What happens after you’re arrested at a protest in New York
medium.com
medium.com
Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.
It took me about 4 months to get my phone back from the NYPD, which was fun.
I love it when white people are shocked by their first arrest, because it (unfortunately) means something might get done. The system sucks. Now please scare other white people about it.
This. My arrest taught me that there is zero humanity and zero fucks given in "the system".
It's unclear to me why race has anything to do with this. Are you implying that you expect non-white people to handle "their first arrest" more casually, as if it is something they are familiar with and know will happen?
If we really want things to improve, we need to stop complaining about how "white people don't see how bad it is for the rest of us." Focus on what we have in common, not what you arbitrarily perceive as what makes us different. The system is shitty for everybody. Your argument would have been just as informative and a lot more pleasant to read if it didn't begin by partitioning your readers by race.
Almost none of my white friends understand the terrible truths in the system beyond reading accounts like this in the media. I include myself among them. Part of it is probably population realities - when a minority segment of the population suffers the majority of indignities, it's more likely to hit close to home.
Yeah, I'd like to remove black and white from many conversations. White guilt feels almost vogue, I have to hear about it so often from white friends and colleagues. But when it comes to the criminal justice system...
However, to suggest that the experience of the system is the same for everybody is naive at best. I read task_queue's comment more as the following:
"Societal structures do not change until those with more (social, political, economic, etc) power experience the inconvenience and injustice that people without the power to effect change experience on a more regular basis. That this is true is unfortunate."
Swaths of people go through this regularly or are targeted and treated, much, much worse than this guy for the sole virtue of being the wrong race. Somehow, many white people, especially those in the upper class, never have to see this injustice ever.
There's a reason MLK's strategy during the civil rights movement worked. It inconvenienced or scared white people into seeing the injustice of the system they are a part of and control.
Police brutality and injustice is a side of America we are privileged to be mostly excluded from. When it becomes our problem, the system at least attempts to correct itself.
As an aside, for many people I know, the whole police brutality meme really started brewing when it became common knowledge that cops can come into your house and shoot your dogs. It doesn't and didn't matter that has been going on for decades to those of the wrong race or religion, often with deadly consequences.
https://thenib.com/great-moments-in-peaceful-protest-history...
Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.
What I'm about to suggest is not meant to remedy or suggest alternate remedies to the workings of the criminal justice system as it currently operates.
I'm merely expressing amusement at the colossal unfamiliarity of most of the generally law-abiding public (Black, White, Hispanic or otherwise) at how poorly our system works, even with the best intentions of the law makers and policy wonks.
I can't but find people who expect an uniform carriage of justice, across all wealth levels, across all demographics and in all instances of law-breaking, to be nothing short of, deranged.
Not so long ago, I held such similar delusions of equality and fairness, albeit not to the same degree as some here on HN.
I always knew there was more than a little truth to the adage that it is far better to be wealthy and guilty than poor and innocent, in America.
Any speck of doubt cleared up after I sat in a courtroom to witness the pre-trial consultations of a high profile defendant in SF. In a criminal case.
It was a farce, to put it mildly. Just the resources available to the prosecutor on one side and the defendant with his high powered legal team -- which came with their own personal scribe to document the exchanges in the court, a videographer and the partner of the law firm among others -- on the other side, settled the matter for me.
I don't quite know if its standard courtroom protocol to call both the parties - the prosecutor and the defendant's attorney - into recess to discuss matters in the judge's quarters but I counted 7 such times they just left to talk behind closed doors.
I was floored at the deference with which the judge spoke to the defendant. The whole thing seemed like some closed door Congressional testimony with ranking members. I've never seen anything like it although I've seen the inside of a courtroom in unrelated matters before. I've seen common folk arraigned before. This was something else.
And mind you this was in proletariat-loving SF not some courthouse in Montgomery, Alabama or Angola, Louisiana. I don't know what one should expect in those places.
Try it sometime. Go to a courthouse and sit in one of the air-conditioned courtrooms and observe the proceedings.
Edit: see comment below. Thx refurb.
To be honest, the US is particularly bad in that regard.
Suddenly that picture of a luxury condominium overlooking a favela is less hyperbole and more of an accurate depiction of what we're doing over here.
tbh, I'm German and while we have our own issues with police, conduct like this is next to unheard of.
I have thought of the police tactics shown in e.g. NCIS (shouting at people until they confess, tricking them into confessions, ...) as typical Hollywood exaggerations, but apparently I was blatantly wrong.
