“Together We Rise”

One woman decided not ignore a great injustice done to her by the government.
This is the story of Amanda Nguyen's and her organization, Rise.

Featuring: Amanda Nguyen
Director: Victoria Rivera
DOP: Soren Nielsen
AC: Taylor Antisdel
Gaffer: Sean Li
Sound Operator: Monica Rodriguez
Sound Operator: Katerina Aurigema
Hair and Makeup: Elvira Gonzalez
Hair and Makeup: Michelle Coursey
PA: DaeQuan Alexander Collier
PA: Carrington Amey
PA: Kodi Perryman


Production Studio: Already Alive
Executive Producer: Michael Marantz
Executive Producer: Jason Oppliger

CAST
Young Amanda/Patient: Sara States
Nurse: Ann Herberger
Doctor: Qurrat Kadwani
Woman on Subway: Naaji Kenn
Woman at Grocery Store: Athena Alexis
Soccer Teen: Sadie Bea Kosoff
Woman at Swimming Pool: Christina Catchis
Woman Jogging: Loren Barr
Girl With Backpack: Jaida Simpson
Man In Train Station: Drew Gardner
Video Portrait: Carrington Amey
Video Portrait: Cara Marceante
Video Portrait: Constance Tang
Video Portrait: Jacob Horsey
Video Portrait: Julia Barrett-Mitchell
Video Portrait: Kor Skeet
Video Portrait: Petra Jarrar

EDITORAL
Editor: Zach MacDonald
Composer: Michael Marantz
Assistant Editor: Riley Price
Sound Mixer: Brandon Hickey
Colorist: Michael Marantz

Rise Team
Deputy to the CEO and UN Liaison: Nataliya Palinchak
Fellow: Cameron Marsh
Development and Communications: Holly Johns Rowland

Vital Voices Team
President and CEO: Alyse Nelson
Vice President, Leadership & Global Activation: Lauren Wollack
Program Manager, Leadership & Global Activation: Sophia Greve

THANK YOU
Kara Dubbs
Deanna Kowal
Alex Kurze and AbelCine
Chloe Sarbib

Journalist Will Potter Describes Being First and Only Journalist to Visit Federal Communication Management Unit

from the Sparrow Project :

In a new TED Talk released today, investigative journalist and TED Senior Fellow Will Potter describes his experience as the first and only journalist to visit secretive prisons on U.S. soil that are referred to by prisoners and guards as “Little Guantanamo.”

Communications Management Units, or CMUs, are experimental prison units in the United States for so-called “second-tier terrorists.” There’s an estimated 60-70 prisoners in CMUs and they are overwhelmingly Muslim, along with several animal rights and environmental activists.

“According to the Bureau of Prisons, CMUs are for prisoners with quote ‘inspirational significance.’ I think that’s a polite way of saying they are political prisons, for political prisoners,” Potter says in the talk. “Prisoners are sent to the CMU because of their race, religion, or political beliefs.”

There are currently two CMUs, located within larger federal prisons in Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion, Illinois. Neither underwent the formal review process required by law when they were opened.

CMUs are not solitary confinement, but they radically restrict prisoner communications with the outside world to levels that meet or exceed the most extreme prisons in the country.Will Potter was allowed to visit environmental activist Daniel McGowan, who was being held at the CMU in Marion. Approval of this visit came as a shock since no other journalist has been allowed inside the CMUs and because documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that the Counter Terrorism Unit has monitored Potter’s speeches, articles, and his book Green Is The New Red. Attorneys and prisoners have said that inmates are transferred to the CMUs without notice and without opportunity to challenge their new designation, in what they say is a clear violation of due process rights.

“Three months after our visit, McGowan was transferred out of the CMU. Then without warning, he was sent back,” Potter says in the TED talk. “I had published leaked CMU documents on my website, and the Counter-Terrorism Unit said McGowan had called his wife and asked her to mail them. …For that, he was sent back to the CMU.”

Potter says CMUs are part of a dangerous post-9/11 trend that he has been documenting, in which the rhetoric of terrorism is used to justify rollbacks in fundamental rights.

“This story is not just about prisoners, it is about us,” he says. “It is about our own commitment to human rights.”

About Will Potter

Will Potter is an award-winning investigative journalist, author, and TED Senior Fellow based in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement Under Siege. He specializes in civil liberties post-9/11 and how protest has been labeled as terrorism; Glenn Greenwald described Potter as “the most knowledgeable journalist in the country on these issues.” He is currently a Knight Fellow in Law Reporting at the University of Michigan.

