Pattern of abuse

Convention protesters' civil liberties were violated in LA and Philly. Why isn't anyone paying attention?

What's happened to the corporate news media and the Democratic Party in this country? Has a decade of prosperity and political success bred complacency, a willingness to ignore repeated violations of civil liberties for the sake of keeping order? Or is it just that they don't care?

The police response to protests during the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles was nothing short of shocking. Riot-gear-clad members of the Los Angeles Police Department shot rubber bullets into a crowd of protesters during the first night of the convention. They made liberal use of their batons to intimidate protesters throughout the week. And they randomly dispersed groups of activists under threat of arrest -- on the pretext that these groups constituted an unlawful assembly, though they were demonstrating peacefully.

Media coverage of the rubber-bullet fest was immediate and dramatic. But much of it seemed to blame the riot on a handful of troublemakers who threw bottles and other debris at the cops. There is simply no way to justify the LAPD response -- which was to corner not just the troublemakers but all the protesters in the area, rush them with horses, strike them with batons, and fire rubber bullets straight in their direction. In the days after the riot there was little follow-up. Where were the editorials expressing outrage at the LAPD for having fired upon United States citizens exercising their First Amendment right to free speech? Why didn't the leadership of the Democratic Party denounce the police actions from the podium?

The protesters, a diverse group that included anarchists, environmentalists, Green Party members, and animal-rights, gay-rights, and prison-reform activists, were in LA to publicize their myriad causes. Nearly all were united, however, in a profound distrust of the Democratic Party, which activists say has become too cozy with corporate concerns at the expense of progressive causes. Regardless of any particular protester's message, however, police treated them all the same way: with a vicious disregard for their civil liberties.

There can be little doubt that the LAPD intended to stifle political speech. Just like the cops in Philadelphia during the Republican convention -- and the police in DC during protests against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

"What we're seeing is a horribly dangerous trend," says civil-rights lawyer Carl Messineo, who is one of the attorneys representing thousands of protesters in a class-action suit against the DC police department for its "pre-emptive arrests and confiscation of political material" during the IMF protests this spring. "This is a pattern by police departments across the country. The uniformity in tactics is evident."

In both Los Angeles and Philadelphia, police disrupted live satellite broadcasts of the protests by the group Free Speech TV. In LA, the police claimed there had been a bomb threat near Free Speech TV's satellite truck. They closed off the area and denied access to the truck. In Philadelphia, the police did the same thing -- but on the pretext of fire-code violations. In both instances, police shut down the group's broadcast of protest actions.

In Philadelphia and Washington, DC, the police raided the work space of the protesters on the pretext of fire- and building-code violations, and they seized demonstration tools such as PVC piping and materials used to make the gigantic puppets that have become a signature of this grassroots movement.

The police in LA surely would have raided convention protesters' work space as well, were it not for a courageous court order issued by federal judge Dean Pregerson preventing the police from entering the space without a warrant. Before the ruling, the LA cops had been taking down the license-plate numbers of people driving up to the space and photographing people entering and leaving.

In both DC and Philly, we saw large-scale arrests of protesters near the start of the demonstrations. In DC, 600 people, including bystanders and local residents, were arrested in a massive sweep just one day before the demonstrations were scheduled to begin. In Philadelphia, John Sellers, head of the California-based Ruckus Society, was arrested and held on $1 million bail -- for a number of misdemeanors. The bail was eventually knocked down to $100,000, which was still outrageous. Others arrested on misdemeanors, as well as a few charged with felonies, were hit with bail in the high five and six figures.

The arrests in each city kept people locked up throughout the convention demonstrations. In Philadelphia, a number of activists were actually locked up all the way through LA's Democratic convention.

These acts are nothing if not clear violations of civil liberties, but the press has done little but make fun of the protesters. This display of media cynicism is truly frightening.

One has to wonder: if someone had been killed during these protests, Kent State style, would it have been more than a two-day story? We should all be concerned -- under these circumstances, it's certainly possible.

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