More Examples of Police Brutality in New York

BY JONATHAN LEMIRE,
NANCY DILLON
and DAVE GOLDINER
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS

Many were protesters, others were in the wrong place at the wrong time. More than 1,500 have been arrested during demonstrations against the Republican National Convention. Here are some of their stories:
The party's over

Matthew Kavanagh thought there was no better way to lampoon what he called the corporate greed of the Bush administration than by holding a mock party in the middle of Wall St.

Within seconds, cops were all over Kavanagh and his friends. They wrestled protesters to the pavement and slammed their faces against the tar, even though no one was resisting, he claimed.

www.nydailynews.com...

This is what really bothered me:

Innocence lost

Katherine Krassan is a middle-aged mom from suburban New Jersey, not a Bush-hating protester.

But cops swarmed around Krassan and everyone else outside Ground Zero when a demonstration got out of hand. The terrified suburbanite tried to run into a PATH station, but cops grabbed her, ignored her cries of innocence and arrested her.

She spent the next 24 hours behind bars, panicked because she couldn't reach her teenage son back home in Eastampton, N.J. "I've never been so scared in my life," said Krassan, 49. "I was just an innocent bystander. ... I never thought anything like this could ever happen to me."

What are the cops doing by arresting innocent bystanders? She was not part of the protest yet the cops arrested her to. I'm beginning to think the cops will arrest anybody. Regardless if they're a protestor or not. This is wrong what's happening in New York.

.
Oh come on guy. Haven't you ever watched COPs on TV? They pound on suspects needlessly all the time. The yank them around even when the person they are arresting is not fighting at all.

And that is all ON CAMERA. God only knows what some of them might do off camera.

Bad cops: mindless testosterone on the lose [pretty common]
Good cops: Intelligent, savy, tough, fair-minded, well trained [not so common]

Call the cops ONLY if you are desperately in need.

[I realize that being a good cop is an incredibly difficult job, kudos to those upstanding individuals and units.]
.

I'll see that and raise you:

Press Gallery: Security Guards Caused Moore Disruption

By Joe Strupp

Published: September 02, 2004 1:45 PM EST

NEW YORK Security guards at the Republican National Convention overreacted when USA Today guest columnist Michael Moore entered Madison Square Garden Monday night and were responsible for a disruption that made it difficult for several members of the press, including Moore, to cover the proceedings, said the U.S. House Daily Press Gallery, which oversees press credentials for the convention.

The gallery conducted a review of the Monday incident, which it calls the worst case of police media control since the 1968 Chicago convention.

"It was heavy-handed. They were very highly over-reactive," said Jerry Gallegos, superintendent of the gallery. "That is what made the whole situation far worse than it needed to be."
www.editorandpublisher.com...

It's extremely difficult to police what's going on in NYC now.

You have to understand the police are responsible for the city's well being, for the safety of its residents, for their own safety, AND for the safety of the protesters too. That's a hell of a responsibility.

Now, when things are orderly it's not a big deal. There are thousands of protests in NYC a year. At city hall and many other places it's a common sight.

Unfortunately when you have groups like the assholes who torched a float in the middle of 250,000 people things get messy. Cops don't know what to expect. Are these idiots going to light fires, blow something up, hit people, throw glass bottles, lie down in the street? Who knows. It is incredibly difficult to maintain composure when it's YOUR job to keep things orderly and you have groups of lunatics claiming that they're going to do crazy things.

I'm not excusing the arrest of a bystander, or excusing unnecessary force in any case, just consider what I wrote when you think about the seemingly rude NYPD.

Yes the police are responsible of the well being of bush and his party convention, yeah I get the picture, and everybody else is just a "terrorist"

This is what the administration wants to instigate fear in the regular citizens of this country.



[edit on 2-9-2004 by marg6043]

Originally posted by Djarums
You have to understand the police are responsible for the city's well being, for the safety of its residents, for their own safety, AND for the safety of the protesters too.

Arresting non-violent protesters for their own safely? i don't understand?

[edit on 2/9/04 by muppet]

It does sound funny muppet, but it makes sense when you consider that the majority of people who would've been injured by the float that was set on fire on Sunday would have been other protesters being that the crowd was so massive and people could have been trampled to death or crush very easily when a panic would have spread. So some of those arrests were made to protect other (civilized) protesters.

Here's what syndicated columnist Dave Barry has to say about it:

