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NYC Police Use Gestapo Tactics, Instigate Disturbances
(Shannon McCaffrey, Miriam Hill, and Tony Pugh, Knight Ridder, September 2, 2004)
New York police have arrested more than 1,700 people, more than at any other U.S. political convention. And the GOP convention still has a day left, and President Bush's appearance is almost certain to drive protesters to the streets again. . . . "In the history of political conventions, there have never been so many people demonstrating opposition to their government," former Chicago Seven member Tom Hayden told demonstrators yesterday. . . . Police report 1,765 convention-related arrests since last Thursday. At the Republican convention in Miami Beach in 1972, there were 1,129 arrests. Chicago's notorious 1968 street riots resulted in about 588 arrests. . . . Organized by the Internet and driven by opposition to the war in Iraq, as well as by economic and social issues, protesters have arrived in New York in droves. Heavily Democratic New York also has contributed to the protesters' ranks and provided a friendly base of operations. . . . "Police are much more likely to put people into pens and react aggressively with physical force than they were before Seattle. It has gotten worse since 9/11," said William Grover, a political science professor at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. . . . Civil liberties advocates say the aggressive tactics and "overarrests" aren't warranted in many cases. . . . On Tuesday night, police arrested 1,187 people as groups without city permits tried to march to the heavily fortified Madison Square Garden convention site. [COMMENT: Does anyone still belive there is freedom and democracy in the U.S. when it's ruling party has to hold its convention inside the most heavily fortified convention hall in world history? Face it, the USA is now officially a police state ... no matter who wins the next election.] . . . Protesters also have become less confrontational. . . . "These protesters don't want to discredit themselves or the Kerry campaign, so they have been careful not to be overly confrontational," said John Berg, a professor of government at Suffolk University in Boston. . . . Television was the new force that encouraged the protest movement of the 1960s. Today, the movement is fueled by the Internet and by other technologies such as text messaging and wireless communication, which allow protesters to organize and communicate. . . . "New York is really the first Internet protest movement to hit a convention," Berg said. . . . This is now the age of 24-hour television news, where there's an almost constant hunger for new pictures and stories. Protesters are less concerned with reaching the Republican delegates than with getting their message out to a wider audience, he said.

posted by LoZo 10:56 AM