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Environmental Law & Justice Project
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Pier 57: "clean, well-equipped and
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Protecting the protestors from
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Lawyers
Guild, NYCLU Collecting Information on infamous Pier 57 jail |
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Sep 6 - Days after reports of inhumane and unhealthy conditions at the Pier 57 detention center, a temporary holding facility used for protesters and bystanders arrested during the Republican National Convention, the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) are meeting to plan what the next step should be. During the Republican National Convention (RNC), descriptions from detainees of their experiences at Pier 57 included reports of sustaining chemical burns and rashes from the floor of the detention center, which was previously used as a warehouse for industrial vehicles. Arrestees also reported a lack of medical attention, the use of small holding pens at the pier, and illegally lengthy detentions. Yetta Hurland, lawyer with the NLG said, "The NLG and NYCLU have been collecting information [about] the allegations of holding tanks, chemical burns and asbestos." According to Hurland, members of the New York City Council has requested the testing of clothes worn by the detainees to identify what chemicals were on the floor at Pier 57. Hurland said there is now less of the sense of urgency there was last week, when roughly 1,900 people were detained in arrests linked to anti-RNC activist events. "As far as I know, all the detainees have been released," Hurland stated. So far, there are no specific plans or lawsuits scheduled by the NLG and NYCLU, but they expect to spend the week gathering more information and making plans for further action. In a statement released to the press, New York City Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said, "Contrary to the assertions of protesters who were inconvenienced by these arrests, the post-arrest screening site at Pier 57 was clean, well equipped and certainly humane." |
NYTIMES.COM
September 6, 2004
METRO MATTERS
A Setback for the City of
By JOYCE PURNICK
But while
When it is host to the Republican National Convention, that's when. A total
of 1,821 protesters were arrested and taken to Pier 57 on the
An overwhelming majority of protesters demonstrated peacefully, just as
most police officers exercised restraint. But some demonstrators broke the
rules and the old adage still applies: do the crime, do the time. The question
is how much time, and if detainees had their rights violated. And what of those
who contend they were innocent? (Not to mention the concept of innocent until
proven guilty. Remember?)
Of the 1,821 arrested, 81 percent - 1,480 - were charged with disorderly
conduct, a violation that normally involves a few hours in detention at most.
Another 282 were charged with misdemeanors and 56 with felonies,
and 3 were juvenile arrests.
Why the city couldn't deal with the volume of arrests is puzzling, since
Police Commissioner Kelly had long said he expected 1,000 arrests a day.
The courts and district attorney's office anticipated the multiple arrests
and maintain they were prepared with extra prosecutors and judges. But they sat
idle. "We were ready to go, but we never got defendants,'' said a
spokesman for the court system, David Bookstaver.
The same with prosecutors. "I think
there was a failure to anticipate what would happen if they got that many
people at once,'' the Manhattan district attorney, Robert M. Morgenthau, said of the Police Department. "Otherwise,
I think they did a damn good job.''
THE bottleneck developed after the arrests. Detainees go through several
procedures before they can be arraigned in front of a judge. In the last 10
days, those procedures were conducted at a snail's pace, apparently complicated
by the decision to take all detainees to the pier first, and to fingerprint everyone,
even those charged with minor violations.
Fingerprinting is very time-consuming anyway, and there was no
fingerprinting equipment at the pier. Everyone had to be ferried downtown in
police vans for printing, and then the prints had to be checked against records
in
Critics see a calculated strategy, intended to keep disruptive protesters
off the streets. "I told the judge I think it was deliberate,'' said
Normal Siegel, the civil rights lawyer who is representing some defendants.
Not so, said both a police spokesman and the Bloomberg administration's top
city lawyer. Paul A. Browne, spokesman for Commissioner Kelly, cited the volume
of arrests as the central problem. Michael A. Cardozo,
the corporation counsel, agreed. He contends that the 1,200 arrests on Tuesday
night created a backlog. "We didn't expect them all to come at once,'' he
said. "While we had planned for 1,000 over a
24-hour period, we had not planned for 1,200 in a four-hour period.''
If not, why not, one might reasonably ask? Mr. Siegel says the problem
began well before Tuesday, charging that people arrested as early as the Friday
before the convention were held beyond 24 hours as they went through the
processing paces - the fingerprints and mug shots, the examination of all
personal items, from backpacks to water bottles. That took a lot of time and
the effort of many police officials.
