> This was super distressing for a lot of people, as those belongings usually included wallet, phone, and keys. So after you are done at Central Booking, you are basically left with no possessions or money, and no way to get into your home or contact anyone.
This is standard fare for any police department ever.
It took me about 4 months to get my phone back from the NYPD, which was fun.
I love it when white people are shocked by their first arrest, because it (unfortunately) means something might get done. The system sucks. Now please scare other white people about it.
It's unclear to me why race has anything to do with this. Are you implying that you expect non-white people to handle "their first arrest" more casually, as if it is something they are familiar with and know will happen?
If we really want things to improve, we need to stop complaining about how "white people don't see how bad it is for the rest of us." Focus on what we have in common, not what you arbitrarily perceive as what makes us different. The system is shitty for everybody. Your argument would have been just as informative and a lot more pleasant to read if it didn't begin by partitioning your readers by race.
I'm white. Systematic injustice has a funny way of being swept under the rug for years, decades and centuries when it doesn't inconvenience us or when powerful people of our race benefit from it.
Swaths of people go through this regularly or are targeted and treated, much, much worse than this guy for the sole virtue of being the wrong race. Somehow, many white people, especially those in the upper class, never have to see this injustice ever.
There's a reason MLK's strategy during the civil rights movement worked. It inconvenienced or scared white people into seeing the injustice of the system they are a part of and control.
Police brutality and injustice is a side of America we are privileged to be mostly excluded from. When it becomes our problem, the system at least attempts to correct itself.
As an aside, for many people I know, the whole police brutality meme really started brewing when it became common knowledge that cops can come into your house and shoot your dogs. It doesn't and didn't matter that has been going on for decades to those of the wrong race or religion, often with deadly consequences.
I don't think it's entirely unfair. I'd venture that in the US, black people (and likely other minorities) are much more likely to have heard about and clearly understand what's in store for them if they get arrested. Most probably have a family member or close friend that has dealt with this injustice.
Almost none of my white friends understand the terrible truths in the system beyond reading accounts like this in the media. I include myself among them. Part of it is probably population realities - when a minority segment of the population suffers the majority of indignities, it's more likely to hit close to home.
Yeah, I'd like to remove black and white from many conversations. White guilt feels almost vogue, I have to hear about it so often from white friends and colleagues. But when it comes to the criminal justice system...
The system is shitty for everybody and an appeal to a common humanity is absolutely critical for any reasonable expectation of humane social structures.
However, to suggest that the experience of the system is the same for everybody is naive at best. I read task_queue's comment more as the following:
"Societal structures do not change until those with more (social, political, economic, etc) power experience the inconvenience and injustice that people without the power to effect change experience on a more regular basis. That this is true is unfortunate."
Tell me more about how I'm the real racist for pointing out that the system is intractably racist.
If this makes you uncomfortable, you need to come to terms with history and the present reality.
We (white people) have been at the reigns and designed the legal system from the start to give us an advantage. I'd say we have to hold some accountability for maintaining a system we knew was broken for too long.
I'd also go as far as to say those with power (in America, well-endowed white people), who have worked hard to change the the legal system such that they get a Fast Pass through it, have a responsibility to fix that system.
That is the racists part. Some people are in power, they are white but that doesn't mean you get to slam white people anymore than you get to slam all black people for being criminals. Downvoting me won't make the former any less racists than the last.
This is the root of racial inequality in our justice system. No one is claiming that all white people are evil supervillians. But many white people don't comprehend the harsher reality people of color face when being arrested.
The comment "I love when white people are shocked" is a reference to the fact that "some people are in power, they are white". If the people in power are shocked by what it's like to be arrested, perhaps it will spark positive change in the system.
Show me where I slammed white people. No where did I slam white people.
I'm sorry if having to take responsibility for the system we've been handed and benefit from makes you uncomfortable.
But since mentioning race is inherently racist, we can go back to not mentioning race and pretending we're a post-racial society while the boys in blue continue to knock down doors and arrest every black person on the street corner because, by cop heuristics, they're all guilty.
It's almost as if being asked to acknowledge the racism of the system bothers you in some way. A way to get rid of that bad feeling is to put your color-blinders on and pretend society is race-blind as well. I can do that, too, and never once have to face the injustice of or account for the system I maintain.
