Tag Archive for 'republican'

The Washington Post has an article today on the arrests of demonstrators in NYC during the Republican Convention. The article describes how a large majority of the people arrested by the NYPD were in fact completely innocent of any crime. It is not a crime to demonstrate, unless you live in North Korea or, apparently, New York City.

The keeper quote from the article is this wonderful quote from our Repulican Mayor Bloomberg:

Bloomberg has acknowledged that police may have arrested some innocent bystanders, but he suggested that it was partly their fault.”If you go to where people are protesting and don’t want to be part of the protest, you’re always going to run the risk that maybe you’ll get tied up with it,” he said on a weekly radio show on WABC.

What the f***?

-TPP

A firsthand report from a peaceful demonstration in Union Square Park on August 31st 2004 shows how the cops trawled, literally, the demonstrators into a sidestreet, blocked both ends of the street with orange netting and arrested everyone, after sitting them down on the street for more than two hours, then bused with city buses to temporary holding pens at Pier 57.

People were arrested in several locations of the city in exactly the same way.

Apparently the whole thing was planned beforehand, but when the arrested got to Pier 57, it was clear the cops had not planned that part too well or simply didn’t care about people’s medical emergencies, lack of sleep or feeding the detainees with proper food.

The detainees are the same people, who were held in custody too long and subsequently caused a Supreme Court Judge fine New York City $1,000 per detainee for not releasing them.

Funny how the democratic convention in Boston didn’t produce such “results”.

-TPP