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.

The secret history of jaywalking: The disturbing reason it was outlawed — and why we should lift the ban

from Salon: by RAVI MANGLA

Tensions between cars & pedestrians aren't new, but pedestrians are working to make jaywalking the rule of the road

“Jaywalk.” The word seems better suited to a dance craze than criminal infraction. The jitterbug, the lindy hop, the jaywalk. Some trace the origins of the term to Syracuse, New York; others to Kansas City (home briefly to a bar called Jaywalkers). One of the earliest references to the practice is in an article in the Chicago Tribune: “chauffeurs assert with some bitterness that their ‘joy riding’ would harm nobody if there were not so much jay walking” (April 7, 1909). The quote reflects a mind-set of entitlement among the motorist class, a readiness to allocate blame to the lowest tier of traveler. In early America “jay” was a pejorative used to denote a rube or rustic, someone unacquainted with the niceties of urban refinement. To be called a jay was to have called into question your very sense of belonging, your right to exist within the city proper.

* * *

Before the proliferation of automobiles streets were shared by all manner of traveler. Crosswalks had not yet been established (the first one wouldn’t appear until 1911) and pedestrians had just as much right to the road as streetcars and carriages. Cars, in their earliest incarnation, were seen as interlopers, an unwelcome addition to the urban milieu. Traffic fatalities were not looked upon kindly by the general public. Angry mobs were wont to drag offending drivers (kicking and screaming, one would presume) from the comfort of their cars. According to the Detroit News, upwards of 60 percent of automobile-related fatalities in the 1920s were children under the age of 9. “One gruesome Detroit article described an Italian family whose 18-month-old son was hit and wedged in the wheel well of a car. As the hysterical father and police pried out the child’s dead body, the mother went into the house and committed suicide.”

By the close of the 1920s, automobiles had claimed the lives of more than 250,000 children and adults in the United States. In New York City, temporary memorials were erected in Central Park to commemorate the dead, as if casualties of combat. Automobile drivers were uniformly painted as villains in newspaper editorials, a menace to civic well-being. Cartoons depicted them in full reaper regalia, armed with sharpened scythes. The phrase “jay driver” prefigures its more common counterpart, appearing in print as early as 1905. (A 1907 headline in the Albuquerque Evening Citizen reads “Jay Drivers Imperil Life Each Hour in Albuquerque.”) The growing tension between motorists and pedestrians had larger class implications. While motorists tended to be men of means, the pedestrians they sought to displace were largely working-class. Andrew Mellon, during his tenure as secretary of the treasury, instituted a landmark tax reduction strategy, lowering the top marginal rate from 77 percent to 24 percent. The combination of lower taxes, flourishing markets and weakened unions led to prodigious levels of inequality. The chasm between rich and poor reached its pinnacle in 1928, with 23.9 percent of all pretax income channeled to the top 1 percent of families. Even with improved methods of production, automobiles were still out of reach for millions of Americans. As James J. Flink writes in “The Automobile Age,” “The automobile trade journals were agreed in 1923 that ‘illiterate, immigrant, Negro and other families’ were ‘obviously outside’ the market for motorcars.”

In 1923, Cincinnati residents pursued an ordinance that would require motorists to outfit their cars with mechanical devices called governors. The governors would switch off car engines if vehicles exceeded speeds of 25 miles per hour. Local automobile dealers mobilized to strike down the measure. Over the next decade the auto industry pursued aggressive action to take sole possession of public roads and, in turn, reshape the conversation around cars. The American Automobile Association, or AAA, sponsored safety campaigns in schools, educating students on the dangers of crossing the street in unmarked zones. Boy Scouts handed out cards to pedestrians, warning them against the practice of jaywalking. Mock trials were conducted in public settings to shame or ridicule offenders. The National Automobile Chamber of Commerce persuaded politicians and journalists to shill for their cause. The Packard Motor Car Co. went so far as to construct tombstones engraved with the name Mr. J. Walker. In Buffalo, beachgoers were treated to a public performance by the National Safety Council, in which a jaywalker was arrested, handcuffed and fitted with a sandwich board that read “I am a jaywalker,” and then ushered into a police wagon plastered with anti-pedestrian slogans. (“Hell is paved with good intentions, but why crowd the place? Don’t jaywalk.”) By the 1930s, jaywalking had been adopted as common law in most major municipalities. The term was near ubiquitous, and opposition to the automobile had softened to scarcely a whisper.