If anything, what you see on shows like NCIS are a romanticized, sanitized, whitewashed version of what really happens.
Can I be a german please? I'm just about serious at this point.
Although I would personally recommend that you stay where you are and join a movement to change your country.
I'm Italian, moved to the US a few years back.
"Once arrested, protesters, including five Britons, were taken to a police barracks where they were beaten again, sprayed with asphyxiating gas, threatened with rape and forced to sing fascist-era songs."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/feb/12/night-police-be...
But yeah, coming from the UK, this whole thing strikes me as a little mad. But I suspect the author is omitting some details for dramatic effect. It would very much surprise me if it wasn't made very clear what she was being arrested for, and the officer explained her rights etc. I'm also sceptical about the "u turns to show off" - in the UK, all police vehicles have incident recorders, so showing off for shits and giggles is dangerous and likely to get you fired. It#s I'd be surprised if there weren't similar devices. It's also made exceedingly clear you don't post pictures on duty in social media unless it's approved etc.
Nonetheless, sounds all very horrible, and it shouldn't be. I like to think we do it a lot better.
I had to walk from downtown Brooklyn back to the precinct that had my stuff because I didn't have any money or keys into my apartment.
Cops being paid overtime is a tremendous conflict of interest motivating them to arrest and to process slowly.
This stuff is simple enough. Get out of your escort, stand among the other normal people and do some dogfooding of the police experience. I guess nobody higher up wants to spend the day doing that, because at the end of it there wouldn't be anyone still employed at NYPD.
That's bad analysis. Free speech means freedom from government-imposed consequences, and since their employer is the government, being fired would be a government-imposed consequence. (For the same reason, public universities cannot discipline students for their protected speech.) Rather, the correct reason these cops should be fired is because they legally do not have the right of free speech when in uniform - see my other comment up-thread.
These police officers expressed contempt in an organized, planned way for anyone who would hold police officers accountable for murders committed on the job. They essentially declared that they expect 100% support from their boss in the executive branch, no matter the illegality of their conduct, and committed to staging a standing strike in protest, and to publicly shunning their boss at a funeral. It's a power play that a nation of rights & laws cannot permit, if it wants to remain one.
You know what? We can find other people to be police officers. Ones which aren't so abusive of the people they're supposed to be serving, and so privileged to a lack of consequences for this abuse, that they're on the edge of a coup against the elected civilian government.
Can we though? I sure as shit don't want to be one.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/sto...
They certainly could have gone on strike, when they were not on the clock.
Similarly longshores get pretty sweet benefits too.
And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it by the people.
Further reading, from an actual lawyer: http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/10/18/ferguson-revenge-of-...
Oh, they still have rights when in uniform. Eg at the most basic, the right not to be killed. But you are right about the free speech. Just like any other employee in their capacity as an employee, only more so.
In the first link, the case is about a memo written as part of the employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (district attorneys don't wear uniforms, and the word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).
In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person". It's abundantly clear that these police turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral over a political stoush between the parties are not acting as voices of the government. No reasonable person would even remotely think that the police turning their back on the mayor is 'what the government message is'. Those police are clearly not 'speaking' in an official government capacity (and literally are not speaking at all).
I have no great love for the police, but the correct path forward is a fair view, not a knee-jerk 'fire them all on principle'. This thread is full of knee-jerk hysteria, but the irony is that so many people are calling for an end to multiple people's careers because, while not on duty, the were literally standing still while facing the incorrect direction. Ironic because it's supposedly a reaction against undue application of power, and yet the punishment for facing the wrong way is termination, regardless of whether or not that officer has abused power elsewhere.
The facts are not identical, but the facts are sufficiently similar that you could cite that case as precedence for arguing that the facts in question here should be treated similarly. The lawyer I linked to certainly thinks so. Are you a lawyer?
> In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person".
You took that out of context. "Person" here means the private person, not the cop representing himself as a cop. The paragraph goes on to say, "the speech of a person who presents himself in his official governmental capacity is no longer the individual’s free speech, but the official person’s speech. And the latter is not free."
in his official governmental capacity were the words - the funeral/protesting police were not on the clock on active duty, and as I said, no-one sane would confuse their message with a governmental message, official or unofficial.
Are you a lawyer?
?
It's clear neither of us are. So what? You're still misreading the second article re: private vs offical personage. That article is not saying what you're claiming it says. And as a result, the first link you provided is also not supporting your claims. The lawyer you linked to says absolutely nothing about uniforms - the term (and concept) 'uniform' appears nowhere in the article, but it does talk about the loss of freedom of speech when speaking in an official capacity.
