OCCUPY WALL STREET Lawsuit Aims To Stop The NYPD From Targeting Free Speech

from The Gothamist:

A new lawsuit filed in federal court last week aims to challenge a reality evident to anyone who has attended a large political gathering in Lower Manhattan over the past decade: lawful behavior is no safeguard against being arrested.

The lawsuit centers on more than 200 arrests made around the first anniversary of Occupy Wall Street in September 2012, when the NYPD "should have known that members of its police force would encounter individuals engaged in expressive speech activity."

Instead, the NYPD continued to arrest and harass protesters for seemingly no reason other than that they were protesting.

The lawsuit asserts that this is part of a "pattern, policy, and practice of the NYPD misapplying the disorderly conduct statute to peaceful protesters in New York City."

"The City of New York has continually failed to appropriately police the many non-violent and lawful expressions of speech, resulting in the continual breach of individual rights, the waste of judicial and civic resources, and the need for appropriate training policies, methodologies, and systems to address individuals conducting peaceful and legal expressive speech as protected under the First Amendment," the suit states.

Remember, it was the "white shirts," or NYPD commanding officers, who set the tone for how these protests would be policed: pepper-spraying a group of women standing on the sidewalk, sucker-punching a random man in a crowd of people, or in the case of former Chief of Department Joseph Esposito, the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the NYPD, body-checking a protester with his baton. (After retiring from the NYPD, Esposito was appointed by Mayor de Blasio your Commissioner of Emergency Management.)

This behavior eventually cost the city millions of dollars.

In addition to Esposito, Mayor Bloomberg, and former NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, the suit names other police officials who seemed to truly relish cracking down on protests, including Deputy Chief "This is New York City, you can't be making noise at night" James McNamara, and Deputy Chief Thomas Purtell, seen here tossing a live-streamer to the ground like he's facing the cameras at Summerslam.

Legal experts tell the New York Times that the suit "raised important questions" and noted that it's "well-written," but one expert believes that “These plaintiffs are going to have a really tough time making a case" against the City itself.

In an email, Wylie Stecklow, one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, responds that "my firm has spent the past few years litigating twenty different cases involving constitutional violations of rights of members of Occupy."

Steecklow adds that depositions of NYPD officials obtained in other suits would help the plaintiffs prevail: "These class representatives are in a very good position to move forward on their claims."

Those nine plaintiffs include former Episcopal bishop George Packard, and photographer Charles Meacham.

Meacham was arrested by Inspector Edward Winski, who has been named in many Occupy-related lawsuits against the City; this lawsuit cites a deposition in which Winski admits that he has never received any training on the First Amendment.

"He knows who I am. He's asked how I'm doing before," Meacham told us after his 2012 arrest. "He knows I'm a photographer. He'll say, 'Hey, where's your press pass? Oh that's right, you don't have one.'"

Meacham's charges were eventually dismissed.

You can read the entire complaint below.

OWS First Amendment Suit

Please, click on the link at top if you want to get all the links mentioned throughout the piece.

OCCUPY: the Movie Watch it here now...

Tiny Homes for the Homeless an Occupy Madison Project

from Revolution News:

Madison Wisconsin: In a city with a homeless population that has risen by 7 percent over the last four years to about 3,370, Occupy Madison organizers decided to tell their local leaders to “put up or shut up” and developed a non profit organization Occupy Madison Inc. In June 2013 OM Build was born and Tiny Homes was decided on as a solution.

To achieve their goals of a Tiny Village complete with 9 tiny homes, permanent comprehensive day resource center, safer places to sleep at night, as well as access to restrooms, showers, laundry, community gardening space, and other basic needs for people experiencing homelessness, OM Build realized that they would need to work from within the system. The hard and relentless work paid off. Scheduled for November 15th 2014 is a Ribbon Cutting Event for The first Tiny Village for the Homeless in Madison.

Local organizers also state “Our approach to working within the system came only after we realized that without dotting every “i”, and crossing every “t”, the city and the county would never let us operate– they used every opportunity to enforce ordinances, regulations, and seemingly arbitrary whims against us. This paralleled precisely the persecution of everyday, unaffiliated, homeless individuals. When you are homeless, “the system” is rife with obstacles designed to prevent creative innovation or adaptation– we at Occupy Madison experienced the same headaches.” organizers also stated “In many ways, we have had much more success since we changed our approach. This was due not only to how we communicated with city and county offices (we never shirked from being open or transparent), but how we are perceived by Madison’s genteel liberal population. It’s stunning how a flowerbed on a windowsill can be so much better for PR than the window itself, or the house it’s attached to.”

At least six other cities nationwide are adopting Tiny Homes… others are installing Homeless Spikes. One OM Build organizer in Madison stated that Homeless pikes are “disgusting” and a “weak attempt to make even society’s most uninviting spaces– doorways, parks, etc– uninhabitable as well” He also states “People don’t choose to sleep in the gutter. Physically preventing people from getting whatever rest they can will not help them in any way, and nor do they help society. It’s tempting to say that for every spike a municipality erects, they should provide a warm, safe, clean, bed. But the truth is that we should be providing those beds anyway.”

