Before I begin, let me explain my stance on the demonstrations during the RNC. First, I hate Bush as much as anybody, if not more. I was busy during the RNC: I marched from Union Square to 8th and 30th on September 2nd, marched in the big march on Sunday the 29th, and screened an anti-Bush propaganda film, DC 9/11 - The Evildoers’ Remix, on the 30th. In short, I’m the opposite of a right-winger and my free speech rights are very sacred to me. The police were waaaaaaaay out-of-line in their arrests. But, from my POV, they warned people that the arrests would go down. It seemed pretty easy to avoid arrests if you kept your wits about you.

I’ve read two accounts by arrestees of (I would call it) a march at around 7:00-7:30PM on August 31st near Union Square on 16th street. I have to say, the arrestees sound very naive. You can read an account by Eddie Codel here and one by my favorite political cartoonist, Tom Tomorrow, here.

They both play dumb, especially Tom Tomorrow, but to me it was obvious that the cops were going to round everyone up and everyone had a good amount of time to disperse.

Of course you can argue whether or not it was legal to round everybody up (I would argue it wasn’t), but to pretend like you didn’t know it was going to go down is simply disingenuous.

This is what happened on the 31st on 16th street:

The march started at Union Square South with a band leading it. It was a pretty spontaneous eruption. Very exciting (photo). The band led the marchers up Union Square East — in the street — until the police blocked them at 16th. The marchers tried to go up on the sidewalk heading uptown but the cops blocked them so they headed down 16th towards Irving Place with the bulk of them in the street and some on the sidewalk (photo). I was following along in the median of Union Square East (photo).

At this point the cops blocked off 16th (photo). Now, at this time, it was obvious to me that anyone on that block would be arrested if they didn’t disperse. IMO, this should have been obvious to anyone. I saw some people slide through the police line and go down 16th and a superior yelled at other cops, “What are you doing? Don’t let any more people down there, let them out if they want out, but don’t let any more go down.” I saw the police letting people leave the block if they wanted. I left a few minutes after this so I don’t know how long it was until the arrests went down.

What’s my point? The police and city’s policy was out-of-line, way out-of-line. They should have allowed for more marches and demonstrations. But I don’t think the cops (on a whole) were out of line. They gave people time to leave. If I was one of them I might have thought that anyone who elected to stayed wanted to be arrested. permanent link to this post