Judge
Rules for Chaos at Saturday's Anti-War Protest in New York
By Daniel Forbes
for DrugWar.com
February 13, 2003
NYPD handling a huge protest peacefully-
photo Preston Peet
With Monday's ruling against an orderly,
nonviolent protest march anywhere on the streets of Manhattan
this Saturday, U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones has steered
the City of New York towards chaos. Though event organizer United
for Peace and Justice states its willingness to follow any
route the New York Police Department designates, the only legal
option at hand is for anti-war demonstrators to be massed in tightly
controlled police pens stretching far up First Avenue north of
the United Nations. Of the perhaps 100,000 people corralled there
- stationary, cold, unable to hear or see the program directly,
unable to duck out without difficulty for coffee or the Port-o-John
- how many will chant for a guilt-assuaging hour and then head
home?
Then there are those who will seek a more
creative outlet, avoiding the pens and hoping to sow chaos all
over Manhattan. The Net features discussion of such tactics, honed
at past free-form protests, as using cell phones to coordinate
splinter actions. Of the currently 29 UFPJ-sanctioned "feeder"
marches - by such groups as the "Queer Anti-War Contingent,"
the "Interfaith Ministers for Peace," not to mention
the "Anarchist Red & Black Contingent" and the "Anti-Capitalist
Bloc" - how many might break up like mercury in a dish, blobs
going off on their own rather than being shunted into the pens?
As former Brooklyn DA and Congresswoman
Liz Holtzman told me, "It's tough to distinguish [regular]
walkers from marchers."
One contributor to the NYC
Indymedia Center Web site called for: "a tactical plan
for widescale CD [civil disobedience] throughout Manhattan. This
could include surprise People's 'inspections' of various corporate
and governmental sites, traffic lockdowns, a mass die-in, street
theatre, prayer vigils, snowball fights, you name it. It's time
to be both bold and creative. Let's transform Feb. 15 into a carnival
of peace and resistance throughout Manhattan all afternoon. Save
the protest pit for last call."
This is among the more temperate postings.
Another stated mildly, "We can't settle for tired megaphone
speakers inside a protest pen encircled by police - we gotta bust
out into the streets."
Writing in ZNet
online, Brian Dominick, an emergency medical technician from
Syracuse, NY, noted his phone message to New York Mayor Michael
R. Bloomberg that, "permit or no permit, we will march."
He added, "This latest clash between the streets and the
elites is at this phase neither cataclysmic nor revolutionary,
but it is certainly momentous."
As the national coordinator for the Independent
Progressive Politics Network, which normally focuses on alternatives
to the two major parties, Ted Glick represents such groups as
the National Lawyers Guild and the Green Party. An organizer of
Saturday's demonstration, he disagreed about taking it to the
streets, saying in an interview, "I doubt there will be a
breach of police barricades - it will be absolutely peaceful and
nonviolent. We're not looking for a confrontation, but to manifest
the views of millions of people."
Glick added that the city seeks to discourage
attendance by forbidding a march. "But to the extent they
don't cooperate with those of us with a history of organizing
peaceful demonstrations, then they put a lot of stress on what
can happen."
By phone, Brian Dominick, a veteran of many
demonstrations, wondered about an exit strategy - both citizens'
and the cops'. While he's helped organize medical facilities at
prior demonstrations, he's just coordinating buses for this one.
Based on his experience, he speculated that,
"With hundreds of thousands of people at what was planned
and promoted as a march, they will have that expectation. What,
are the police somehow going to manage to say we have to leave
in very small groups and disperse us a few at a time? That's what
they do when there's hundreds or even a few thousand people. But
unless the police want to keep us penned up there for hours on
end, it's going to be chaos. In reality, there's going to be a
march. People will be at a rally pumped up for it, and that's
the natural inclination."
