Police Ready For Convention Crackdown

by Alexander Cockburn

What we have here is clearly preliminary clearing of the decks for the demonstrations expected to take place during the Republican convention in Philadelphia in July. Constitutional protections for free speech and assembly will be swept aside, with police permitted to arrest anyone wearing ski masks, hooded sweatshirts, scarves acting in a suspicious manner, and so forth. As Jonik wryly asks, "Some women's hats include net veils. Included? Illegal in a demo? Are real beards legal and fake ones not? What about wigs and/or hair coloring, fake scars, tattoos and piercings? Big sunglasses?" And what about those big, wearable puppet outfits that featured big in the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle and Washington?

In Los Angeles, scheduled to host the Democratic convention in August, the cops are also preparing. California State Sen. Tom Hayden, sitting on a budget subcommittee, recently noticed a request by the California Highway Patrol for $1 million for "security equipment" for the Los Angeles Police Department. Hayden got hold of the detailed list of what the LAPD feels it needs: $125,000 worth of pepper spray, tear gas and gas guns; 40 semiautomatic launchers to fire 20,000 pepper balls; 20 40mm gas guns; plus $60,000 worth of surveillance cameras, $19,000 worth of bolt cutters, $263,000 in bomb detection and demolition services; plus mountain climbing gear and a $2,400 paper shredder.

It turns out that the LAPD was embarrassed to go to the L.A. City Council with that sort of request, not least for the paper shredder required by a police force that's been in trouble for framing people. So, it routed its budget request via the CHP, which was finally shamed by Hayden's probe into cutting back the request to $340,000. Add this amount to a security bill for the convention that, on a calculation by the Los Angeles Times, presently totals up to about $25 million, put up by the feds, state and city for police costs and overtime for a 40-day convention.

The demonstrations in Seattle and Washington, particularly the former, have provoked complete hysteria in authorities in cities anticipating protests of this kind. Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit, recently hosted what turned out to be a demure meeting of 34 foreign ministers of the Organization of American States. All 2,000 cops in Windsor were issued with gas masks. A brick road was tarmaced to prevent the bricks from being used as missiles. The venue of the scheduled talks was surrounded with a high fence. On the other side of the river, 4,000 U.S. police officers were on full alert.

Naomi Klein, a very smart writer who recently published the first-class "No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies" about corporations like Nike, wrote an acrid column about the Windsor event for the Toronto Globe and Mail, pointing out that we are being firmly guided toward the view that public protest is somehow per se illegal, and properly dealt with by savage police violence. Constitutional protections are automatically suspended, and anyone preparing to participate in an entirely legal manner in a demonstration is treated as though he or she is a felonious terrorist.

Klein reported a graphic designer in Windsor getting preemptively hassled by cops in Windsor, just for making signs. She described meeting young demonstrators in Washington wearing goggles and bandannas soaked in vinegar, "not that they were planning to attack a Starbucks, just that they thought that getting gassed is what happens when you express your political views." Civil disobedience such as sit-ins, Klein correctly pointed out, is now automatically equated by the cops, prosecutors and judges as "violence."

Arrested last year in Philadelphia for demonstrating near the Liberty Bell in support of Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier, a New York green named Mitchell Cohen and several others were convicted in U.S. District Court of failing to obey the order of a Park Service officer. This is the sort of charge that usually gets dismissed a few days after the demonstration. Cohen and the others not only got fined $250 plus $25 to the victims' restitution fund, but also drew a year's probation, meaning the threat of warrantless searches, urine tests, and so forth. Cohen also got his passport lifted. Another Abu-Jamal organizer got a request from the FBI for 10 years' worth of financial records.

The message of the state is clear enough. The only "good protesters" are those waving a couple of placards in a cop-designated parking lot 4 miles from downtown. All others are "bad demonstrators," targets for pepper spray, police bludgeons, wire taps, preemptive hassles and a very hard time in court if they have the audacity to contest whatever charges the local prosecutors lay on them. We haven't moved far from that infamous police riot in Chicago against antiwar protesters outside the Democratic convention. The only difference is that there's no public outcry at these militarized assaults on the rights of free speech and assembly.