* * *

In Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta, a young woman named Raquel Nelson was stepping off the bus with her two children. They had been shopping at the grocery store and it was late in the evening. The nearest crosswalk was three-tenths of a mile from the bus stop, so she—like many of the regular passengers—attempted to cross the busy road. She and her children were struck by an onrushing van, and her 4-year-old son was killed. The driver, it was later discovered, had alcohol and painkillers in his system. He had two previous hit-and-runs on his record and was visually impaired in his left eye. The driver pleaded guilty to fleeing the scene of the accident and served six months in prison. Nelson, soon after the funeral was held for her son, was charged with second-degree vehicular homicide, reckless conduct, and crossing a roadway in an inappropriate manner—in other words, jaywalking. These charges, in collaboration, carried a penalty of up to three years in prison. In the end, Nelson was sentenced to 12 months of probation, for doing nothing more than trying to get her children home.

Modern attitudes toward jaywalking can be traced to “broken windows” policies implemented in larger cities like New York and Boston. In 1998, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani instituted a citywide crackdown on the practice of jaywalking. The fine for walking outside of designated crosswalks was raised from a token $2 fine to a heftier $50 penalty. This past year, under the stewardship of Mayor Bill de Blasio, that fine was once again raised, this time to $250. However, just like stop-and-frisk before it, the clampdown on jaywalking has disproportionately targeted people of color. The Department of Justice report on the Ferguson Police Department revealed that 95 percent of those cited for jaywalking are black. In Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, that figure is 89 percent, even with a populace that is primarily white. A female English professor at Arizona State University was forcefully pinned to the ground by campus police after crossing the street to avoid sidewalk construction. Instances like these fail at maintaining even the guise of upholding public safety. So the question becomes, who is being served and who exactly is being protected?

* * *

The criminalization of jaywalking may be in part justified if crosswalks were in fact safer, but this doesn’t seem to be the case. Crosswalks that aren’t supported by traffic lights or stop signs are no safer than unmarked zones. One study published in Transportation Research Board of the National Academies found that the risk of injury inside the painted lines was the same as it was outside of them. On roadways with multiple lanes and high-volume traffic the crosswalk proved the more precarious option. A safety study conducted by NYU Langone Medical Center was even more decisive in its findings: Of those injured, 44 percent had used a crosswalk with the traffic signal on their side, while 23 percent had been struck crossing mid-block. In what can only be attributed to dreadful luck, 6 percent had been injured while on the sidewalk.

To compound the issue, most crosswalk buttons are nonoperational. Only 9 percent of buttons in New York City, the Department of Transportation estimates, are responsive to user commands. The remaining 91 percent, which are set to fixed timers, serve as placebos for Type A personalities or germ-laden playthings for restive children. In car-centric cities like Dallas, the number of functioning buttons is even lower. Many of these buttons worked at one point but have been deactivated to improve efficiency and flow. Explanations of this sort are par for the course. Efficiency has been the mantra of the urban planning profession for the better part of 60 years. However, by prioritizing efficiency above all other ideals, such as equity and livability, we strip pedestrians of their personal agency and demote non-drivers to the status of second-class citizens.

* * *

Recent years have seen an uptick in pedestrian advocacy. The global recession exposed sprawl for what it is: a blatant cash grab and misappropriation of resources. For the first time auto usage is down in the United States, and suburbanites are returning to the city in large numbers. Younger generations seem especially keen to escape the isolationism and uniformity of suburbia. With this migration is a renewed desire for walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. And while cities have been generally receptive to these entreaties, modern planning still begins and ends with the automobile. Until the scales of power and privilege are balanced, cars will continue to exercise their dominion over city roads.

20’s Plenty for Us, a not-for-profit organization founded in England, advocates for a 20 mph speed limit on urban and residential streets. Campaigners maintain that reduced speed limits would allow pedestrians and cyclists safer access to roadways and dramatically lower the number of traffic collisions. Moreover, pedestrians struck by a vehicle traveling less than 23 mph have a 90 percent chance of surviving the accident (compared to only 25 percent when met by a car traveling over 50 mph). The organization presently has 250 chapters operating across the United Kingdom. Pedestrian organizations with similar aims have blossomed around the United States, but few have the means and resources to expand their influence beyond the local level.