There were apparently not enough of them to grease the system. Or maybe
there were just as many as the leaders of a leery city
wanted in what is still an eerie time, when
http://cbsnewyork.com/topstories/topstoriesny_story_245163526.html
CBS2
Pier 57 Likened To
Protestors Have Been Taken There For Processing
Sep 1, 2004 4:29 pm US/Eastern
Either way, the dilapidated, hulking pier on the Hudson River in
Some protesters have complained bitterly about conditions at the temporary
holding area set up by police at Pier 57 in
Police officials insist their Post Arrest Screening Site allows them to safely and promptly process mass arrests and avoid
overwhelming neighborhood stationhouses.
Commissioner Raymond Kelly has dismissed complaints about conditions,
including questions about asbestos. Testing done Monday night found no problems
with air quality, he said.
"There have been some exaggerated claims and outright
falsehoods," Kelly said.
NYPD officials declined a second request to allow an AP reporter to tour
the site Wednesday, saying officers were too busy processing the nearly 1,000
people arrested the day before.
Among them was an AP photo messenger, who was taken in along with a group
of protesters when police broke up a demonstration that she and a colleague
were covering.
Jeanette Warner was there for several hours. She said conditions were far
from inhumane, although the facility was dirty and the experience was
exhausting.
"It was like a warehouse, it was the best they could do," Warner
said. "You didn't want to sit on the floor, that's for sure."
Detainee JoAnn Wypijewski, a 48-year-old freelance magazine writer, said
officers manning the makeshift lockup were polite.
"You get the feeling that they're being held prisoner too," she
said. "It's not a great working environment in there."
Sitting less than 20 blocks south of
The garage, which closed last year, was recently taken over by the NYPD.
The department says it cleaned up a section of the interior and built a series
of chain-link holding pens in preparation for the convention.
Officers search and interview the detainees at the pier before busing them
to a booking facility in lower
While they wait, they are offered milk and sandwiches — bologna,
cheese or peanut butter — and each detainee is handed a small paper cup
which they can fill with water from coolers inside the pens, Warner said. They
are also allowed to access portable restrooms alongside the pens.
While she was there Tuesday night, some chanted "This is what a police
state looks like," and one woman was put back in handcuffs after she
started rattling the chain-link fence and jumped against it. For the most part,
however, detainees got along well with the officers posted there, Warner said.
Many of those arrested are veterans of other demonstrations where "few
got arrested and most got away after breaking the law," Kelly said.
"Here, they are being surprised by the fact that the opposite holds true:
Most of the lawbreakers will be apprehended and only the law-abiding will get
away."
At a news conference Tuesday outside the holding facility, Lynn, civil
rights lawyer Norman Siegel and transportation union officials raised concerns
about possible asbestos contamination there, and complained that people were
being held too long.
Jay Bermudez, a former shop steward at the bus depot, said, "We've
always had a problem here with safety issues." He claimed a fire in 1994
released asbestos into the air.
Lynn, who described himself as an independent videographer,
said he was arrested last week at a bike ride protest and held at Pier 57 for
18 hours. (Police say protesters typically wait about 90 minutes before being
transferred.)
The protesters,
Conditions were "absolutely disgusting,"
The Advocate
Arrested protester joins class-action suit against NYC
By Mark Ginocchio
Staff Writer
September 5, 2004
As Matt Hoegemann lay down in the middle of 28th
Street and Broadway in New York, he knew he was about to be arrested.
What he didn't know was that his detainment was going to last nearly two
days.
The 22-year-old
Hoegemann and other members of the War Resisters League
were protesting the Bush administration's foreign policy in
When police cut off his group, Hoegemann and 47
others lay down in the street and were arrested.
After his arrest, he said he was held in a number of different cells and
was not released until Thursday afternoon after 36 hours had passed.
Hoegemann is now part of a class-action suit against
"I wouldn't called the conditions inhumane,
but they were really unpleasant," said Hoegemann,
who is studying English at the
He and 60 others were initially held at Pier 57, a former bus depot that
was used by NYPD as a temporary holding pen. At about 4:30 a.m. Wednesday, he
was moved to a large pen with about 600 other people. There the group was told
to sit in a line on a floor that was covered with "beetles, grease and
oil. I was caked in filth and my hands were black," Hoegemann
said.
