Take Them All …
… And let the judge decide.
Apparently whoever is in charge of the NYPD response to the Occupy Wall Street demonstration is using a variation of: “Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”, the order given by Abbé Arnaud-Amaury of Citeaux to the troops at Béziers during the Albigensian Crusade against the ‘Catharsian heresy’. It is translated roughly as ‘Kill them all. G*d will recognize His own.’
Despite what the MSM are reporting, there is no selection process in who gets arrested, they simply scoop up groups of people on the sidewalk.
Ellroon has the reporting of John Farley, WNET [PBS] Observations of a Jailed Journalist. Along with Mr. Farley they scooped the employee of a local business, and a woman who was shopping in the area.
Susie Madrak has the Lawrence O’Donnell video, in which he thoroughly castigates the NYPD for their actions. He has the videos and makes several points about what the police are doing.
Susie also has a nice take-down on NPR’s failure to cover the event.
From what I’ve seen, the regular patrolmen are doing a good job of maintaining order, and then some ‘maroon’ in a white shirt creates the problems. It is rather difficult to claim that the demonstrators are ‘obstructing pedestrian traffic’, when it is obvious that people can just walk along until the police bring everything to a screeching halt with their orange netting.
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This has in fact been NYPD policy for some time now in handling protests, since at least 2004 — gather up protesters, spectators, and press all in one big glop, plop’em in a warehouse at the waterfront for a few hours, then charge’m with “disorderly conduct” and “impeding pedestrian traffic”, while incidentally gathering and “accidentally” losing any cell phones, cameras, or recording devices that may have been in the possession of those swooped upon and removed from the scene. The goal is to dissuade reporters and spectators from viewing protests and dissuade others from videotaping / recording the police response to protests. As you can tell it hasn’t exactly worked out that way, due to the new-fangled streaming services that allow streaming video content directly to servers on the Internet…
Of course none of this has anything to do with 1st Amendment right of assembly or anything so humdrum as the U.S. Constitution, which, as the Shrubbery once put it, is “just a piece of paper”. So it goes in Soviet America…
— Badtux the Observant Penguin
It also violates the Criminal Procedure Law of the State of New York, not that NYC has ever been particularly good about obeying it, but it annoys the Court of Appeals, the highest court in New York, and has resulted in a lot of really annoying requirements for officers working in the rest of the state as a result of cases out of New York City.
The leaders in NYPD have abused all of the goodwill the department gained as a result of 9/11 to do just about anything they want, and continue to promote cronies to all of the management positions.
Maybe if a few more journalists get arrested, they will start covering what is going on in something other than the Style section.
It not only annoys the Court of Appeals, it annoys the city courts who will see most of these disorderly conduct charges and dismiss them as nonsense (I think the statistics from the last protest were that 87% were dismissed without even a hearing, just a defense request for summary judgement on their client’s behalf). But of course while the protesters are penned up in a warehouse at the waterfront waiting for bail they’re not bothering the Captains of Thievery on Wall Street with their chants for the whole den of thieves to be indicted and put on trial for fraud, theft, and general lack of moral fiber, so the Captains of Thievery are happy, so the NYPD doesn’t care, and thus far it doesn’t seem there’s anything happening that’s going to make them have to care.
– Badtux the Sovok Penguin
The city courts can’t make the life of law enforcement throughout the state a living hell, and the Court of Appeals can by changing the rules overnight.
The town justice I appeared before would have reamed anyone who tried it in his jurisdiction. He had views regarding what was worthy of his attention, and you did it his way, or you would be filing paperwork forever. He was the arraigning justice for the entire township [a New York subdivision under the county] and while he didn’t try felonies, he was the gate-keeper.
Rumor had it that when he got tired of 5mph over the limit tickets by Sheriff deputies, he started billing the Sheriff for court costs on those tickets. The word went out that if you didn’t have 10+ over, you didn’t write the ticket in that town. We also didn’t do drug possession arrests unless it was a large quantity.
It is going to take a major law suit against them to stop this crap, and that day is coming. Lawyers are feeling the GOPression too.
A major law suit will result in a large damages claim, which will be paid out of the NYC self-insurance fund, which will result in Mayor Bloomers whining about how lawyers are forcing NYC to lay off firemen and policemen. It won’t be the first time NYC was sued over the actions of the NYPD, and it won’t be the last. What has it ever changed? The NYPD appears to believe they are judge, jury, and, all too often, executioner (just ask Amadou Diallo). Unless people high up in the NYPD hierarchy actually start going to *jail*, instead of laughing at the fact that they just cost the city a few million more, nothing’s going to change. The only way to reform the NYPD is to fire every single person above the level of street cop and start over again. Yeah, like that’s happening.
It is now being reported that ‘Tony Baloney’ is in the ‘Counter-terrorism’ Bureau, which gives confirmation to the view NYPD has of the First Amendment – utilizing it makes you a ‘terrorist’.
Bloomberg appoints the hierarchy of the NYPD, so he isn’t going to find any fault with it. The system is rotten, like the Pentagon, with politicians filling the top.
Oh, Tony is represented by a union for the ‘executive class’, as I suspected. I lost my union representation when I was promoted to the ‘management’ level, so it is a fairly consistent pattern in New York. [I also lost time-and-a-half overtime, which wasn’t mentioned in the job posting.]
Bloomie has been talking to media about how the demonstration is against the clerks on Wall Street making $40-50k, as if people don’t know where the fault lies.