I find these outbursts of genuine surprise and bewilderment amusing, in the best possible way.
What I'm about to suggest is not meant to remedy or suggest alternate remedies to the workings of the criminal justice system as it currently operates.
I'm merely expressing amusement at the colossal unfamiliarity of most of the generally law-abiding public
(Black, White, Hispanic or otherwise) at how poorly our system works, even with the best intentions of the law makers and policy wonks.
I can't but find people who expect an uniform carriage of justice, across all wealth levels, across all demographics and in all instances of law-breaking, to be nothing short of, deranged.
Not so long ago, I held such similar delusions of equality and fairness, albeit not to the same degree as some here on HN.
I always knew there was more than a little truth to the adage that it is far better to be wealthy and guilty than poor and innocent, in America.
Any speck of doubt cleared up after I sat in a courtroom to witness the pre-trial consultations of a high profile defendant in SF. In a criminal case.
It was a farce, to put it mildly. Just the resources available to the prosecutor on one side and the defendant with his high powered legal team -- which came with their own personal scribe to document the exchanges in the court, a videographer and the partner of the law firm among others -- on the other side, settled the matter for me.
I don't quite know if its standard courtroom protocol to call both the parties - the prosecutor and the defendant's attorney - into recess to discuss matters in the judge's quarters but I counted 7 such times they just left to talk behind closed doors.
I was floored at the deference with which the judge spoke to the defendant. The whole thing seemed like some closed door Congressional testimony with ranking members. I've never seen anything like it although I've seen the inside of a courtroom in unrelated matters before. I've seen common folk arraigned before. This was something else.
And mind you this was in proletariat-loving SF not some courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama or Angola, Louisiana. I don't know what one should expect in those places.
Try it sometime. Go to a courthouse and sit in one of the air-conditioned courtrooms and observe the proceedings.
> I find these outbursts of genuine surprise and bewilderment amusing, in the best possible way.
> What I'm about to suggest is not meant to remedy or suggest alternate remedies to the workings of the criminal justice system as it currently operates.
> I'm merely expressing amusement at the colossal unfamiliarity of most of the generally law-abiding public ( Black, White, Hispanic or otherwise ) at how poorly our system works, even with the best intentions of the law makers and policy wonks.
> I can't but find people who expect an uniform carriage of justice, across all wealth levels, across all demographics and in all instances of law-breaking, to be nothing short of deranged.
tbh, I'm German and while we have our own issues with police, conduct like this is next to unheard of.
I have thought of the police tactics shown in e.g. NCIS (shouting at people until they confess, tricking them into confessions, ...) as typical Hollywood exaggerations, but apparently I was blatantly wrong.
> I have thought of the police tactics shown in e.g. NCIS (shouting at people until they confess, tricking them into confessions, ...) as typical Hollywood exaggerations, but apparently I was blatantly wrong.
If anything, what you see on shows like NCIS are a romanticized, sanitized, whitewashed version of what really happens.
If you work in IT I am sure it can be arranged. It will take a bit of time though. Get a job with a EU based company (in the Schengen agreement), but in their local office to you. Work for a couple of years there. Then get a transfer to one of their EU offices. Work there for a number of years. Apply for citizenship. The process is of course more complicated than that and dependent in which country you pick, but that is the general gist of it. But do your research.
Although I would personally recommend that you stay where you are and join a movement to change your country.
I think part of it is that in Italy, and I'd guess in Germany too... well, we have "being a police state" in living memory, so nobody wants to start being THOSE guys again. It keeps police-state tactics in check.
Well, Italians aren't just very patient at organising - so police will deal with those situations more impulsively:
"Once arrested, protesters, including five Britons, were taken to a police barracks where they were beaten again, sprayed with asphyxiating gas, threatened with rape and forced to sing fascist-era songs."
> I can't but find people who expect an uniform carriage of justice, across all wealth levels, across all demographics and in all instances of law-breaking, to be nothing short of deranged.
To be honest, the US is particularly bad in that regard.
From a UK law enforcement perspective - completely illegal if it were over here. Not only can you only keep property being used as evidence - which your mobile phone could be - but a risk assessment is conducted at the end of detention to make sure the detainee can get home safe, which would definitely include making sure they have cash/medication/etc, and making sure they're not suicidal.