Local organizers and volunteers state that “next is occupancy and fundraising. We’ve done a lot of work and spent a lot of money getting our site ready for people to move in. Now is a critical time for us financially– if we can’t raise enough funds to pay for making the site as wonderful as it is, there’s a real risk our whole project could go under.” Donations can be sent to paypay account http://bit.ly/1uSYGew Fundraiser in the past have been matched on a dollar per dollar basis and none of current progress would be possible without a 100% volunteer effort.

Local grass root groups that deserve a special shout out include: Friends of the State Street Family, The Bubbles program, (which provides free laundry services to the homeless), Occupy Madison, OM Build, Homeless Ministry at Bethel Lutheran Church, Madison Street Pulse (a cooperative homeless newspaper based In Madison WI).

Protesters occupy the streets in Turkey: Demonstrating against their authoritarian Government

from Dangerous Minds (over the weekend)

Thousands of people have continued to demonstrate for a third day against the government in cities across Turkey.

The demonstrations are against the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s authoritarian and “pro-Islamic policies,” which protesters believe will limit their freedom.

Crowds gathered in Taksim Square, where demonstrations originally began over plans to build a shopping mall, but soon broaden out into anger at the way in which the country is being governed.

Many demonstrators stayed overnight in the square, camped-out around a monument to Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey.

Today in Kizilay Square, Ankara, more than a thousand protesters were fired-on by the police with tear gas and water cannon.

There have been 235 demonstrations in 67 cities across the country.

According to Amnesty International, 2 protesters have been killed, while dozens have been injured, 1 critically. Over 1,700 people have been arrested.

In an interview with Press TV, Barcin Yinanc, the associate editor for the Hurriyet Daily News in Istanbul explained some of the background to the situation:

Yinanc: Well it’s not a secret that the prime minister is a conservative person. He is a pious Muslim and I think in his mentality he has some kind of a standard definition of how Turkey should be, how the citizens should behave.

So, more and more he is trying to impose his vision of how people should behave, how Turkey should be upon the people.

Press TV: But, is that a democracy as you used the word correctly, imposing his will regardless of what his personal beliefs may or may not be. In a democracy, should it not be decided by the people themselves?

So, as you had said that he is going more and more in this authoritarian direction. Do you think that we are going to continue seeing protests like we have already witnessed. Or, do you think that it will put enough pressure on the prime minister that we will see him backing down from some of these decisions that he has made?

Yinanc: Well it is very hard to say. What I can say is that this is huge. It has been a long time since we have seen anything like that. There is this huge civil disobedience movement going on in Turkey.

Let me add that although the Turkish prime minister has implied that these are marginal groups, throughout the day, I have been in the streets, and really there is nothing marginal about these groups. They don’t carry anything. They have no violent intentions. They are just coming to protest at what they see as interference to their lifestyle.

At the end of the day, this comes as an ideological problem, because more and more people feel that the government has been too much interfering with their lifestyle and over the years this was coming step-by-step, but there was not this kind of organized reaction. So this is really a first and there is no one group dominating these demonstrators. Really everybody that has an iPhone or an internet have heard it and have come out.

So it is not representing any particular political party, but it is of course hard to say whether this will continue because - as I said - it is not oriented or organized by certain groups. It is really a lot of people coming there by their own. So it is hard to guess whether this will continue like that or not.

In an interview with Turkish state television, Prime Minister Erdogan rejected claims he was a “dictator” and said he was “committed to serving the nation.” He also said Twitter was “a curse,” and that “social media as a whole is a pain in the side of society.”

However, it should be noted that if Erdogan is serious about entering the EU, he will not be able to use excessive force to quell demonstrations, as this would breach the Human Rights of his citizens—which are guaranteed by the EU.

Amnesty International has condemned the “disgraceful” use of excessive of police force against protesters. A post on its website reads:

Urgent steps must be taken by the Turkish authorities to prevent further deaths and injuries and allow protesters access to their fundamental rights, as well as ensuring the security of all members of the public, Amnesty International said following reports of more than 1,000 injuries and at least two deaths of protesters in Istanbul.

Amnesty International kept its office, which is close to the Taksim area of Istanbul, open as a safe haven for protesters escaping police violence throughout the night. Twenty doctors are currently in the office and treating injured protestors. Other civil society organizations have taken similar actions.

“Excessive use of force by police officers can be routine in Turkey but the excessively heavy-handed response to the entirely peaceful protests in Taksim has been truly disgraceful. It has hugely inflamed the situation on the streets of Istanbul where scores of people have been injured,” said John Dalhuisen, Director of Amnesty International for Europe.

Today, across Europe, solidarity demonstrations in support of the protesters have also taken place in Belgium, Spain and Germany. According to Euronews:

Holding up anti-government banners and chanting “Resign,” the crowds called for Turkish premier Tayyip Erdogan to step down from what many now see as his increasingly authoritarian rule.

One protestor in Brussels told euronews, “We would like to get rid of this government first and get more freedom, freedom of speech. And at the end of it all, we’d like a better government, perhaps with the ideas of Ataturk, which we’ve had in the past.”

A Tumblr site Turkey Not Alone has been set up to show world-wide support for the demonstrators, which can be viewed here.