In New York City, the pedestrian plaza has experienced an unlikely renaissance, with Times Square serving as the highest-profile example. Despite the initial resistance from area businesses (and taxicab drivers), the pedestrianization of the iconic square is now viewed as an unqualified success. Foot traffic has increased, injuries and noise pollution have plummeted, and three-fourths of Manhattanites surveyed, many of whom stood in opposition to the project, now approve of the changes. Several more streets (including a pocket of 33rd Street, near Penn Station) plan to launch pilot programs over the coming year.

* * *

For the past four months, in my hometown of Rochester, New York, I have been lobbying to convert a popular side street into a shared space. The street in question—Gibbs (for the odd reader familiar with downtown Rochester)—is a one-way thoroughfare, anchored by a renowned music conservatory and century-old concert hall. The narrow street, easily accessible on foot (or via transit), links two larger and more lively roads, East and Main. At this point, I have met with school administrators, city planners, urban activists and architects, and have made disappointingly little headway.

Shared spaces are the democratic alternative to the autocracy of the pedestrian plaza. They seek to restore the natural order of the road by granting equal access to all modes of transportation. By eliminating traditional demarcations, shared spaces promote open communication and cooperation between drivers and pedestrians. Describe this concept in a meeting and watch the frown form on the face of your interlocutor. (You may as well be stomping on the table and chanting “anarchy.”) Despite clear evidence of its safety and efficacy (see: Europe), the approach struggles to gain traction on this side of the pond, especially in smaller and midsize cities where the car is king.

Rochester has taken tentative steps to retrofit its infrastructure, adding a network of dedicated bicycle lanes and sharrow markings. The Inner Loop, an underused freeway from our industrial past, which has acted as a garrote around the neck of the city’s poor, has been partially entombed beneath a layer of gravel (with plans to build a city street and cycling track on the burial site). While bulldozers continued their task of erasing the Loop, the city quietly greenlit a $157 million overhaul of a highway interchange in the Rochester suburb of Gates. For a little context, the highway redesign comes in at seven and a half times the cost of the long overdue Inner Loop revisal. The two projects may not be in direct opposition of one another, but they do send mixed signals about the priorities of local leadership. In a city hemorrhaging wealth, we can’t afford to hedge our bets.

Attempts to lure young talent to our snowy shores tend to focus exclusively on job creation (with corporate tax credits handed out like Sunday coupons). But as much as young people need jobs, they also yearn for livable neighborhoods with vibrant street life. The car-dependent cities of our past risk becoming fossils in the future. (How can street life be expected to unfold when everyone is just passing through?) The revival of cities like Rochester will depend less on the breadth of their highways than the state of their streets. And the first step involves returning to pedestrians what was wrongfully taken from them, so that jaywalking is no longer a provocation but the rule of the road.

England Passed a Law That Can Make Skateboarding Totally Illegal

from the RIDE CHANNEL

Last October, England passed a new law called Public Spaces Protection Orders (PSPOs). This law can be used to ban any activity that the city deems to have a detrimental effect on the quality of life of locals. At its core, street skating is based around utilizing objects like ledges, benches, handicap ramps, and the like in non-traditional, possibly disruptive, ways, making it a primary target of PSPOs.

Once in place, a PSPO makes skateboarding or even walking through a certain area at night illegal. A person can receive an on-the-spot fine of up to £100 and, if prosecuted or convicted, can face a fine up to £1,000 and end up with a permanent criminal record.

This is obviously unnerving to anyone who’s ever skateboarded. Imagine you were walking home from a friend’s house at night, carrying your board, and were stopped and immediately fined and given a court date—as ridiculous as it sounds, this sort of thing is legal under the PSPO law.

As The Independent reports, skaters in the town of Kettering fought this law by collecting 3,000 signatures from people in favor of removing skateboarding from the list of PSPOs—which also propose to bar juveniles from the town center between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.

This Orwellian law obviously infringes on basic human rights and sets a scary precedent. If laws like this become the norm all over the world, it could mean the end of street skating as we know it.

One of the most misunderstood law suits of all time

The Right to Remain Silent. a short film by By Phil Brown

The film covers the mass arrests of nearly 2000 peaceful protesters during the COP 15 in Copenhagen (environmental meeting), whilst following effected activists and discussing the wider ramifications of the growing trend around the world of criminalizing protests.

Recent Lyle Preslar interview (yeah, Lyle, the guitar player from Minor Threat)

UPDATE: Wow, i posted this before i listened to the whole thing, pretty weird nice dudes talking way too much, and some things pretty inaccurately, but nonetheless interesting insight into the mind of Lyle ...

