BOSS HOGTIE
by Jason Cherkis
Washington City Paper
January 17-23, 2003
Hundreds of people wandered into Pershing Park on the morning of Sept. 27
activists looking for a protest, nurses in town for a conference, lawyers
headed to work, and a cyclist training for a race. And there was Chief
Charles Ramsey with his troops, ready to arrest them all.
By 2:25 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 28, lawyer Julie Abbate had arrived at D.C.
Superior Court under the close watch of U.S. marshals. Once in the
building, Abbate says, she was put up against a wall and patted down. The
officers then told her to pull down her green slacks and underwear, squat,
and cough. "I thought they were kidding," Abbate says. "They weren't." She
felt stupid. "Every order I obeyed even 'Take off your fucking pants and
cough.'" Orders to take off your pants and cough are standard operating
procedure for processing an arrestee in D.C.
But standard procedure took on a new meaning in the mass sweep that
corralled Abbate and more than 400 other innocent people in Pershing Park
on Friday, Sept. 27. It was the first day of a protest that was supposed to
shut the city down, spread the gospel of anti-globalization, and plead for
a U.S. foreign policy based on peace and love.
Many bystanders, such as Abbate, wandered into the fray, unaware of the
police department's protocol for handling civil demonstrations. She ended
up being arrested that morning in Pershing Park, at 15th Street and
Pennsylvania Avenue NW. The charge was failure to obey a police order, the
same rap applied to her fellow arrestees. She spent five hours handcuffed
on a bus. Eventually, she was hogtied wrist-to-ankle on the floor of the
police academy's gym. That lasted for another 12 hours.
On Saturday morning at 5 a.m., Abbate was transferred to central booking
downtown. She and other Pershing Park arrestees crammed into a cell
consisting of cement floors, one bench, and one toilet. They had to form a
"pee wall" to prevent officers from watching them go to the bathroom.
Officers took their time processing them; some even threatened to leave
them in custody through the weekend.
"That's what you get," taunted the officers, according to the 36-year-old
Abbate.
Eight hours later, they were transferred to Superior Court, where they went
through the squat-and-cough routine. They were moved to a cell that became
so crowded that arrestees had to stand on the toilet to make room. "It was
exhausting, infuriating, bewildering, maddening," Abbate says. "It made me
feel really, really helpless."
Police Chief Charles Ramsey viewed the treatment of Abbate and her
cellmates as something of a coup. As the whole drama at Pershing Park
unfolded that Friday morning, Ramsey looked on from the middle of 15th
Street. He leaned against a standard-issue riot baton he used for a cane as
his troops rounded up the 400-odd arrestees. The arrests were choreographed
so well, all he had to do was wait.
One man, maybe two, hollered questions at Ramsey. Why are those
demonstrators being detained? What did they do wrong? These were easy
questions to ignore, especially if you were accompanied by an entourage of
blue.
Metrobuses 8733 and 8734, two of many filled with Pershing Park arrestees,
were shoving off to muted applause from activists. Soon the riot cops
trotted away, two by two. Then the bike cops left, with their supervisor
shouting, "Thanks to everybody!" Ramsey started back to his cruiser.
Ramsey shuffled against his makeshift cane down Pennsylvania Avenue. He
took his time, turning back once to see that everything was quiet. On this
day, downtown was his living room, where cops could double-park, set out
rolls of police tape, form pop-up police lines, and arrest 400 people
without dirtying a uniform.
At a late-afternoon victory lap before the media, Ramsey took to the
bouquet of microphones assembled in front of police headquarters and
rattled off the one statistic that mattered the number of arrests for the
day: 649. He praised his force for performing "very well." There was
already a buzz about Pershing Park something about arbitrary arrests. "We
gave warnings," Ramsey said, Mayor Anthony A. Williams smiling behind him.
"We followed everything by the book!"
"Remember, they had no business being in the street," Ramsey continued,
playing offense. "There was no parade. You can't just take over
Pennsylvania Avenue. You just can't take over 15th Street. For the last
four months, these folks been talking about shutting down the city. When
they do something like that and they fail to move, I can only presume
that's what they intended to do. And that happens to be illegal. And we
took the action that was appropriate." Ramsey added that those arrested
would be processed promptly.
As video footage and first-person accounts show, the park events constitute
one of the most serious collective violations of civil rights in this city
since the Vietnam War era or at least since the last major
anti-globalization demonstrations, in April 2000. Protesters and
bystanders, nurses on their way to a convention, lawyers on their way to
work, a woman training for a bike race all rounded up, seized without
warning, without orders given, and arrested en masse. They were then tied
up like farm animals for hours.
The next day, in the Washington Post, Ramsey described the scene at
Pershing Park this way: "Ain't it a thing of beauty. To see our folks up
there ready to go."
No one is calling that day a thing of beauty anymore. No one is even
calling the arrests worth pursuing. The D.C. Office of the Corporation
Counsel, the city agency charged with pursuing the Pershing Park cases,
declined to prosecute a single demonstrator caught up in the police's
dragnet. "We no-papered everything in Pershing Park," explains Peter
Lavallee, the Corporation Counsel's communications director. "We did not
feel in the cases that came from Pershing Park that the witness statements
and the evidence that we had [presented] probable cause that a crime was
committed and/or that a specific individual committed a crime."
Read more
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/01/21/1260466
