In a message dated 00-08-08 19:51:18 EDT, you write:
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
http://www.ainfos.ca/
http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/08/04/front_page/target04.htm
Key activists were earmarked by police
Protesters say their leaders were arrested not for what they did, but for
what they might do. Police deny this.
Even as the world's media shone a bright light on Philadelphia police
clearing masses of protesters from blockaded streets this week, police were
carrying out a much less public - and much more selective - operation to
collar demonstration leaders.
Eyewitnesses accounts and video taken by demonstrators document police
moving in to swiftly arrest at least two such leaders.
One, John Sellers, 33, a nationally known civil-disobedience activist from
Berkeley, Calif., was arrested Wednesday as he walked along JFK Boulevard.
Yesterday, Sellers, who grew up in Chester County, was held on $1 million
bail - even though he was only charged with misdemeanor offenses.
Defense lawyers called the sum unprecedented and punitive, while a
prosecutor portrayed him as the real puppetmaster in a protest replete with
puppets and other theatrical agitprop objects.
Another protester, Paul Davis, a Philadelphia activist on AIDS issues in his
20s, was arrested Tuesday as he walked on a blockaded street and spoke on a
cell phone. It was unclear last night whether his bail had been set.
Police Commissioner John F. Timoney yesterday spoke of "some arrests
effected in the Center City area that included some of the so-called
leaders," but declined to provide details.
He did say police had good reason for every arrest.
"We think we can prove they've engaged in criminal activity," the
commissioner said during his morning news briefing.
There were no preemptive strikes "just to take leaders out," he said.
Furious demonstrators yesterday strongly disagreed. They said that the
strikes were indeed preemptive, and that police arrested people for what
they might do - and not for actual crimes.
The critics said the arrests of several protest leaders - "ringleaders," as
the District Attorney's Office termed them - were part of a pattern in which
police aimed to decapitate the leadership of the demonstrations. People
involved in the protests acknowledged that the arrests scrambled their
communications and reduced their effectiveness.
They said people had been arrested on false pretexts - especially during a
Tuesday raid on a West Philadelphia warehouse that was a key protest
facility.
Then, they said, protesters were held behind bars for unusually long times,
thus keeping them off the streets.
As of early yesterday, they noted, police said only about 30 of 369 arrested
protesters had been released. Scores more were released later in the day,
but officials could provide no figures.
"The whole point of this is preventive - preventive detention. Get them all
off the streets until the Republicans are out of town," said Ann Northrup,
an AIDS activist from New York City with the group ACTUP. "It didn't matter
if they had done anything."
Her view was echoed by Larry Gross, a University of Pennsylvania
communications professor who served on a blue-ribbon panel critical of
police misconduct during a 1991 protest. Gross noted that police had been
photographing demonstrators in weeks before the Republican National
Convention.
"They spied on the protest groups. I think they prepared a list of
organizers that they were looking for, and when they found them, they
arrested them," Gross said.
Yet Stefan Presser, a leading critic of the warehouse raid as legal director
of the state's American Civil Liberties Union branch, said the Police
Department acted within the law if it targeted leaders preparing an
unpermitted and, hence, illegal demonstration.
He said helping organize an illegal demonstrations, such as by staying out
of the fray and directing others via cellular phone, was criminally no
different than blocking traffic.
"It's probably smart tactics," Presser said, referring to the selective arre
sts. "And it probably succeeded, if you look at the speed at which the city
resumed to normalcy. I don't see that there's a constitutional question
here. It just makes good sense on the part of the department."
Apart from the protesters sitting on streets, police this week targeted
certain activists who they knew had been involved in past protests or who
simply looked as though they were organizing actions over a mobile phone.
The result was that scores of people, even medics and bicycle messengers
trying to do their jobs, were swept up in the search for a select few who
may have been pivotal to the protests.
Police interest in people with cellular phones and walkie-talkies led them
to detain and question