Sunday Sermon

Back in August, during a Springfield City Council public hearing on amending the city's nondiscrimination ordinance to include sexual orientation and gender identity protections, Rev. Phil Snider of the Brentwood Christian Church lashed out at the council for "inviting the judgement of God upon our land" by making "special rights for gays and lesbians."

He goes on to invoke the bible and morality and the end of days a few more times before suddenly appearing to lose his train of thought.

And then something pretty amazing happens.

via Sparrow Media from Gawker

5 Freedom-Killing Tactics Police Will Use to Crack Down on Protests in 2012

from Alternet, by Steven Rosenfeld

Across America many cities and police forces are eyeing new ways to crack down on protesters.

The First Amendment right to assemble and protest is going to get a black eye in 2012—as it has every time there has been an upsurge in America’s social justice movements.

Already in city after city, protesters and civil rights lawyers are troubled by proposed and newly enacted anti-protest rules, many of which are likely to be found unconstitutional if they have their day in court. In the meantime mayors, police and in some cases federal agencies are making detailed plans to thwart protests at local and national events.

In many cities, ordinances aimed at Occupy protesters are emerging to restrict protests and anything resembling camping on sidewalks, streets and parks. New fees are being drawn up to discourage large demonstrations. Anti-leafleting and postering rules are also muzzling people trying to spread the word about events. And all of that is being shepherded with a new pretext for using paramilitary tactics, replacing last year’s "health and safety" excuse for sweeping away Occupy sites with the rationale of protecting "national security" in a presidential election year.

“It looks to me like the law enforcement preparations are similar to what we have seen at most of the political conventions or other major events over the last dozen years, which is paramilitary policing against a civilian population,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund and co-chair of the National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Committee. “This tends to be different than the way Occupy actions have been handed for the most part, although one can point to Oakland or the New York Police Department [as exceptions]. But I would stress that it is not new.”

Verheyden-Hilliard and her colleagues, including hundreds of volunteer attorneys across America who helped defend Occupy protests last fall, are not just continuing to litigate numerous instances of abusive policing—such as the trap-and-detain tactics used in mass roundups in New York, Oakland and the use of excessive force on university campuses. They are tracking the latest versions in a well-known policing playbook now being fine-tuned for 2012’s big events, such as Chicago’s NATO summit in May, the national political conventions in late summer, and the anticipated re-emergence of local Occupy protests when the weather warms.

“People do overcome,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “But I think you have to have a fair and honest assessment of what the grounds are in front of you in order to be able to succeed. We think that people should know the hurdles they are facing. Yet at the same time, it is not all hand-wringing. There are a lot of people who go over the top and say fascism is here. Fascism is not here. We are still out in the streets.

“We still have democratic abilities to be out in the streets. It’s just that there are real problems that people are facing. People have to know what they are, but they can fight them and they can overcome them.”

What follows are the main pages from the anti-protest playbook being fine-tuned by municipal officials in advance of 2012 protests.

Tactic 1: Expanding Permit Requirements: Municipalities -- and not just Charlotte, South Carolina, where the Democratic National Convention will be held, and Tampa, Florida, where the Republican National Convention will be held -- are adopting local ordinances requiring protesters to apply for permits months or weeks in advance, even if they haven’t unveiled all of their rules for the events. That idea is not only to prevent spontaneous assembly, but also to create deterrents, leading to tactic two: charging protesters for exercising their rights.

Tactic 2: Charging Protesters for Municipal Costs: In supposedly liberal cities, such as San Francisco and Syracuse, New York, city halls have told protest groups they have to pay for the costs of (unwanted) police escorts and other fees to discourage marches. The fees—which can be challenged in court and thrown out if found to be selectively applied—are in Charlotte’s new rules for the Democratic Convention and include “hiring and paying off-duty law enforcement officers, or reimbursing the city for costs of providing on-duty law enforcement officers, to appropriately police street closures.” In Tampa, the new rules require protesters apply 60 days in advance for special permits and obtain insurance.

These fees are in addition to fines against groups if people put up their signs, posters or leaflet supporting their cause. New York City and Washington, DC, has versions of these anti-leafleting and poster rules. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, Public Citizen has sued over a new county rule forcing protesters to pay for its legal costs. “There’s hundreds of different rules about it,” Verheyden-Hilliard said, saying these fees were one of the “under the radar” trends and obstacles facing protesters in 2012.