By Dave Barry
Knight Ridder Newspapers
(KRT)
NEW YORK � This is turning out to be WAY more exciting than the Democratic convention. At the Democratic convention, the only dramatic tension came from wondering, when you went to a party, whether Ben Affleck would be there, or Ben Affleck plus a Baldwin brother.
But here in New York, a LOT of stuff is happening. Maybe too much stuff. This is what I was thinking when I was having my right kidney probed by a billy club, at the other end of which was a New York City police officer the size of a Humvee.
This happened in Herald Square at rush hour. On hand for the festivities were hundreds of slogan-shouting protesters, hundreds of police, hundreds of media people, the occasional Republican delegate with the facial expression of a gerbil realizing it has just been set down inside a python cage, and 3.6 million New York City residents who just wanted to get on the damn subway and go home.
I was standing with a clot of media people observing this scene when a bunch of protesters started moving toward an area where the police didn�t want them to be. Unfortunately, this put my clot directly between the protesters and the police, and suddenly a dozen officers, including Officer Humvee, came charging at us shouting MOVE MOVE MOVE.
Except I couldn�t move, because I was already pressed up against a dense wad of protesters and camera guys. I was trapped, a slice of luncheon meat in a mob sandwich. I wanted to shout: �I�m not a protester! I�m a professional journalist, here for the free food and liquor!� But all I could say was, quote, �oog,� which is the sound you make when you think maybe you are experiencing kidney puncture.
Fortunately just then the protesters lunged off in a different direction, and I escaped. I took refuge in the doorway of a Burger King with Mike Luckovich, who is a cartoonist. (In dangerous situations, you always want to be with a cartoonist, because if something bad happens, he can draw a funny picture of it.)
Mike and I witnessed a dramatic confrontation: A lone, courageous police officer faced an entire sidewalk full of commuters and told them he could not let them through to their subway station. Now if this had happened in, say, Des Moines, the crowd would have peacefully dispersed, because (a) Iowans are low-key, and (b) Des Moines has no subway.
But these were New Yorkers, and every single one of them felt the need to loudly criticize, in the strongest possible terms, the police, the protesters, the city of New York, the Bush administration and humanity in general. Finding the police officer unresponsive, some of them began voicing their complaints to Mike and me, huddled in the Burger King doorway. They apparently believed we had some authority, because we both had credentials around our necks. Mine was a press credential; Mike�s was the �DO NOT DISTURB� sign from his hotel.
Cartoonists.
Anyway, the point here is that this has been a trying experience for the city of New York and its wonderful (although a tad loud) people. They deserve our sympathy, not just because of the inconveniences caused by the convention, but also because Tuesday night the vaunted New York Yankees got their overpaid butts kicked by Cleveland TWENTY-TWO TO NOTHING HAHAHAHAHAHA.
Speaking of things best left unmentioned, here is today�s:
UPDATE ON THE BASELESS PUBLISHED REPORTS THAT REP. DAVID DREIER HAD CARNAL RELATIONS WITH A LLAMA: These reports remain totally baseless; please continue to disregard them. Thank you.

He's a hoot.

s'ok I do know what you mean Djarums.

Sure you should arrest the people who set fire to the float, or the violent protesters, but once you start rounding up people en-masse, like 40 odd year old moms who weren't even related to the demonstration, that's a different issue entirely.

To me this looks more like dissent suppression and intimidation, not crowd protection.

[edit on 2/9/04 by muppet]

I hate to say it but I hope that no one ever holds one of these things in my city again.

As one of Mr. Barry's typical New Yorkers I am proud to say I'm always in a rush and I like to get home from work in less than 2 hours. I don't like to hear about traffic, and rerouted busses, and trains that are delayed an hour. Next time, let them put the convention in a big circus tent set up in the middle of a farm in Montana where it won't bother anyone. Between the protesters and the cops and the lost idiots meandering in the street this entire week's commute has been a nightmare.

By the way, any New Yorker you speak to will agree with me. Some of us have real jobs and families we'd like to get to. We don't all get 50 car police escorts to bust us through traffic. Next convention, send us a postcard.

Thanks for the quote ECK, I have to say with all the chaos and scare I wish I was in NY right now; I will like to see democracy and freedom of speech fighting the civil rights violations under the patriot act.

I have to say the people in this country should not be taken slightly I believe we can rise to the occasion and the powerful in this country knows that too and thinks that laws and patriot acts is going to stop the people.

The people of NY knows also that in their beautiful city anything can happened, and that city has witnessed when in history dreams used to come true to the immigrant that came trough the cities ports.


[edit on 2-9-2004 by marg6043]

www.nydailynews.com...

They got stale cheese sandwiches to eat and a night on the hard floor of Pier 57, dubbed Guantanamo on the Hudson.

Julia Gross, 20, was upset over getting arrested for protesting and even more steamed over the rash she got from lying on the motor oil-stained floor of Pier 57. But what drove her over the edge was when cops piped the New Age music of Enya into a holding cell.

"It was really degrading and upsetting," said Gross, a student from Philadelphia.

My heart bleeds for these poor mistreated souls. Truly this is maltreatment on a par with Auschwitz.

[edit on 04/9/2 by GradyPhilpott]

The Democrats had fewer problems with protesters because they were kept in cages well out of view of convention goers.

www.cnn.com...

www.boston.com...

www.greatdreams.com...

Protesters are hard to please.

But, all wasn't violins and roses at the Democratic Convention.

www.cnn.com...



[edit on 04/9/2 by GradyPhilpott]

cops and brutality? oh my! i am from a particular city in south-western OHIO that is notorious for police brutality. nice to see the rest of the country catching up.

Ubetcha Marg.

Hey DJARUMS,

Does it bother you and your friends/colleagues that BushCo is trying to exploit the tradgedy of 9-11?

I'd give anything to be in NYC right now.

Originally posted by marg6043
Yes the police are responsible of the well being of bush and his party convention, yeah I get the picture, and everybody else is just a "terrorist"

This is what the administration wants to instigate fear in the regular citizens of this country.



[edit on 2-9-2004 by marg6043]

I'm with you Marg. I think the majority of protestors are getting arrested for no reason whatsoever. I don't think they've broken the law. IMO, the government is trying get the people to stop protesting and speaking their minds. Of course, the government will never say this. Do I have any proof of this? No but this is just my opinion.

Everyone forgets the evergrowing number of cops that have been injured by these so called "peaceful protesters" I think the count was at 70 last time I check they are acting pretty restrained considering how many of their fellow cops are getting hurt.



[edit on 2-9-2004 by ShadowXIX]