there was no way to contact them all beforehand.
I'm a bit ashamed to admit I was utterly terrified, my stomach in
spasms; but so, too, were many organizers far more experienced than I.
Of course, in the morning, the meeting spots turned out to be totally
unguarded, and we assembled without event.
The episode was instructive, for it underscored how much of police power
is psychological. That's why the D.C. police have bragged about their
surveillance of activists, and why NYPD detectives went out of their way
at the May Day march to tell certain activists that they had seen them
down in D.C. It's why law enforcement officials from other cities and
agencies - including the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, for christ's
sake - openly accompanied New York's police brass on May Day.
They all want us to know that they're watching us: monitoring our
mailing lists, attending our meetings, even infiltrating our groups.
Indeed, in utter violation of the law, they ostentatiously videotape
every march and gathering they can.
And the message the NYPD sent by arresting the 19 anarchists was that
you can't escape this surveillance: Leave your face uncovered, and
they'll tape you; cover it, and they'll arrest you.
This escalation of police strategies toward our movements is new enough
that there have been few discussions of how to handle it. For myself,
I've decided to acknowledge that it frightens me, and work like hell not
to let it make me paranoid.
I think it's important not to be blasé, not to adopt the pose of
toughened political heavies who don't bat an eye at the sight of riot
gear. ("Hey, this is nothing - you should have seen what they did in
Seattle . . . .")
It's all bad: every single use of force to stifle speech, whether
through intimidation or incarceration. Past police operations - whether
against the Black Panthers, the Vietnam antiwar movement, or the World
Trade Organization protests - shouldn't be the yardstick by which we
measure abuse.
It's also crucial that we not give in to the temptation of paranoia. The
minute we start obsessing about who in our ranks might be a cop, or
whose telephone might be tapped, we begin closing ourselves to newcomers
and poisoning our movements with suspicion.
Secrecy is the hallmark of undemocratic institutions: the WTO, the IMF,
and the World Bank, to name a few. Our strength is in openness. (Sure,
there are small affinity group actions that must be kept hush-hush,
ranging from banner hangs to sabotaging genetically modified crops, but
that's a different story.)
For ultimately, what do we have to hide? We see gross economic injustice
in a world on the brink of environmental catastrophe, and we intend to
expose and challenge the responsible parties. We want fundamental
change - a revolution, if you will - and we know that those in power
will use every means at their disposal, from ridicule to police
repression, to stop us.