Tactic 3: Demonizing Protesters In Pre-Event Press Conferences: The track record of police saying there are mounting public health emergencies was a central feature before Occupy evictions in New York’s Zuccotti Park, Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, Washington’s McPherson Square and elsewhere. In Chicago, police officials looking ahead to May’s NATO summit have begun to invoke the 2012 corollary: security concerns, saying downtown businesses are anticipating riots with police saying that they do not know how many protesters will show up, “some of whom could become violent.” These smear tactics not only justify spending vast sums of public money on policing, but they also deter peaceful people from coming out to join the protest.

Tactic 4: Creating Exclusion Zones and Segregating Protesters: There have been many court rulings asserting the First Amendment right of assembly in the street and on sidewalks. However, that has not stopped a range of municipalities and even state legislatures from eyeing or passing laws that range from making protesting in the street in front of a private home illegal—such as legislation passed by the Georgia Senate last week or Charlotte’s new protest rules—or that bar camping on city property. Charlotte’s anti-camping provisions were used to shut down the city’s Occupy protest.

The sidewalk and camping restrictions are part of a trend of declaring larger areas of cities off-limits to protesters. In Washington, DC, which has some of the most protest-friendly rules in the nation (after repeatedly being sued and losing in federal court), the city is eyeing a proposal to extend sidewalk restrictions to all parkland—targeting future Occupy encampments. This trend continues with more sweeping measures like declaring a large swath of a city a special security zone, such as at the NATO summit and during the national political conventions, where paramilitary forces will be deployed.

Some restrictions are reasonable, such as the U.S. Coast Guard closing and patrolling the Lake Michigan shore and Chicago River during the NATO summit. But others, such as Charlotte’s new rules, impose broad and likely unconstitutional restrictions. These start with banning any object or activity that blocks roads, outlaws crossing police lines, bars possessing anything the police say can conceal a weapon or person’s identity (backpacks and scarves), limits the hanging of banners on private property without permission from property owners, and makes it illegal to use police scanners inside the security perimeter (but does not stop police from spying on protesters, including using helicopters).

The national political conventions each receive $50 million for security from the federal government. In Tampa, Florida, where the Republican Convention will be held in late August, the downtown will be sealed off from public access, roads closed, and the city will spend $30 million hiring 4,000 additional law enforcement personnel, local papers report. Tampa police already have spent nearly $300,000 on an armored SWAT vehicle and $1.18 million on “video linkages” between ground police and helicopters, the news reports say. Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn also has been hostile to would-be protesters, telling local papers, “Just because they want to occupy something doesn’t mean we are obligated to provide them with an opportunity to camp out in a public park or on a sidewalk.” He has all but rejected the Florida ACLU’s efforts to negotiate.

In Charlotte, the police won’t “talk about $25 million in new equipment for the DNC,” the Charlotte Observer reported in a January article that talked about how the technology and equipment will affect how local policing is conducted for years. The ordinance upgrades in Charlotte and Tampa do not expire after the conventions. Civil libertarians expect both events to be highly militarized with protesters treated poorly.

“Exclusion zones are appalling,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “We completely oppose and do not negotiate for any type of pens or pits in which people can stand. Our view is that people have the right to be on the streets and sidewalks and it is not a compromisable right. But that is definitely what you are going to see this year.”

Tactic 5: Mass Arrests, Punitive Detention: As many Occupy protesters learned last fall, the police have the bullhorns, handcuffs, pepper spray, waiting vans and jail cells at their disposal if they want to conduct sweeps, and use trap and detain tactics. Perhaps the best-known example was the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge—which is being litigated to possibly impose rules on New York police to prevent similar arrests and to clear the records of those arrested. However, it is an unfortunate reality that despite all the constitutional protections and subsequent court victories, including collecting damages, the police can and do overpower protesters.

Perhaps the best warning to protesters of impending police overreach can be found in the rules that Washington, DC was forced to adopt in 2005, after it lost a series of suits and a sympathetic city council wanted to restrict police excesses. Washington’s revised standards include: restrictions on using police lines, restrictions on ordering an crowd to disperse or to end an event; a ban on arresting someone who is parading without a permit. It requires that protesters be given time to comply with an order; restricts the use of riot gear; limits the period of arrest and detention; restricts the use of pepper spray; prohibits inhumane use of handcuffs or physical restraints; requires food and water be given to anyone arrested; requires those arrested be given a statement on how to obtain a quick release; requires detailed arrest records be kept; and requires police to display badges.