But yeah, coming from the UK, this whole thing strikes me as a little mad. But I suspect the author is omitting some details for dramatic effect. It would very much surprise me if it wasn't made very clear what she was being arrested for, and the officer explained her rights etc. I'm also sceptical about the "u turns to show off" - in the UK, all police vehicles have incident recorders, so showing off for shits and giggles is dangerous and likely to get you fired. It#s I'd be surprised if there weren't similar devices. It's also made exceedingly clear you don't post pictures on duty in social media unless it's approved etc.
Nonetheless, sounds all very horrible, and it shouldn't be. I like to think we do it a lot better.
> for every one of the 120+ of us in holding, there was also a cop who was waiting there too, being paid overtime and trying to get our paperwork processed so that they could go home
Cops being paid overtime is a tremendous conflict of interest motivating them to arrest and to process slowly.
I doubt very seriously that any cop does not find the manual paper entry and time wasted a good thing. More than likely they wanted to go home just as bad as the "perps."
But it is a potential conflict of interest, hence it is something worth addressing, no? Especially it's in the best interests of both the cops and the people.
Then again, you could be seen as punishing the cops for making a (possibly good) arrest by forcing them to spend long hours processing paperwork and not getting paid. Though, I do agree that the current situation is stacked in a bad way.
NYPD needs to be disbanded. If you have officers repeating the same conduct one just got charged with depraved heart murder for, it's out of control.
This stuff is simple enough. Get out of your escort, stand among the other normal people and do some dogfooding of the police experience. I guess nobody higher up wants to spend the day doing that, because at the end of it there wouldn't be anyone still employed at NYPD.
When they expressed insubordination by turning their backs on the Mayor, that signalled to me that they have no respect for authority. This is exactly the kind of people that do not belong on a police force. I can't imagine why they weren't all fired. They certainly don't deserve any of the respect that they get, nor their pensions.
Every single one of those officers should have been fired on the spot. I'm no fan of de Blasio, but he's the democratically elected mayor of New York. Turning your back to him is turning your back to the people who elected him.
I would have loved to see that happen... but that's probably not practical, considering the shear amount of cops who did that. This video makes it seem like there was a good thousand of them or something: http://nypost.com/2015/01/04/cops-again-turn-their-backs-on-...
Ignoring for the moment that the union certainly wouldn't allow such firings this also seems like a 1st amendment issue. What does the court have to say about expressions of speech in this context?
The military forbids its members from making political statements while in uniform. The police should probably have the same rule. If you want to campaign for/against someone, do it out of uniform.
On the other hand, when the mayor shows up at a police funeral to give a speech while the press is there, that's clearly a political statement. It doesn't seem fair to use the police as props (implying their support) while you have a rule saying they can't make a statement in reply.
The first amendment doesn't apply to my employer as I work for a private company, so you are right there. But is that true for cops who work for the government? I'm honestly not sure.
When you are on the job for the government, you are acting as a government representative and not a private person. You can be fired for what you say while on the job.
However, the police unions would never allow such a thing.
First of all, we aren't even talking about the police saying anything out loud. We're talking about them turning their backs on the mayor while at a funeral which, while not verbal speech, is clearly a form of expression that would fall under the 1st amendment.
Second, I suspect that a majority of the officers in question were not on the job while attending that funeral.
The first amendment does apply to your employer in that he can't muzzle you, or have you beaten up from speaking out. The worst your employer can do is fire you, which happens often, and that's fine.
In fact my employer can muzzle me. I've signed various documents over the years that prevent my from speaking about my employer (or past employers) in various ways.
And the fact that my employer can't have me beaten up has nothing to do with the 1st amendment. That would be assault no matter what their motivation.
The fact that your employer can't have you beaten up is because assault is illegal, not because of your first amendment rights. The first amendment protects you from being thrown in jail by the government for your speech.
Calling it insubordination is too generous. Turning their backs on their mayor in such setting is downright juvenile. It shows level of deep rooted rotten mob mentality that permeates the force.
It seems peculiar to American discourse that wrongdoing in a job should be countered by firing rather than retraining or reform.
