Protest At Your Own Risk

In many places across George Bush's America, you may be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI, and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization -- or, at the very least, the marginalization -- of dissent.

"We have not seen such a crackdown on First Amendment activities since the Vietnam War," says Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

This crackdown took a violent turn in late November at the Miami protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and at an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland last April. In both cases, the police used astonishing force to break up protests. But even when the police do not engage in violence, they sometimes blatantly interfere with the right to dissent by preemptively arresting people on specious grounds.

Sarah Bantz is a member of the Missouri Resistance Against Genetic Engineering. Last May, she and several hundred others were gathering in St. Louis to protest against Monsanto and the World Agricultural Forum, which was meeting there.

On May 16, the first day of the protest weekend, Bantz and a small group of other activists went to the Regional Chamber and Growth Association to give their pitch on how biotech was hurting local farmers. After that meeting, she and her fellow activists piled into her van, but they were able to get only about a mile down the road when something unusual happened.

"All of a sudden there was one police car and then another, and I was pulled over," she recalls. "One officer came around and asked me to get out of the vehicle, which I did. The cop started to look through the van without permission. I had some Vitamin C pills sitting out, so they decided that was a drug and they were going to arrest me. They put me in cuffs and put me in the back of the car. They really had no grounds for arresting me, but I spent ten hours in jail." One reason they cited, along with the vitamins, was her failure to wear a seatbelt.

Bantz was scheduled to deliver three speeches at what organizers called their Biodevastation 7 Conference. "I gave none of them," she says. "For one, I was in jail, and for another I was talking to the police about why they detained me. And I was too frazzled to give the third. It was all unbelievable."

That same day, the Flying Rutabaga Bicycle Circus expected to take part in the protests. "We are a group of concerned bicyclists, puppeteers, musicians, farmhands, clowns, cheerleaders, activists, eaters of food, and drinkers of water," the circus says on its web page. "We are united in a quest to seek out food (that's our fuel) that is not tampered with by biotechnology companies. We ride for diversity, organic farming, and biojustice everywhere."

But they weren't allowed to ride in St. Louis.

"We set off on our bicycles for our first performance, a small skit, to let the protesters know about our Caravan Across the Corn Belt tour," says Erik Gillard, one of the Flying Rutabagas, who was riding with eight others. "We were following traffic rules when a big police paddy wagon pulled up with its light on. Gradually, more police officers arrived, and they told us we had to leave our bicycles. We were all arrested for operating our bicycles without a license."

There is no such offense in St. Louis, the ACLU of Eastern Missouri says. Afterward, Police Chief Joe Mokwa said the arresting officer was "overenthusiastic," according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

After a while, the polce changed the charge to "impeding the flow of traffic on a bicycle," Gillard says. "It was written up for some intersection ten blocks from where we were all picked up." He says the police detained the group for six or seven hours. "All of our journals that contained phone directories or e-mail lists or information about where we were going to stay were taken and never returned," he says.