Even with these standards in law—which are a list of tell-tale signs of police excesses—Washington city officials this week are eyeing legislation to ban "crowding" in city parks, and an attorney representing the police department was chastised by a federal judge this week for knowingly submitting false affidavits in an ongoing lawsuit over past protests.

Hope Not Fear

Despite these obstacles, civil rights lawyers are already looking at ways to defend First Amendment rights at 2012’s largest events: the NATO summit and political conventions. Also, there is a large cadre of lawyers across the country who gained experience during last fall’s Occupy protests and can be deployed quickly as events spiral.

“Nationally, what we were able to accomplish this past fall in terms of legal support was unprecedented,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “I am the co-chair of National Lawyers Guild mass defense committee, and as Occupy actions sprung up all over the country, we were able to pull together hundreds of volunteer attorneys, law students and legal workers in cities and towns throughout the U.S. without notice.”

But looking toward the national political conventions, the hurdles are more formidable, she said, because the police and various federal agencies are not discussing their plans.

“We are working with legal teams in Tampa and Charlotte who are looking at ordinance challenges, permitting issues, etc.,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “As it unfolds I would expect there to be legal challenges, but part of the initial hurdle is trying to pin down from law enforcement what the restrictions are going to be. One of the tactics that the government uses is to try to wind down the clock and not provide information on restrictions until the last minute so that you are only able to go to court on a short time-frame and without opportunity to develop a record to overcome the pretextual and untested security claims that will be presented to the judge. The fact is they know well in advance what they are planning to do.”

There are other major factors the police cannot control, however. The first is the number of people who will protest—whether it is in local Occupy protests or national political events. When enough people take to the streets, police cannot arrest everyone. Nor can they control the media from covering police overreach and excessive force. Together those factors can change the political climate and force governments at the local, state and national level to adopt reforms—not because legislators are feeling benevolent, but because they are worried about what is happening in the streets.
Steven Rosenfeld covers democracy issues for AlterNet and is the author of "Count My Vote: A Citizen's Guide to Voting" (AlterNet Books, 2008).

© 2012 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Photographers: Stand Your Ground

thanks, Ryan

Are Cameras the New Guns?

from Gizmodo:

In response to a flood of Facebook and YouTube videos that depict police abuse, a new trend in law enforcement is gaining popularity. In at least three states, it is now illegal to record any on-duty police officer.

Even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists.

The legal justification for arresting the "shooter" rests on existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws, with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited. Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are among the 12 states in which all parties must consent for a recording to be legal unless, as with TV news crews, it is obvious to all that recording is underway. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested. Most all-party-consent states also include an exception for recording in public places where "no expectation of privacy exists" (Illinois does not) but in practice this exception is not being recognized.

Massachusetts attorney June Jensen represented Simon Glik who was arrested for such a recording. She explained, "[T]he statute has been misconstrued by Boston police. You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want." Legal scholar and professor Jonathan Turley agrees, "The police are basing this claim on a ridiculous reading of the two-party consent surveillance law - requiring all parties to consent to being taped. I have written in the area of surveillance law and can say that this is utter nonsense."

The courts, however, disagree. A few weeks ago, an Illinois judge rejected a motion to dismiss an eavesdropping charge against Christopher Drew, who recorded his own arrest for selling one-dollar artwork on the streets of Chicago. Although the misdemeanor charges of not having a peddler's license and peddling in a prohibited area were dropped, Drew is being prosecuted for illegal recording, a Class I felony punishable by 4 to 15 years in prison.

In 2001, when Michael Hyde was arrested for criminally violating the state's electronic surveillance law - aka recording a police encounter - the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld his conviction 4-2. In dissent, Chief Justice Margaret Marshall stated, "Citizens have a particularly important role to play when the official conduct at issue is that of the police. Their role cannot be performed if citizens must fear criminal reprisals…." (Note: In some states it is the audio alone that makes the recording illegal.)

The selection of "shooters" targeted for prosecution do, indeed, suggest a pattern of either reprisal or an attempt to intimidate.

Glik captured a police action on his cellphone to document what he considered to be excessive force. He was not only arrested, his phone was also seized.

On his website Drew wrote, "Myself and three other artists who documented my actions tried for two months to get the police to arrest me for selling art downtown so we could test the Chicago peddlers license law. The police hesitated for two months because they knew it would mean a federal court case. With this felony charge they are trying to avoid this test and ruin me financially and stain my credibility."

Hyde used his recording to file a harassment complaint against the police. After doing so, he was criminally charged.