By Wednesday afternoon, he was transferred to central processing, where he
was moved into another cramped cell.
"There was about 60 people in there and we
had to take turns sitting, laying down and standing," Hoegemann
said.
The New York Police Department reported 1,827 arrests for
convention-related incidents. Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said in a
statement, "contrary to the assertions of protesters who were inconvenienced
by these arrests, the post-arrest screening site at Pier 57 was clean,
well-equipped and certainly humane."
Nearly 30 hours passed before he got to make his first phone call -- to his
mother, Carol, who he had last talked to on his cell phone as he was about to
be arrested.
His mother was supportive.
"When I didn't hear from him at first I was getting worried, but by
Thursday morning I was angry with what they were doing to him," Carol Hoegemann said. "I guess I was lucky I was even able
to get that call before hand."
She was planning a protest of her own with National Organization of Woman
on Wednesday, but scrapped those plans when she hadn't heard from her son.
Meanwhile, Matt Hoegemann continued to wait for
his release. Thursday afternoon he was finally able to meet with his lawyer, and a judge and then was allowed to leave. The
process lasted 20 minutes.
"That just proves how ridiculous it was to keep us there that
long," Hoegemann said. "I had always
thought they couldn't keep people more than 20 hours."
A city judge agreed. He ordered their release and threatened to impose a
fine of $1,000 for every protester held past his 5 p.m. deadline.
Upon his release, Hoegemann refused to stop his
fight against the Bush administration. He joined another protest in between
meeting with more lawyers, eating and giving interviews to the press.
The National Lawyers Guild, which will represent the protesters, asked for Hoegemann's clothes to check the stains for any dangerous
chemicals.
His mother, who said she attended protests in the 1970s, said she admires
her son's courage.
"I'm proud that my son is willing to stand up for what he
believes," Carol Hoegemannsaid. "The
protests I used to go to in the '70s were the ones where I wouldn't get arrested."
Copyright © 2004, Southern Connecticut Newspapers,
Inc.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/02/1454254
Thursday, September 2nd, 2004
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We speak with detained protesters being held at
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Protests against the Republican convention continued yesterday throughout
Early in the day, AIDS activists from the ACT UP group breached the Madison
Square Garden convention hall and briefly interrupted a speech by White House
Chief of Staff Andrew Card to young Republicans, including Bush's twin
daughters.
Outside, five thousand people protesting high job losses formed a silent,
single-file unemployment line that stretched for three miles from Wall Street
to
Later in the day, some 2,000 people staged a "March on the Media"
to protest what they say is uncritical coverage of the Bush administration by
the mainstream press. Other major protests yesterday included a women's rights
demonstration and a protest against Coca-Cola.
The police arrested 19 people, bringing the total of those detained so far
during seven days of relentless convention-related protests to more than 1,760,
a record for a political convention.
Hundreds of people yesterday protested the conditions under which those
arrested are being held before going to court saying the site was contaminated
with oil and asbestos. Pier 57 is a three-story, block-long pier that has been
converted to a holding pen.
Yesterday morning we received a call from one of the protesters being held
at Pier 57 who had smuggled a phone inside. Detainees passed the phone to each
other and described the conditions of the holding facility. Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke took the call and spoke with the
detained protesters.
Detained protesters call from prison
The voices of protesters detained inside Pier 57. New York City Mayor
Michael Bloomberg has denied the city was operating what some called "Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson." And defended the use of the
of the pier garage saying "It's not supposed to be Club Med."
Last night, a judge ordered protesters who had been held for 24-hours
released with desk appearance tickets if they were not charged with serious
crimes. Before midnight, some protesters started emerging from
Simone Levine, lead organizer of the National Lawyers Guild's campaign to
protect the rights of protesters during the Republican National Convention.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
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AMY GOODMAN: Hundreds of people protested the conditions under which those
arrested are being held before going to court, saying the site is contaminated
with oil and asbestos. Pier 57, where they are being held, is a three-story
block-long pier that has been converted to a holding pen.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yesterday morning we received a call from one of the
protesters being held at pier 57 who had smuggled a phone inside. Detainees
passed the phone to each other and described the conditions of the holding
facility. Democracy Now! producer Mike Burke took the
call and spoke with the detained protesters. Listen closely. After the first
caller passes the phone, you can hear a prisoner in the background calling out
for help and medical assistance.
