A Liberal Is A Conservative Who’s Been Arrested
8 minutes QuickTime
Check Point “Dubya” focuses on constitutional violations by security forces and the brutal over use of pepper spray at the 14th & Pennsylvania Ave. inauguration parade route check point. January 20th 2005. This piece aired on Free Speech TV as part of the documentary Mandate?
Remember the disgraceful and brutal behaviour of the police towards peaceful protestors during the demonstrations at Bush’s two inaugurations in Washington DC? At the 2001 inauguration:
At a primary entry and check point to the Parade route and the location finally given by permit to protestors, the private Bush-Cheney Presidential Inaugural Committee working jointly with the D.C. Police and federal law enforcement officers prevented activists from entering, creating a highly provocative situation, in order to stop activists from being along the route of the Presidential motorcade.
At another location along the parade route, government agents provocateurs carried out felonious assaults, beating and pepper spraying peaceful protestors in order to disrupt their demonstration and assembly activities.
Elsewhere, hundreds of protestors who were marching to get to the parade route were surrounded on all sides trapped, and detained and falsely imprisoned by law enforcement officers with violence and force.
The naughty bad anarchists deserved all they got, according to some Bush supporters. But the courts saw it differently:
The D.C. police department agreed yesterday to pay $685,000 and take steps to protect protesters from police abuse and ensure their rights to settle a lawsuit over the treatment of demonstrators at President Bush’s inauguration in 2001.
[…]
The lawsuit uncovered evidence that the department had suspended rules limiting the use of force during the protests, had pressed undercover officers to infiltrate protest groups and had sought to provoke protesters and uninvolved bystanders by attacking them with batons and pepper spray.
Under the settlement, the department denies any guilt but agrees to change its police handbook to better protect protesters, adding a requirement that officers report the use of force during a mass demonstration and prohibit arrests without evidence of a crime. Officers assigned to civil disturbance units will be reminded of the changes in a new, mandatory 40-hour training course and annual refresher session.
[…]
The settlement, which comes as [police chief] Ramsey is preparing to leave his post, is the latest in a series of payments the city has made stemming from police conduct at demonstrations. In January 2005, the District government agreed to pay $425,000 to seven people caught up in a mass arrest at Pershing Park in September 2002. More than 400 people were rounded up at the downtown park during demonstrations against the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Several investigations found that Assistant Chief Peter J. Newsham, after conferring with Ramsey, had ordered arrests without warning or evidence of a crime — including of people who had nothing to do with the protests.
Even those friendly towards Bush were shocked by the brutality of the DC police , including this Republican who was also a party to the lawsuit:
Mike Shinn, a security consulting company owner who joined in the suit settled yesterday, said he was glad that the department would be forced to follow the laws of the country. Shinn, a Bush supporter who went to watch the inaugural celebration, said he felt he was in another country when police pushed him, other spectators and protesters against a wall and an officer hit him on the head from behind with a baton.
“I tried to explain what I was doing and ask him what he wanted me to do, and he hit me again,” Shinn recalled. “He said, ‘Do you want some more of this?’ I was just shocked, just utterly shocked. I thought: What in the world are they teaching them?”
Shinn said he hopes the incoming chief, Cathy L. Lanier, and the departing Ramsey learn a lesson.
“You can’t arrest people for just having opinions, as unpopular as they may be,” he said. “You don’t just arrest everybody on the streets because you think they might have an opinion. It flies in the face of everything that is America.”
If only more wingnuts were to feel the full force of the paramilitary police every time they exercised their right to free speech – that right that they like to boast is one that’s unique to the US – perhaps they might be a little more clued in to what it is the rest of us are actually protesting about.
There are a number of lawsuits pending re the police violence at the 2005 inauguration and the Republican conventions in New York and Philadelphia and we’re going to be hearing a lot more soon about exactly what it is the Bush administration has been putting the police and FBI up to.
Read more: US politics, Bush inaugural protests, Court settlement, Washington DC, Police brutality,