In short, recordings that are flattering to the police - an officer kissing a baby or rescuing a dog - will almost certainly not result in prosecution even if they are done without all-party consent. The only people who seem prone to prosecution are those who embarrass or confront the police, or who somehow challenge the law. If true, then the prosecutions are a form of social control to discourage criticism of the police or simple dissent.

A recent arrest in Maryland is both typical and disturbing.

On March 5, 24-year-old Anthony John Graber III's motorcycle was pulled over for speeding. He is currently facing criminal charges for a video he recorded on his helmet-mounted camera during the traffic stop.

The case is disturbing because:

1) Graber was not arrested immediately. Ten days after the encounter, he posted some of he material to YouTube, and it embarrassed Trooper J. D. Uhler. The trooper, who was in plainclothes and an unmarked car, jumped out waving a gun and screaming. Only later did Uhler identify himself as a police officer. When the YouTube video was discovered the police got a warrant against Graber, searched his parents' house (where he presumably lives), seized equipment, and charged him with a violation of wiretapping law.

2) Baltimore criminal defense attorney Steven D. Silverman said he had never heard of the Maryland wiretap law being used in this manner. In other words, Maryland has joined the expanding trend of criminalizing the act of recording police abuse. Silverman surmises, "It's more [about] ‘contempt of cop' than the violation of the wiretapping law."

3) Police spokesman Gregory M. Shipley is defending the pursuit of charges against Graber, denying that it is "some capricious retribution" and citing as justification the particularly egregious nature of Graber's traffic offenses. Oddly, however, the offenses were not so egregious as to cause his arrest before the video appeared.

Almost without exception, police officials have staunchly supported the arresting officers. This argues strongly against the idea that some rogue officers are overreacting or that a few cops have something to hide. "Arrest those who record the police" appears to be official policy, and it's backed by the courts.

Carlos Miller at the Photography Is Not A Crime website offers an explanation: "For the second time in less than a month, a police officer was convicted from evidence obtained from a videotape. The first officer to be convicted was New York City Police Officer Patrick Pogan, who would never have stood trial had it not been for a video posted on Youtube showing him body slamming a bicyclist before charging him with assault on an officer. The second officer to be convicted was Ottawa Hills (Ohio) Police Officer Thomas White, who shot a motorcyclist in the back after a traffic stop, permanently paralyzing the 24-year-old man."

When the police act as though cameras were the equivalent of guns pointed at them, there is a sense in which they are correct. Cameras have become the most effective weapon that ordinary people have to protect against and to expose police abuse. And the police want it to stop.

Happily, even as the practice of arresting "shooters" expands, there are signs of effective backlash. At least one Pennsylvania jurisdiction has reaffirmed the right to video in public places. As part of a settlement with ACLU attorneys who represented an arrested "shooter," the police in Spring City and East Vincent Township adopted a written policy allowing the recording of on-duty policemen.

As journalist Radley Balko declares, "State legislatures should consider passing laws explicitly making it legal to record on-duty law enforcement officials."

Wendy McElroy is the author of several books on anarchism and feminism. She maintains the iconoclastic website ifeminists.net as well as an active blog at wendymcelroy.com.

Thanks, Chris!

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are planning to have the Pope arrested in the UK

It's a buddy-cop movie plot for the new millennium: Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are teaming up to arrest the Pope when he comes to Britain in September.

Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, said: "This is a man whose first instinct when his priests are caught with their pants down is to cover up the scandal and damn the young victims to silence."
Hitchens, author of God Is Not Great, said: "This man is not above or outside the law. The institutionalised concealment of child rape is a crime under any law and demands not private ceremonies of repentance or church-funded payoffs, but justice and punishment."

Richard Dawkins calls for arrest of Pope Benedict XVI


thanks, BoingBoing

The Love Police

The Love Police show you how to beat the London cops on a bullshit terrorism stop.

Lessons here: KNOW YOUR SHIT BEFORE YOU FUCK WITH THE PO-LICE. And you may win the battle and help win the war against law enforcement abuse.

That said; However tight these guys are I don't think this would fly worth a shit in New York or Los Angeles in 2010. But it is an incredible act of a citizen who cares.





For more great examples of these guys trying to keep the law in it's place go to their youtube channel: cveitch.org

Thanks, BoingBoing

Come Back With a Warrant doormat

...apropos of bloggers being bullied into parting with their hard drives: check out this nifty doormat, available at Target for 18 bucks and some change.

from Xeni at BoingBoing