EMILY: My name is Emily. I was arrested yesterday off of
VOICE SHOUTING IN THE BACKGROUND: I need medical attention!
ALTHEA: My name is Althea and I was -- am a
MIKE BURKE: Have you been able to communicate to any of your family or
friends about your situation?
ALTHEA: No, I haven't. I have been asking my arresting officer when can I
make a phone call? And no one knows where I am.
Basically I feel like I’ve been ‘disappeared.’ Nobody knows
in my family that I have been arrested. And I was out by myself shopping; so,
you know, there's no one to -- they haven't allowed me to contact anyone.
VEEPA MAJAMUTAR: Hi. This is Veepa Majamutar. I'm calling also from the arresting facility.
Basically I was just a stand-by and I was walking on the sidewalk and there was
a march going on. They cordoned off the whole street and just arrested all of
us. When I tried to explain that I was just walking by -- I had a receipt from
a store that I had bought something from on that street. They did not pay any
attention. And here we are sitting in this almost a human-rights abuse
conditions. So many of us are cold. We are freezing.
Some of us need medical attention; but nobody's telling us what to do. Nobody's
listening to us. Nobody’s giving us any timeline, any idea of when we
might get out. They’ve always been saying ‘Next two hours. Two
hours.’ It's been more than 12 hours now.
MIKE BURKE: Could you describe what you were doing just before you were
arrested?
VEEPA MAJAMUTAR: What was I doing?
MIKE BURKE: Yes.
VEEPA MAJAMUTAR: Basically I was just – I was walking on the
sidewalk. I didn't even know that there were police and the march was going on.
And all of a sudden the street basically just gets cordoned off and we cannot
move. So before I was arrested I was just standing still because that's all we
could really do. And then they just started putting handcuffs on people. They
didn't tell us, please leave otherwise we’ll arrest you. They gave us no
warning. They gave us no chance to leave. They just basically closed off the
street, put handcuffs, and took us. They did not listen to anybody. They did not
listen to even pure reason. They just put us off. We thought we would basically
get out in a couple of hours if we had done nothing. But here we are 12 hours
later and, basically, almost ridicule us. They ridicule us if we start to
complain. And the condition here are atrocious. You
have to see them to believe it. It's dirty. It’s smelly. It’s
filthy. We don’t have a blanket. We don't have something to sit on. We
are sitting on the floor. There's dirt on the floor. There’s oil on the
floor. There’s chemicals around us. It's smelling bad. I could go on and on. It’s
atrocious.
MIKE BURKE: Could you describe what kind of room you are in? It sounds like
there are many, many people in the same room.
VEEPA MAJAMUTAR: We are like a hundred – a hundred people in a very
small room. It's surrounded by fence and we are like -- it's almost like rats
in a hole. I mean, there's nothing, there is just a floor which is very dirty,
which is a lot of oil and all dust in it, I mean, all our clothes are dirty our
hands are ditty. We had to eat an apple with our extremely dirty hands because
we have no tissue paper, nothing to clean our hands with. We are just basically
packed. Nobody can sit down. They don't even give us a plastic bag to sit on.
They don't even give anything to lie down on. We just have to lie on the hard
floor, basically. And there is not enough space for everybody to lie down
because we have to sit so close together. It's cramped. And we were freezing
before and people were actually coughing, they were getting cold and nobody
paid any attention, nobody gave them even a blanket nobody gave them even a
plastic bag to cover themselves with.
JANET: My name’s Janet and I was arrested
last night. I was actually on the sidewalk. We were having a party in the
street, we were dancing a little bit and then the cops started to pen us in, so
we moved onto the sidewalk and there was a lot of us
crammed into a small space. They did not give us an order of dispersal.
Instead, they just smashed us all together; and they started -- at first they
were picking people out and smashing their heads on the sidewalks. I couldn't
really get a good look of that because I was in the back being like crammed
between a wall and a bunch of people. Then they slowly, slowly, slowly broke us
off and put us on the buses. We were on the buses for a really long time. Now
we are in a holding cell. It's been probably more than 12 hours. It's been
about 13 hours. They just told me when I got medical attention that there's --
they arrested 1100 people last night and we’re all still in here. It's
totally nasty. The floor is greasy. There are signs everywhere saying we should
be wearing masks and goggles; and I have this really bad rash on my hand that's
getting worse and worse. It feels like I just stuck my hand in an oven, it
burns so bad, and my arms are tingling and my other hand is getting it, too. I
spent a really long time trying to let them get me out of here so I could at
least wash my hands and put some ice on it. Finally my arresting officer came and
she took me over there and there's a doctor and a nurse in this office and they
didn't have a sink for me to wash my hands; but they let me pour saline
solution over my hand into a garbage can and then rub some hand-sanitizer on my
hands. My hands are so black and dirty from how gross it is in here that I
couldn't even get them clean. Then they gave me a wet tissue to put on it.