Anyway, police departments generally have a hard enough time already finding and keeping staff. Firing them en masse requires replacing them en masse. Who polices the city while you're looking for and training a heap of new recruits?
And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.
> And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.
Oh, they still have rights when in uniform. Eg at the most basic, the right not to be killed. But you are right about the free speech. Just like any other employee in their capacity as an employee, only more so.
In the first link, the case is about a memo written as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (district attorneys don't wear uniforms, and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).
In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person". It's abundantly clear that these police turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral over a political stoush between the parties are not acting as voices of the government. No reasonable person would even remotely think that the police turning their back on the mayor is 'what the government message is'. Those police are clearly not 'speaking' in an official government capacity (and literally are not speaking at all).
I have no great love for the police, but the correct path forward is a fair view, not a knee-jerk 'fire them all on principle'. This thread is full of knee-jerk hysteria, but the irony is that so many people are calling for an end to multiple people's careers because, while not on duty, the were literally standing still while facing the incorrect direction. Ironic because it's supposedly a reaction against undue application of power, and yet the punishment for facing the wrong way is termination, regardless of whether or not that officer has abused power elsewhere.
> In the first link, the case is about a memo written on duty as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).
The facts are not identical, but the facts are sufficiently similar that you could cite that case as precedence for arguing that the facts in question here should be treated similarly. The lawyer I linked to certainly thinks so. Are you a lawyer?
> In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person".
You took that out of context. "Person" here means the private person, not the cop representing himself as a cop. The paragraph goes on to say, "the speech of a person who presents himself in his official governmental capacity is no longer the individual’s free speech, but the official person’s speech. And the latter is not free."
Speaking of taking things out of context, did you read the rest of my paragraph, which talks about private speech versus official capacity, and matches the context surrounding my quote from the article?
in his official governmental capacity were the words - the funeral/protesting police were not on the clock on active duty, and as I said, no-one sane would confuse their message with a governmental message, official or unofficial.
Are you a lawyer?
?
It's clear neither of us are. So what? You're still misreading the second article re: private vs offical personage. That article is not saying what you're claiming it says. And as a result, the first link you provided is also not supporting your claims. The lawyer you linked to says absolutely nothing about uniforms - the term (and concept) 'uniform' appears nowhere in the article, but it does talk about the loss of freedom of speech when speaking in an official capacity.
And no, 'in uniform' is not the same as 'official capacity'. In none of these cases are they equivalent: the district attorney doesn't wear a uniform; Novara's phone call was about abusing his official capacity, and he could have been in the nude when he called, for all it mattered; the police turning their backs at the funeral are clearly not acting as a government voice and couldn't be confused to be doing so.
There are limits. You probably wouldn't object to a police officer being fired when it's discovered they have 5,000 posts on Stormfront expressing solidarity for their Aryan brothers in their struggle against multicultural impurity.
These police officers expressed contempt in an organized, planned way for anyone who would hold police officers accountable for murders committed on the job. They essentially declared that they expect 100% support from their boss in the executive branch, no matter the illegality of their conduct, and committed to staging a standing strike in protest, and to publicly shunning their boss at a funeral. It's a power play that a nation of rights & laws cannot permit, if it wants to remain one.
You know what? We can find other people to be police officers. Ones which aren't so abusive of the people they're supposed to be serving, and so privileged to a lack of consequences for this abuse, that they're on the edge of a coup against the elected civilian government.
Are you serious? Members of the police force are prevented from to expressing their opinion while in uniform, they are sworn to duty. If they do it anyway, that way lie the Freikorps of the Weimar Republic. As the grandparent says, these guys need the equivalent of a dishonourable discharge.
Yes, a peaceful, static protest by simply facing the other way while uniformed but off the clock - at a funeral for a colleague - is totally the basis of a new Nazi state and the tens of millions of deaths it caused.
What would you expect would happen to you if you made such a brazen, public display of disrespect against your executive management? Would you have your job after?
They certainly could have gone on strike, when they were not on the clock.
They have strong unions. That allows them lots of things regular workers don't get. Unionized workers get these kinds of benefits --not that I agree with unions, as I think they are past their expiration date, but the strong ones provide great extra-work related benefits.
Similarly longshores get pretty sweet benefits too.