As endorsed by Judge Jones on Monday, the
city has seemingly transformed a largely self-policing, follow-your-nose
chant-and-sing march along any route the city might choose - UFPJ
having abandoned its goal of marching by the UN - into an unpredictable
and potentially chaotic cat-and-mouse struggle. Any rampant hooliganism
will besmirch the peace movement, true, but also black the eye
of civil liberties in a country touting itself as a democratic
example to the world.
And, to the degree that news cameras focus
on cops tussling with some kids decked out in anarchist regalia
or some shattered plate glass rather than on throngs tramping
by under a Unitarian or Queer or Labor peace banner, that apparently
suits the authorities just fine. (At one point, UFJP's negotiations
with the city were delayed because, according to its legal complaint,
Mayor Bloomberg "needed to be part of the decision-making
process…." And sitting with city lawyers before Judge
Jones bolstering denial of a march permit were two U.S. assistant
attorneys.)
Effective, massed dissent an intolerable
visual spectacle as war approaches, the city now invites struggle
on both ends of a nightstick. The current thin strip of a rally
- Jones estimated it might stretch from its start north of the
UN for some 25 blocks - precludes TV shots of a vast, anti-war
crowd gathered in Central Park, UJFP's requested endpoint. (Before
they decided they would accept any route of march the city dictated,
UJFP wanted to march past the UN, then west, then up through Times
Square and along Seventh Avenue to Central Park.)
Representing the UFJP, the New
York Civil Liberties Union noted in its federal suit, "For
decades people in New York City have paraded and marched through
the public streets as a means of expressing and demonstrating
their views in a wide variety of topics …. Marching in the
streets is a time-honored tradition in our country that lies at
the core of the First Amendment."
The NYCLU appealed Jones's ruling Wednesday
morning before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
In an oral decision Wednesday afternoon, Judge Jose A. Cabranes
upheld the city's ban, saying his ruling applied to Saturday's
demonstration only.
Said Glick, "People want to see who's
there. You can't do that if everyone is jammed, you can't see
the vets and the women's groups and labor. Marching manifests
who we are and shows the breadth of the movement. It might take
a long time for everyone to march. But that allows the size of
it to be seen - as the hours pass."
Last week, city lawyer Jeffrey Friedlander
told the Associated Press, "We will not allow any event to
jeopardize public safety or prevent people from going about their
business." As to the latter, thousands of marchers might
hope - corporally and en masse - to turn many fellow New Yorkers
from the quotidian, to raise a question or two. Dissent becomes
a less lonely business surrounded by thousands of the like-minded.
Perhaps some burghers in from the burbs for a Saturday matinee
just might keep that ticket in their pockets, seeing so many well-fed
folks just like them marching along. Or any number of teens descended
on Times Square for some gawking and a movie might be enticed
by their peers in the line of march.
NYCLU head Donna Lieberman said, "A
rally has a different tenor than a march. It's important to go
throughout the city to express your views to the people of New
York in places that are vital to that message." People trapped
in holding pens have a limited ability to communicate with each
other, to grasp any sense of the totality of the event.
According to the NYCLU complaint, when the
NYPD first rejected a march, "the reason given for the denial
was congestion and related concerns arising out of a march."
Subsequently, according to the NYCLU, after flirting with the
idea of allowing a march, the city refused. "The only reason
given for the decision was a concern about the NYPD resources
required to police a march."
In her decision, Judge Jones defended the
city's refusal "because of safety and security considerations."
After Monday's ruling, the city's Friedlander stated that both
the judge and the NYPD concurred that any march "would have
put the public's safety at risk." This is in a city famous
for decades for its world-class ability to cope safely with crowds.
But both UFJP co-chairwoman Leslie Cagan
and Lieberman stated at a press conference Monday that city officials
testified before Jones that they don't anticipate any violence
or terror attacks. Lieberman said, "The city argued it doesn't
have the time to plan or the manpower, and it invoked 9/11 in
terms of fear of attack. But it said it had no fear from the demonstrators."
She added that the city issued a permit
for a peace demonstration less than a month after 9/11, when fears
and emotions were at an even higher pitch than now. The city agreed
once it was pointed out that the demonstration coincided with
the Columbus Day parade. Apparently next month's St. Patrick's
Day parade doesn't provide the same rationale.