Basically they couldn't really do anything for me. They told me to put some
hydrocortisone cream on it, which isn't very helpful because I’m in here.
And now I am just sitting back in a cell with everybody else. They’re not
really telling us what's going on. It seems like we’re going to be in
here for a really long time.
AMY GOODMAN: Phone calls from jail. Voices of protesters detained inside
pier 57.
AMY GOODMAN: Simone Levine is with us, lead organizer of the National
Lawyer’s Guild Campaign to protect the rights of prisoners during the
Republican National Convention. Thanks for coming in with no sleep. But what is
happening here? How many people do you understand remain detained?
SIMONE LEVINE: Well right now, Amy, we actually have a number of 900 people
who are still detained.
AMY GOODMAN: Last night, I was at the Republican Convention as people were
leaving, I was talking to delegates and I asked if they were aware of the
protests and one woman said yes. And I said are you aware that there have been
over 1500 arrests? For a moment, they couldn't talk. They were completely
shocked.
SIMONE LEVINE: Well that's good to know that they are actually listening.
It's good to know that they, actually, somebody's giving them the news.
AMY GOODMAN: Well that was how they were learning. But they certainly
hadn't known it from inside the Republican Convention. As
most New Yorkers don't. Because not very much is being
talked about. Why are they being held in this way? Is this common
practice?
SIMONE LEVINE: Well, I don't think that it's common practice for arrests to
be held as long as they have been held. I mean we have now,
we have people that have now been detained for more than 36 hours. What the law
says is, the law says that somebody cannot be held
past 24 hours barring some kind of emergency situation. And that's exactly what
we were arguing yesterday in court. That this is not an
emergency situation. The number of arrests that they have made over the
last 24-hour period is not more arrests than they would make in a normal day in
AMY GOODMAN: But they have those arrests, as well.
SIMONE LEVINE: No, they don't. Because what has happened is they have taken
all the police out of the outlying boroughs, out of the Bronx, out of Brooklyn
and out of Queens, and they put them in
JUAN GONZALEZ: There's only a skeleton police force anywhere else in the
city. I spoke to a judge yesterday who told me, it was in arraignment court. He
told me that the one big problem that they are having is that the, all these
arrested are being processed, obviously everyone is fingerprinted and those
fingerprints are sent to
SIMONE LEVINE: I don't know if I would say it was deliberate, but I think
that one thing that I am definitely secure in saying is that the police
department has known for over a year that they are going to be having the Republican
National Convention here. They have said for over six months that they,
themselves, expect 1,000 arrests a day. They decided to set out a completely
separate facility to detain people in, and they decided to set up their own
central booking system. They go by their own rules and they set up their own
special facilities. That being said, they provided a facility, a detention
facility which was slick with oil, which is causing people to have chemical
burns at this point. It used to be a bus depot. And they have a holding
facility in which we have received calls from demonstrators that they have been
held in for 20 and 30 hours and nothing has been
happening whatsoever. The other thing that I would just mention is the
fingerprints, the police department obviously has jurisdiction to give people
desk-appearance tickets and summonses without fingerprinting them.
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to Simone Levine, she
is the lead organizer for the National Lawyer’s Guild campaign to protect
the rights of protesters during the Republican National Convention. We will be
back with her, and then go to some of the speeches on the floor of the
Republican National Convention and ask who is Zell
Miller, the Democratic Senator of Georgia, who is endorsing the Republican Presidential
candidate George Bush and Republican President George Bush. Also we will hear
Dick Cheney's speech, his acceptance speech at the nomination for Vice
President, and talk about his record, as well. Stay with us.
