Outgunned, Outmatched

By Don Hazen, AlterNet. Posted September 1, 2004.

Tuesday, August 31 – The day protesters had designated as "direct action" day certainly lived up to its billing, but not as they had planned. As the second day of Republican convention speeches dragged on a few blocks away at Madison Square Garden, an extremely aggressive New York Police Department pre-empted protest actions, trapped marchers in no-escape cul de sacs, and surrounded groups and individuals in orange netting as though they were capturing schools of fish. Police arrested hundreds (the New York Times reports at least 900), perhaps more than 1,000. Most of the arrested were young people who were merely exercizing their right to free and peaceful assembly.

Early police skirmishes broke out on the steps of the Public Library at 42nd street and 5th Avenue at around 5:45 PM. This spread to Herald Square in front of Macy's, to Union Square and to areas around Madison Square Park near 26th Street and Park Avenue. In some cases, cops arrested large numbers, while in other cases they kept protestors hemmed in, immobile, for hours. Sometimes dispersal warnings were given; often the police didn't bother before pulling out the handcuffs.

Starting at about 6 PM, the area of mid-Manhattan from 42nd Street to 14th Street was transformed into a wild zone of racing motorcades of cops in all manner of vehicles – bicycles, scooters, vans, big black Ford Crown Victorias for carting the top brass, and huge Black Chevy Suburbans with tinted windows. There were also separate squads of plain-clothes bicyclists and scooter riders.

Protesters, Republican delegates, and New Yorkers alike had to deal with the throbbing sounds of hovering helicopters, a constant cacophony of sirens, and grid-locked traffic as vehicle hordes roared up and down the streets, rushing from spot to spot in a real-life version of a high-action video game.

Protestors tried to move too, but they were on foot and often trapped behind police lines. More often than not, the demonstraters were overwhelmed by the sheer number of police surrounding them. One New Yorker, an older woman who was walking by hundreds of police lined up along 42nd Street outside Bryant Park, commented at the sight of cops outnumbering the protesters by perhaps 2-1: "I can't believe they are spending so much taxpayer money on this."

Earlier in the day at a press conference at Union Square, symbolically in front of a Gandhi statue, protest leaders spoke of their desire to use non-violent civil disobedience to strongly protest a Bush administration they feel has an agenda of "greed at home and war and empire building abroad." Their grievances were many and comprehensive as Raenne Young, a Mills College Student explained: "Our actions will spotlight symbols of the callous disregard by this administration for the lives of Iraqis, U.S. soldiers, for the ecology of the planet and for the poor of the country." And the protest leaders had reason to believe that New York residents were behind them, as 68% approved of non-violent civil disobedience, while 70% disapproved of Bush, in a recent poll.

But clearly this had no effect on the NYPD's tactics for dealing with the protesters.

The NYPD strategy on Tuesday is analogous to the recent Iraq war's display of overwhelming and sometimes unnecessary force on a largely peaceful populace. By all accounts, police action on Tuesday was intent on trying to stop protests before they began. They broke up gatherings of people on the street without cause, often making a bunch of arbitrary arrests, perhaps intended to scare the more timid demonstrators off the streets. And police drove away the remaining crowds by physically pushing them down streets, along with threats of arrest for those who wouldn't budge.

This approach to law enforcement was in evidence early on in the day, as a group of veteran pacifists and protesters from The War Resisters League and School of Americas Watch attempted to march a distance of three miles at around 4 pm from Ground Zero, the scene of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, to Madison Square Garden, where they planned to conduct a symbolic "die in." The march was stopped before it started, as police arrested 200 people near Ground Zero.

Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.

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