Dock work is pretty backbreaking - I'm in favor of people who do that year round, rather than four weeks to make some extra cash for the summer one time like I did, getting good pensions and good health care. You only have one spine and it's gotta last you a lifetime.
It involves a couple of cranes and a lot of moving stuff that's too light to justify bringing the crane over but still seriously heavy, at least where I was (Italy).
I don’t think there is too much non-containerized goods coming in through the major US ports these days. Handling goods via small ports are still back-breaking work around the world though.
Yes, they should be free to express their opinions. But free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. One could make a case that that sort of behavior could be considered insubordination and grounds for termination.
> Yes, they should be free to express their opinions. But free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.
That's bad analysis. Free speech means freedom from government-imposed consequences, and since their employer is the government, being fired would be a government-imposed consequence. (For the same reason, public universities cannot discipline students for their protected speech.) Rather, the correct reason these cops should be fired is because they legally do not have the right of free speech when in uniform - see my other comment up-thread.
Fair enough, my analysis wasn't sufficiently specific. I agree that gov't employees should be free from government-imposed consequences if they are critizing policy. In contrast directly disregarding one's boss, while working in an official capacity, should not necessarily be free from government-imposed consequences (i.e., that should be a sanctionable offense). Obviously there's a divding line betwen the two, so it depends where that line is drawn (and where one places the actions of those officers on that spectrum).
Your comment provoked a lot of discussion here, but no one's mentioned the more alarming behavior during that time: changing arrest patterns as a form of protest.
Perhaps it time someone built a web site where the opinions, comments, and especially actions/votes, of every politician running for office, from City Council on up, were tracked.
Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.
How about try to increase voter turnout first?
No amount of public education and politician tracking will be useful if only 1/3 of eligible voters actually vote.
Low turnout is an acceptable response to an inefficient system where majoritarianism, gerrymandered districts, ballot access laws, etc. culminate in a meticulous engineering of the odds being stacked against the voters.
Though, for some reason, voting and "democracy" elicit such warm conditioned feelings that people are willing to desperately scrape for examples of whatever small local victories they've secured in order to justify that it's worth going through the whole jungle. Electoral reform, though? Dead end.
In my mind the issue is not absolute turnout but representative turnout. If only 1% of people voted but they were a good representation of the varied interests of the population, that would be just fine.
The problem today is that certain groups (poor, young, ethnic minorities) are less likely to vote and thus have less of a voice as a group. There are systematic changes that could be made to encourage more representative voting, such as easier voter registration practices and a national voting holiday. Australia even imposes a small fine for not voting, which surely would not sit well with many in America but would probably be a good thing for our republic.
These things are not so separate as you portray, voter turnout can increase when people learn the people governing them are total dipshits and bullies. There are a lot of motivating reasons, and people are different.
> Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.
Close to this is who's paying for their opinion, and there's a browser plug-in for that: http://allaregreen.us
Plug-ins are nice for us concerned techno-citizens, but most people don't care and it won't change things directly that fast. I think the media needs to do its job of informing us rather than entertaining us, and schools need to train vigilant citizens rather than compliant ones.
It's ridiculous that they're allowed to waste so much of our time, taking hours to fill out paperwork with pen and paper as if it's the 20th century. That needs to change. And police officers taking selfies with the people they arrested and boasting about it on social media should be arrested. So fucking unprofessional.
> The police officers in the front of the wagon were taking selfie videos of the crazy race-car style driving and posting to Snapchat stories that they shared with each other and boasted about openly in front of us, laughing.
Mind blowing. The behavior part of the nation is completely up in arms about, they still see fit doing.
It's out of print and kind of hard to find, but if you can get a copy of "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner [1], it is well worth it. (Don't confuse it for the at least 10 other books whose titles start with "Rough Justice"...).
Heilbroner was a fresh law school graduate who took a job as a New York D.A., and then wrote this book about his time there. He started out handling misdemeanors, and there are a LOT of those. There's basically an assembly line, running all day and all night, to bring in those who have been arrested, get their paperwork to a D.A. for charging, get the arresting officer in to make a statement, and getting a hearing before a judge where the defendant usually pleads guilty and gets a fine.
The Public Defender has a similar assembly line going.