AMY GOODMAN: That was Bob Dylan here on Democracy Now! Breaking
With Convention: War, Peace and the Presidency. The
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes I would like to ask you something Simone. The New York
Times today has an article talking about the enormous success of the police
department and Mayor Bloomberg in effecting a preemptive strike policy on these
protests to prevent them from getting to
SIMONE LEVINE: Well, I would just start out by saying that to the one
protester who was arrested outside of the Hummer dealership that you have to be
congregating with others in order to be guilty of disorderly conduct. She's
clearly not congregating with anybody just by herself there.
AMY GOODMAN: Maybe with the riot police?
SIMONE LEVINE: Maybe with the riot police. The other thing that I was going
to mention is I have actually gotten a lot of comments from press
who have been extremely upset over this issue, as well. Mostly because
we have quite a number of phone calls to our legal office from press who have
been arrested themselves, who have had NYPD-issued press cards, have showed the
NYPD press cards to the police and have still been arrested and they,
themselves, are still in the holding facility.
AMY GOODMAN: Well I heard an inspector, one of the people in charge at
times square as they moved in, often not warning them in advance of the kind of
zap attack. They move in behind them as they are walking and they are some
under cover in front of them and ones come up on motorcycle on the side. So you
are totally hemmed in. And they just arrest you and the inspector said to the
police around him, if they stop, if they ask questions, cuff them.
SIMONE LEVINE: I have heard the same reports and people have really been
caught between police who do come in from the back and also from the front and
they have nowhere to go and that's the way a lot of the press, I believe on
Tuesday, had also gotten trapped by the police.
AMY GOODMAN: What's happening today? What's this writ of habeus corpus? Are they going to keep these protesters in
on, keep them through George Bush’s speech tonight?
SIMONE LEVINE: Well, we have filed two writs last night. Legal Aid Society
filed one. The Legal Aid Society is the major public defenders group here in
AMY GOODMAN: Simone Levine. Thank you for being with us. Lead organizer of
the National Lawyers Guild campaign to protect rights of protesters. Again, the
figures, it looks like about 1800 people have been arrested and Simone that
number one more time of how many remain in imprisoned?
SIMONE LEVINE: 900 people, Amy, still remain inside,
despite the fact that now we have two judicial orders to the contrary.
AMY GOODMAN: And pier 57, I was speaking with the union organizer last
night at T.W.U., because this was an old depot that they are being put in at
pier 57. He was describing the fire that happened there 10 years ago in 1994.
Talked about the asbestos that was there and that they couldn't get the
asbestos out. It hasn't been used as a facility for human beings to be in for
quite a while, until this point now where more than 1,000 protesters have been
detained. We will keep folks updated.
SIMONE LEVINE: The has thing I was just going to say, Amy, is that we are
telling people to, people who have been released from jail, that they must bag
their clothing, seal their clothing, put a label on when they were released and
when they were arrested, that there will be follow-up lawsuits.
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The
republican convention 2004
Detained protesters call holding facility dangerous
A Denver EMT and two lawyers say Pier 57, where police have held many
convention protesters, has left some with chemical burns.
By Susan Greene
Thursday, September 02, 2004 -
Sickles, a 24-year-old emergency medical technician from
She was held for 12 hours at Pier 57, a temporary detention center where an
estimated 1,100 protesters and bystanders arrested Tuesday remained jailed
Wednesday afternoon.
Activists have dubbed the facility - a former garage - "
At least six students from
Sickles said her wrists were bruised from being handcuffed for nearly four
hours. There were few benches, she said, and much of the floor was covered with
oil spilled from buses that used to be stored there.
"People are emerging from there with chemical burns," said Simone
Levine of the National Lawyers Guild, a group monitoring police treatment of
protesters at this week's Republican National Convention.
The Guild is using articles of clothing such as Sickles' socks to test what
lawyer Margaret Ratner Kunstler
called "the gooey substance on the floor."
The group petitioned a
"The conditions are inhuman, dangerous. We allege (the police) have
intentionally punished people rather than put them through the system in an
orderly fashion," said Kunstler.
But Deputy Police Commissioner Paul Brown denied those allegations. He said
Pier 57 is "clean, well-equipped and orderly." He said that those
arrested "may find the process inconvenient, but it is certainly
humane."
After Sickles was released, she and other activists sat in front of a city
jail cheering on detainees as they arrived from Pier 57 on police buses.
As the buses rolled by in a slow convoy, she yelled over a thick police
line asking if the passengers needed medical help.
"We've got someone having a heart problem," one woman called out.
"I can't feel my right hand," another bellowed.