And no, 'in uniform' is not the same as 'official capacity'. In none of these cases are they equivalent: the district attorney doesn't wear a uniform; Novara's phone call was about abusing his official capacity, and he could have been in the nude when he called, for all it mattered; the police turning their backs at the funeral are clearly not acting as a government voice and couldn't be confused to be doing so.
Free speech does not insulate you from reasonable consequences of that speech.
However, the police unions would never allow such a thing.
Second, I suspect that a majority of the officers in question were not on the job while attending that funeral.
And the fact that my employer can't have me beaten up has nothing to do with the 1st amendment. That would be assault no matter what their motivation.
On the other hand, when the mayor shows up at a police funeral to give a speech while the press is there, that's clearly a political statement. It doesn't seem fair to use the police as props (implying their support) while you have a rule saying they can't make a statement in reply.
The police should respect the mayor, but it's more important that they - and the major - respect the law.
It seems peculiar to American discourse that wrongdoing in a job should be countered by firing rather than retraining or reform.
Anyway, police departments generally have a hard enough time already finding and keeping staff. Firing them en masse requires replacing them en masse. Who polices the city while you're looking for and training a heap of new recruits?
Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11...
Though, for some reason, voting and "democracy" elicit such warm conditioned feelings that people are willing to desperately scrape for examples of whatever small local victories they've secured in order to justify that it's worth going through the whole jungle. Electoral reform, though? Dead end.
The problem today is that certain groups (poor, young, ethnic minorities) are less likely to vote and thus have less of a voice as a group. There are systematic changes that could be made to encourage more representative voting, such as easier voter registration practices and a national voting holiday. Australia even imposes a small fine for not voting, which surely would not sit well with many in America but would probably be a good thing for our republic.
If people cared about this.
Plug-ins are nice for us concerned techno-citizens, but most people don't care and it won't change things directly that fast. I think the media needs to do its job of informing us rather than entertaining us, and schools need to train vigilant citizens rather than compliant ones.
Mind blowing. The behavior part of the nation is completely up in arms about, they still see fit doing.
Heilbroner was a fresh law school graduate who took a job as a New York D.A., and then wrote this book about his time there. He started out handling misdemeanors, and there are a LOT of those. There's basically an assembly line, running all day and all night, to bring in those who have been arrested, get their paperwork to a D.A. for charging, get the arresting officer in to make a statement, and getting a hearing before a judge where the defendant usually pleads guilty and gets a fine.
The Public Defender has a similar assembly line going.
When his shift would start, he describes walking into the office, stepping over or around all the officers sleeping in the hall waiting to have their statements taken, then picking up all the cases that the previous shift was working on when their shift ended. Often he'd end up in court with a stack of cases he'd never seen, and have to frantically work to read the notes from the previous shift and skim the officer's statement as the case was being called.
When his shift ends, the cases he's working on are handed off to someone on the next shift, and almost always will be resolved by the time his next shift comes around. So there is no engagement with the case, he's just a cog in the machine, processing his pieces of paper as the pass through, and occasionally taking statements from officers, and reading from these pieces of paper in front of a judge.
Eventually he gets to handle felony cases, which for both the D.A.s and the Public Defenders are more like what they had in mind when they were in law school imagining what their jobs would be like--taking a case all the way from charging through to a trial, and actually making serious legal arguments.
It's quite an eye opener.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-Young-D/dp/039458...
That must've been a sight of relief. What a horrible experience everyone had to go through. This is nothing short of intimidation tactic.
Do you think turf wars start with competing law-firms over that spot?
On the other hand, tax payers are always the losers because they have to pay for both police salary, prosecutor salary, and any legal settlement money for lawyers.
Their work is pro-bono and the engagement technically starts a bit earlier than leaving jail. The lawyers guild is also the group that fields observers to record what demonstrators/police have actually done in protests.
Also the coffee/donuts are usually a separate set of people, lay volunteers up in the middle of the night trying to keep track of people to make sure they're processed quickly enough, or to give them said coffee/donut or a couple of bucks to catch the subway home. The keyword you're looking for is "jail support" http://organizingforpower.org/jail-support-solidarity/
Other than making the NYPD look bad of course. That I got.
Yep. I'm sure they went out of their way just to make her uncomfortable. From reading the article, I picked up on a person that steps outside just hoping to be offended.