When his shift would start, he describes walking into the office, stepping over or around all the officers sleeping in the hall waiting to have their statements taken, then picking up all the cases that the previous shift was working on when their shift ended. Often he'd end up in court with a stack of cases he'd never seen, and have to frantically work to read the notes from the previous shift and skim the officer's statement as the case was being called.
When his shift ends, the cases he's working on are handed off to someone on the next shift, and almost always will be resolved by the time his next shift comes around. So there is no engagement with the case, he's just a cog in the machine, processing his pieces of paper as the pass through, and occasionally taking statements from officers, and reading from these pieces of paper in front of a judge.
Eventually he gets to handle felony cases, which for both the D.A.s and the Public Defenders are more like what they had in mind when they were in law school imagining what their jobs would be like--taking a case all the way from charging through to a trial, and actually making serious legal arguments.
"My arresting officer walked me out the door and down the street past the barricade, where there were volunteers from New York Lawyers Guild waiting to provide information on legal resources, as well as donuts and coffee."
That must've been a sight of relief. What a horrible experience everyone had to go through. This is nothing short of intimidation tactic.
I don't know how I feel about that. I mean on the one hand, it feels like ambulance chasing, but on the other, they're providing the exact thing everyone leaving those cells needed. Food, drink, legal advice.
Do you think turf wars start with competing law-firms over that spot?
Their work is pro-bono and the engagement technically starts a bit earlier than leaving jail. The lawyers guild is also the group that fields observers to record what demonstrators/police have actually done in protests.
Also the coffee/donuts are usually a separate set of people, lay volunteers up in the middle of the night trying to keep track of people to make sure they're processed quickly enough, or to give them said coffee/donut or a couple of bucks to catch the subway home. The keyword you're looking for is "jail support" http://organizingforpower.org/jail-support-solidarity/
As long as the work is pro-bono (which I assume it would be), I welcome this kind of ambulance-chasing. I see it as a checks and balance mechanism against police power abuse.
On the other hand, tax payers are always the losers because they have to pay for both police salary, prosecutor salary, and any legal settlement money for lawyers.
"...and the metal bench was designed to be cold and uncomfortable."
Yep. I'm sure they went out of their way just to make her uncomfortable. From reading the article, I picked up on a person that steps outside just hoping to be offended.
it depends on the states. Some states offer more protection for applicants than others. It also depends on position too.
Basically, any arrest record will stay on your record for number of years including ones where the charges were eventually dropped. But in many states, employers are either disallowed or discouraged from looking at it.
If there was conviction, it will stay with you. There is no way getting around that and that will jeopardize your future employment prospect.
Being arrested at something like this is likely to result in a fine at most. The author notes that he was eventually charged with a traffic obstruction violation. Basically, jaywalking.
The arrest may show up on a background check. I think it would depend on state-level laws about how public the proceedings are. But no one would give it much weight. Of course, if you're arrested every weekend for something like this, they might.
You can be "briefly" (up to a day, and in some places up to the whole weekend if you are processed on Friday night) detained for pretty much any reason other than no reason.
One time, I was detained for three hours on suspicion of DUI because I was on my front porch with my car keys in my pocket... and not a drop of alcohol or drugs in my system, execept I was woozy from sleep deprivation.
Eventually they had me pee in a cup and then let me go. Since we talked IT with the medical person that was there, and he got a few tips out of me, I billed the PD for time at my consulting rate, and to my surprise six months later they paid the bill.
You can bill them? Surely you have to inform them beforehand that any further conversation about IT will be considered as a paid consultation, i.e. make a verbal agreement.
From what I've read, there had been plenty of warnings all day.
>The group was on East 17th Street about halfway down the block when police took a stand and ordered protesters to get on the sidewalk. Before the march, while the group was in Union Square, police handed out flyers and used loudspeakers to warn protesters that they would be arrested if they didn't stay on the sidewalk.
I mean, look at it that other way. People should not be able to openly obstruct traffic. If I were to go run out in the middle of Broadway and block traffic, I would probably be arrested. Just because someone is "protesting" doesn't give them free reign to violate the laws.