So far this week, Sickles has provided treatment for several wrist bruises
and numbness caused by handcuffs. A woman - a bystander, not an activist -
needed treatment after being pepper-sprayed by police, Sickles said.
How'd city do? OK, but lose that orange netting
September 5, 2004
The streets are clear again near
How did the city do?
The answer: It handled the convention and the protests that came with it
imperfectly - but generally well. All told, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Ray Kelly deserve a quick round of applause. They didn't panic in
a tough situation.
Unlike
Even the New York Civil Liberties Union had qualified praise for the NYPD's
handling of the show. In a city that just three years ago was reeling from the
worst terrorist attack ever on American soil, the NYPD showed commendable
poise, skill and sophistication.
Mostly.
But as we implied earlier, the NYPD didn't emerge from the week with an
unblemished record. Any investigation into its tactics needs to focus on two
problems in particular.
No. 1. Indiscriminate arrests.
NYPD brass should rethink the efficacy of using orange netting to round up
suspects in the confusion of massive demonstrations. It's not good enough to
pull in real perps and innocent bystanders in the
midst of a protest and ask the courts to sort them out.
On a usual day, when maybe 300 arrests are made, it takes up to 24 hours to
run a suspect through the system. But last week - when one day saw 1,200
arrests - some arrestees spent far more time than 24 hours in custody.
Indiscriminate arrests are unjust by any definition. But they are
particularly odious when their victims are held for extraordinary periods of
time.
No. 2: Pier 57.
The NYCLU says arrestees were held in a "dank, filthy bus depot where
people had to sit or lie on the floor covered with soot and quite possibly
toxic automotive fluids." The city insists the pier was clean. The
arrestees would seem to have the more plausible story.
Bottom line: Despite a fine job in general, the NYPD got carried away with
arrests here and there, and it didn't worry enough about the post-arrest
process. As well as it did, the city could have done better.
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_np=0&u_pg=1673&u_sid=1191898
The
Published Thursday
September 2, 2004
Old N.Y. pier becomes jail for a week
Either way, the dilapidated, hulking pier on the Hudson River in
Some protesters have complained bitterly about conditions at the temporary
holding area set up at Pier 57 for processing convention-related arrests.
Police insist their Post Arrest Screening Site allows them to process mass
arrests safely and promptly and avoid overwhelming neighborhood stationhouses.
Among those held was Jeanette Warner, an Associated Press photo messenger
who was taken in along with a group of protesters when police broke up a
demonstration that she and a colleague were covering.
Warner was there for several hours. She said conditions were far from
inhumane, although the facility was dirty and the experience exhausting.
"It was like a warehouse. It was the best they could do," Warner
said. "You didn't want to sit on the floor, that's for sure."
Officers search and interview the detainees at the pier before busing them
to a booking facility in lower
While they wait, they are offered milk and sandwiches - bologna, cheese or
peanut butter - and each detainee is handed a small paper cup, which they can
fill with water from coolers inside the pens, Warner said.
They are allowed to use portable restrooms alongside the pens.
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NYC police snag their 'catch of the day'Unconventional -- Perspectives from
Thursday, September 02, 2004 By Dennis Roddy
Many were caught when police stretched long swatches of orange, plastic netting around them. They are warehoused at Pier 57 until buses take them to a processing center. Most are given citations and then returned to the political trout stream to give some other cop a thrill someday. This is wildlife conservation at its best. "There were more arrests in Hayden has led an extreme life.
He organized Students for a Democratic Society, fought his own government on
the streets of Hayden is sick of hearing
comparisons between
"There have never been so
many people in one demonstration in opposition to their government. There
never have been so many people arrested, largely nonviolently, peacefully, in
the history of our 80 political conventions in the It is doubtful the demonstrators
could hear this applause. Police barricades kept Hayden and colleagues across
a noisy, bus-clotted street from Pier 57. It is hard to hear much of anything
in When five demonstrators got onto
the convention floor yesterday at Hayden would have said they got into the sound byte. "In a media-dominated society, you can only interrupt Rove's message," Hayden said. "They were trying to have a successful public relations week. All we can do is interrupt that." So Hayden took enormous pleasure when Rove, Bush's consigliere, was prompted to make scornful note of the protesters failure to shut down the city. As it turned out, the police all but did the job for them. When 300 demonstrators were
scooped up near Ground Zero at the start of their march to |