Jones herself cited case law that, "Such
use of the streets and public places has, from ancient times,
been a part of the privileges, immunities, rights, and liberties
of citizens." But, she added, such rights are "not absolute."
They "may be regulated in the interest of all … in consonance
with peace and good order." In fact, as was disclosed in
Newsday, since
last fall, there have been no permits for any protest marches
in Manhattan below 59th Street. Apparently an ancient right has
been whisked away without notice.
The judge leaned heavily on the testimony
of NYPD Assistant Chief Michael D. Esposito. Referring to the
thousands of protesters, he said, "If they at one time did
something or if somebody in the group had a device, I don't know
how we would be able to stop it with that amount of people or
see anything." But how will police be able to stop a device
from people packed in pens for 25 blocks better than they might
from the same group of people moving their feet?
Judge Jones made the bald assertion that,
"The Police can more effectively monitor crowds for terror
threats at stationary rallies than they can crowds moving in a
procession…" But she offered no support for this perhaps
counterintuitive assertion that's key to the whole dispute. One
might argue that furtive activity would be easier to manage when
people are pressed together, without the natural spacing that
movement involves. (Unless shooting invisible poison or some such
out of a boutonniere on your lapel, given the crowd and the cops,
escape isn't much of an option moving or stationary.)
Esposito testified that since, unlike a
cultural parade, people self-select, perhaps at the last minute,
to come, "That crowd, that number marching through where
they wanted and not knowing how many would be there would be very
difficult to police…. It would be very difficult to do."
Why? Only so many people - soccer moms from
Scarsdale and anarchists (perhaps also from Scarsdale ) alike
- can fit on any given block. At bottom, that number dictates
how the NYPD marshals its forces. Besides, how are the hundreds
of other cities around the world coping with the marches they'll
allow on Saturday? Has the NYPD suddenly lost its status as a
paragon of police science?
During an anti-war protest of similar size
in Washington in January, one that the Bush administration endorsed
(sort of) as Americans exercising their rights, very few cops
monitored the peaceful crowd. At the staging area on the National
Mall, with tens of thousands of protesters, a couple of dozen
U.S. Park Police loitered about. As marchers then passed the Capitol
and nearby federal offices, more cops were in evidence, some few
hundred. Then the march passed into a residential neighborhood
in South East Washington, with nary an officer in sight, mile
after weary, frozen mile.
Ted Glick, who marched in April's big D.C.
anti-war protest, said, "There were virtually no police,
and there were no problems. The disparity with the seat of government
and what's happening in New York couldn't be more stark - and
it's essentially the same people."
There's no reason to expect a New York line
of organized march won't be similarly pacifist. It is a peace
demo, after all. But rather than rely on both peer and more direct
pressure from massed, orderly protesters and parade marshals who
might point out transgressors to the cops, the city instead sets
the stage for bands of hotheads to swoop down for some mayhem
and then try to flee. Rather than an easily policed, peaceful
line of march, now most of Manhattan becomes a protest zone.
An execrable New York Sun editorial last
week raised "the possibility" of demonstrators being
subject to "an eventual treason prosecution." It noted
that by "obstructing" the protest, the city can hope
to limit the turnout. And, "the smaller the crowd, the more
likely that President Bush will proceed with his plans to liberate
Iraq."
Maybe the Sun parsed Bloomberg and company's
ability (and reason) to limit the crowd correctly. Or just maybe
a bunch of folks on the fence about bombing Baghdad might show
up to defend a core freedom Americans have fought and died defending
for a long time. As Glick put it, "The bottom line is the
march rather than hanging around being frustrated near the UN"
-------
Daniel Forbes (ddanforbes@aol.com)
testified before both the Senate and the House regarding the Clinton
administration's secret payments to the TV networks rewarding
anti-drug sitcoms and dramas. Work archived at www.mapinc.org.