> You may be able to march in a public street (as opposed to on a sidewalk) in some circumstances. To march in a street, you must obtain a permit from the Police Department. If you expect to have fewer than 1,000 people in your march, you can apply for a permit at the precinct in which the march will originate. If you expect 1,000 people or more or you prefer to use mail, send your application to: NYPD Investigation Review Section, 300 Gold St., Room 305, Brooklyn 11201. You can download a permit application from the front of the NYPD’s website
The right to peaceable assembly in the First Amendment of the Constitution SHOULD mean that the government cannot require a permit to do so (otherwise, it wouldn't be a RIGHT).
If a large number of people want to get from point A to point B, even on foot, an accommodation of normal traffic laws should be made to allow that.
Why the hell are police arresting peaceful protestors?
If I'm reading what you're saying correctly, this is EXACTLY how it works.
The protesters were allowed to peacefully assemble in Union Square. The protesters were allowed to peacefully march on the sidewalk to anywhere they wanted to go in the city.
What the protesters were NOT allowed to do is obstruct traffic and walk in the middle of the street without a permit. The people that were arrested were the ones that were walking on the streets and blocking traffic.
You only need a permit if you intend to march on the streets. It's the same as you or I needing a permit to host a parade through Midtown.
I agree, it's not a right if you have to ask permission first. OTOH I can see why cities require it because as another comment pointed out a random guy could sit/stand in the middle of the street and call it a protest but I still feel there are better ways to address that other than requiring a permit. A permit requires a level of planning that is not needed for a lot of these protests that get organised over social media and the like.
Unlikely. NYPD had been blasting the audio warning from LRAD trucks that people protesters in the streets would be arrested from the beginning of the rally all the way through the arrests.
It's unlikely that a protester missed one of the many forms of warnings (flyers, LRAD, verbal, etc) used in this case.
Yeah, it's pretty bizarre. Protesters are often arrested, held for 12 hours or so, then released without charges. Another thing I don't think the author mentioned is they often make you sign a form certifying your belongings are OK before giving you your belongings, so if you piss off a cop they can, for example, smash your smartphone and get away with it.
It's intimidation, imho. Classic scare tactics, scare off those who can be scared off - and no one cares about those who have nothing to lose (i.e. poor black people).
I was curious about this. I guess the protesters were blocking traffic? Maybe the people following in the back didn't realize what the people in the front had done in terms of blocking off the street. The followers then were among the arrested.
Though, it seems as though the police can skip the miranda rights bit and interrogate, if they don't want to use subsequent statements or information in court. There's also the "public safety exception", which doesn't seem to apply for the situation in this particular account.
Maybe the accelerometers in people's devices could be used to record rough-riding incidents. There should probably be "black box" devices in all police cars to prevent incidents like the one that allegedly killed Freddie Gray.
> I just got back from 12 hours in NYPD holding. If I can get arrested (with all of my white privilege and generally perceived non-threatening stature), so can anybody. ... Obviously I don’t know what happened in each person’s actual arrest, but I do know that the criminal charges overwhelmingly fell to people of color and those with more masculine gender presentations.
One of the most distressing things I find about the language of 'privilege' is that it denies that women can have it as a group. In this last sentence, she recognizes that women can be privileged over men in some situations.
Privilege theory generally asserts that everyone has some privilege in some situations. It's just that there's a lot of imbalance between groups in terms of how often and how much your personal privilege benefits you.
I think you're attacking a strawman here. I'm sure there are people who say that women have no privilege ever and men have all of it all the time, you shouldn't judge the entire concept based on the angriest 15-year-old Tumblrers.
Why are you so sure that the 15-year-old Tumblrinas are not the true Scotsmen?
I mean, it's clear that you're defending a more reasonable version of the claim and GP is attacking a more unreasonable one, but it's not clear to me which of those is going to win out as the common understanding associated with the expression "privilege theory".
I think that the "common understanding" of pretty much any political idea, no matter where it lies on the spectrum, is going to be mostly composed of soundbites and tweets and memes, because those are the easiest to ingest and repost. It's easy to get a strawman idea from that, but to get to to the heart of an idea you need to read the TL;DR stuff too.
If you're afraid that the superficially furious people are going to win out over the reasonable, thoughtful people on issue X, then the best thing you can do is try to understand issue X and promote the reasonable approach to it. Just saying "All Xs suck as proven by this misspelled Tumblr post" will only further polarize the dialogue and help shout down (or radicalize) the reasonable people.
Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.