War on Iraq

An Unenviable Situation focuses on police behaviour during the rally:

Whoever came up with the plan for crowd control today, it was brilliant, but disgusting. The cops created bottlenecks where there were none strictly for the purpose of keeping us frustrated, though we were not allowed to stand still. They could have opened and closed the cross streets to let traffic through and give free access to each block, but the city’s crowd control designers chose not to. They were afraid apparently that we would end up in mini-rallies on every corner, which happened anyway since they couldn’t move everyone. The cops themselves were assholes. I would have expected better, considering the makeup of the crowd. The first few times I dealt with them I was friendly, but after a while I stopped giving them the benefit of the doubt. The best that could be said was that the vast majority, regardless of race or gender, and most of them of course were white men, just didn’t give a shit.

Tom Tomorrow reports:

Just got back. Astonishing turnout despite the city’s best efforts. Had to walk from 42nd Street to 70th St. before the cops would let me over to First Ave., because the crowd was already so massive. The overflow crowd on Third Ave took over the street, out of necessity–there were too many people to be contained on the sidewalk. City would have been a hell of a lot smarter to just grant the damn march permit, as it was, you had people wandering all over the Upper East Side, unsure where to go, screwing up traffic.

UPDATE: Thoughts on the Eve of the Apocalypse concurs:

~10 million people around the world protested against the impending war on Iraq yesterday. I got out to the NYC rally and spent most of the day herded in between 53 and 55 Sts. on 1st Ave.

Blocked off streets and cattle pens everywhere made movement to, from, and around the protest site extraordinarily difficult. This is what precipitated clashes between police and protestors a little farther north of my position. “Safety reasons” were specifically cited as the reason for the pens, but they actually made the rally less safe and only served to heighten anxiety levels.

From Atrios

35,000 marched, according to Jak