In Baltimore, a Democratic city. MCM
Mark -- I have to be brief because I've been awake now for almost 35 hours. I was rounded up along with a dozen or so other people last night at an impromptu Obama celebration in Baltimore and jailed. My crime? Photographing the Baltimore cops as they loaded people into a paddy wagon. The crowd was very well-behaved -- mostly Hopkins students overjoyed with the Obama victory. A phalanx of cops moved in and started arbitrarily arresting people. They tased an undergraduate for trying to get back into his building -- after asking him to go inside. It was insane. I started taking photos with my cell phone as they lined up cuffed college kids, professors, etc. and a cop approached me. "I'm a journalist," I said (I freelance for Baltimore City Paper) and he knocked the phone out of my hand onto the street. "Write a nice long story about this," he said, spun me around, and he and another cop cuffed me with flexi-cuffs and loaded me into the police van. This was 2am last night (Tuesday). I served as an election judge all day, and the last thing I expected was to spend the night in Baltimore City lockup. Unreal. The dangerous thugs the police decided to jail included me (an election judge, writer, and employee of the Bloomberg School of Public Health), TWO professors of anthropology at Hopkins, a Baltimore City school teacher, and a variety of students. It was one student's birthday. The student who was tasered had bruises on his wrists from the cuffs and a bruised eye. Truly a dangerous group of criminals. We were released this morning -- no charges were brought against us. We're getting together as a group to see what recourse we have. One of the anthropology profs, Aaron Goodfellow, has contacted the ACLU and I'm going to follow-up. There were lots of students with cell phones, videocams, and cameras, so I'm hoping some of this was caught on tape. City Paper has a very brief clip on its site: http://www.citypaper.com/digest.asp?id=16987 Thanks, Mark. I thought you and your readers should know about this. Michael Hughes Michael M. Hughes http://michaelmhughes.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to Mark Crispin Miller's "News From Underground" newsgroup. To unsubscribe, send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR go to http://groups.google.com/group/newsfromunderground and click on the "Unsubscribe or change membership" link in the yellow bar at the top of the page, then click the "Unsubscribe" button on the next page. For more News From Underground, visit http://markcrispinmiller.com -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