That's fair, I got the sense from your first post that the article had some kind of mystery undercurrent of anti-abortion sentiment or something.
It's like 2/3 of the way through the article.
Basically, any arrest record will stay on your record for number of years including ones where the charges were eventually dropped. But in many states, employers are either disallowed or discouraged from looking at it.
If there was conviction, it will stay with you. There is no way getting around that and that will jeopardize your future employment prospect.
Being arrested at something like this is likely to result in a fine at most. The author notes that he was eventually charged with a traffic obstruction violation. Basically, jaywalking.
The arrest may show up on a background check. I think it would depend on state-level laws about how public the proceedings are. But no one would give it much weight. Of course, if you're arrested every weekend for something like this, they might.
Fuck you, NYPD.
>The group was on East 17th Street about halfway down the block when police took a stand and ordered protesters to get on the sidewalk. Before the march, while the group was in Union Square, police handed out flyers and used loudspeakers to warn protesters that they would be arrested if they didn't stay on the sidewalk.
http://7online.com/news/more-than-140-protesters-arrested-in...
Here is the flyer that they were handing out: https://twitter.com/Azi/status/593536703324905473/photo/1
I mean, look at it that other way. People should not be able to openly obstruct traffic. If I were to go run out in the middle of Broadway and block traffic, I would probably be arrested. Just because someone is "protesting" doesn't give them free reign to violate the laws.
This is why public marches/protests require a permit. These guys did not have a permit to do so. See: http://www.nyclu.org/content/know-your-rights-demonstrating-...
> You may be able to march in a public street (as opposed to on a sidewalk) in some circumstances. To march in a street, you must obtain a permit from the Police Department. If you expect to have fewer than 1,000 people in your march, you can apply for a permit at the precinct in which the march will originate. If you expect 1,000 people or more or you prefer to use mail, send your application to: NYPD Investigation Review Section, 300 Gold St., Room 305, Brooklyn 11201. You can download a permit application from the front of the NYPD’s website
That doesn't mean that e.g. someone who had just joined the protest was aware of that warning.
It's unlikely that a protester missed one of the many forms of warnings (flyers, LRAD, verbal, etc) used in this case.
See:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQ996JYzFME
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SpC9PAuHb8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZoEBJDgHQU <-- you can hear the LRAD warnings in the background of this video during the arrests.
If a large number of people want to get from point A to point B, even on foot, an accommodation of normal traffic laws should be made to allow that.
Why the hell are police arresting peaceful protestors?
The protesters were allowed to peacefully assemble in Union Square. The protesters were allowed to peacefully march on the sidewalk to anywhere they wanted to go in the city.
What the protesters were NOT allowed to do is obstruct traffic and walk in the middle of the street without a permit. The people that were arrested were the ones that were walking on the streets and blocking traffic.
You only need a permit if you intend to march on the streets. It's the same as you or I needing a permit to host a parade through Midtown.
You can be "briefly" (up to a day, and in some places up to the whole weekend if you are processed on Friday night) detained for pretty much any reason other than no reason.
One time, I was detained for three hours on suspicion of DUI because I was on my front porch with my car keys in my pocket... and not a drop of alcohol or drugs in my system, execept I was woozy from sleep deprivation.
Eventually they had me pee in a cup and then let me go. Since we talked IT with the medical person that was there, and he got a few tips out of me, I billed the PD for time at my consulting rate, and to my surprise six months later they paid the bill.
I thought this was only necessary if the police are going to question you.
IANAL obviously.
Though, it seems as though the police can skip the miranda rights bit and interrogate, if they don't want to use subsequent statements or information in court. There's also the "public safety exception", which doesn't seem to apply for the situation in this particular account.
One of the most distressing things I find about the language of 'privilege' is that it denies that women can have it as a group. In this last sentence, she recognizes that women can be privileged over men in some situations.
I think you're attacking a strawman here. I'm sure there are people who say that women have no privilege ever and men have all of it all the time, you shouldn't judge the entire concept based on the angriest 15-year-old Tumblrers.
I mean, it's clear that you're defending a more reasonable version of the claim and GP is attacking a more unreasonable one, but it's not clear to me which of those is going to win out as the common understanding associated with the expression "privilege theory".
If you're afraid that the superficially furious people are going to win out over the reasonable, thoughtful people on issue X, then the best thing you can do is try to understand issue X and promote the reasonable approach to it. Just saying "All Xs suck as proven by this misspelled Tumblr post" will only further polarize the dialogue and help shout down (or radicalize) the reasonable people.