Spoke Too Soon!

Last week when speaking about the protesters in NYC, I said that I hadn't heard of any major disasters like what happened in Philly. I really should have put a [knock on wood] at the end. Well, now a week later mailing lists I'm on are being infiltrated by articles and letters from people that have been mistreated or have dealt with unfair situations by the NYPD during the protests last week at the RNC.

Joel Viertel, the author of this story, wants this information to be known and says that his arrest is public record. Anyone can contact Joel at McWawa@aol.com to verify the information here. His piece was a bit long, and there is no URL for it, as he emailed it to someone, who emailed it to a Yahoo Group I'm on. Here are a few snippets I thought were most important...

• A large percentage of the people arrested weren't even protesters. They were observers, passersby, press, you name it.
  
• Pretty much nobody was read their rights.
  
• A lot of people were never told what they were being charged with.
  
• People were held for anywhere from 12 to 60 hours before being arraigned. New York City only allows the police to hold detainees for 24 hours from their arrest.
  
• I spent 40 hours in prison before seeing a judge and was never told what I was charged with up until that moment. But I was told, point blank, by a corrections officer that we were intentionally being detained as long as possible so we couldn't disrupt W.'s speech.
  

And another victim of the NYPD...

There was a very distraught father on the news here several days during the convention protesting that his teenaged daughter had been arrested on her way to join friends to see a movie several blocks from MSG. Forty hours later he still had not been allowed to contact her and she had not been allowed to phone anyone (a basic right upon arrest). They never mentioned the final result, but there were hundreds of such stories floating around.

A friend who works for the EPA told me last weekend that his entire department has been taken off of work on all projects and assigned to work on items that will help the Bush reelection effort. Mind you, it is illegal for government employees to actively work on reelection campaigns during office hours.

You can find the URL here.