Police State

Miami

A reporter for an alternative weekly newspaper said Monday that she doesn't understand why she was arrested during last week's protests outside the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting.

Miami New Times reporter Celesete Fraser Delgado, 36, said she was interviewing protesters opposed to the proposed 34-nation free-trade pact Thursday when a Miami-Dade County police cruiser pulled up and an officer yelled at the group to get on the ground.

The protests had turned sporadically violent Thursday, with some demonstrators throwing objects and firing slingshots at officers and some officers hitting protesters with sticks, zapping them with stun guns and dispersing them with gas.

But Delgado said she and the others complied peacefully. She said she was handcuffed and put into a police van even though she told officers she was a reporter.

"I kept asking them 'What am I being detained for?' but they wouldn't say. In the paddy wagon we could hear the police officers arguing about what they were going to charge us with," Delgado said.

Delgado was charged with two misdemeanors, failure to obey a legal command and resisting arrest without violence. The charges were dropped Friday and she was released.
article

Resisting arrest without violence. In other words, asking why you're being arrested.


Deb forwards Miami FTAA notes from Starhawk - activist, organizer:

We are laughing and joyful, but as we are singing, over at the jail vigil a few blocks away the police declaire an illegal assembly. They tell people to get on the sidewalk and they'll be safe. Then they surround the group on the sidewalk, beat people to the ground, kneel on their spines and arrest them. (Note: this corroborates the video and reports from IndyMedia. Some still photos are here.)

Sobered, we go back to the convergence center to secure it, and pull together a debrief meeting. It's hard to debrief at this moment, when shit is still happening, I say, but it's a part of our resistance, a way of saying that our movement is strong and will continue and will grow.

In the middle of the debrief, a friend comes up and tells me that Abby and her friends have been badly beaten up, jumped by cops on their way home to their hotel, her sweet, lovely face pushed into the pavement.. "We could kill you here," the cops tell them.

I am really shaken. During the break I go off into the field and lay my head in Ruby's lap and just sob.

11/22 The School of the Americas
(Note: IndyMedia coverage of that protest is here.)

I wake up early, catch a plane to Georgia, get driven to the School of the Americas protest to shut down the institute that trains torturers and murderers for Latin America. I have promised to speak, and I speak about the connections - that the SOA trains torturers to enforce the global economic system we are fighting at the FTAA, which can only be sustained by police and military power, as we've seen in Miami. Today is the rally, very calm and peaceful except for the military music blasted from the base to try and drown out the rally.

The news from Miami comes in through the day, bad and worse. Our friends are being tortured in jail. We hear about a young Latino man, taken out and brutally beaten, pepper sprayed and not allowed to wash. They are being kept in cages with no toilets, forced to pee and shit on the floor, then hosed down under the pretence of cleaning the cages. The young anarchists of color are being especially targeted. I am sick with worry for a few friends in particular, and for any immigrants that might be among the group, subject to deportation or disappearance. We hear rumors of sexual assault. (Note: this echoes information on IndyMedia's site.)

...This week we have seen a blatant and ugly form of repression reveal itself. We have been targeted and attacked, not for anything we've done but for who we are and what we stand for. Yet I hear no one suggesting we stop, or give up - only thoughtful consideration of how we support each other and move forward, for we all know that if we don't, we will live with the boot in the face and the nightstick at the skull in unrelieved, grim, despair.


Tom forwards a Miami Herald article on a new piece of legislation currently under fire in Florida. Some folks, prodded by the NRA, want to limit police computer records of gun ownership to a thirty-day window. I can't see how that's going to protect anybody's right to anonymously own a gun, which is what the NRA is supporting. The cops would just be forced to make another computer list of gun-owners and call it something else - I don't know - terror suspects or something. They might not have the gun information in it, but they'd still have a list of gun-owners. According to this article, however, it seems the police would be allowed to keep records on paper, but not in computers, which also doesn't make any sense. Surely that's a misreading - the article isn't clear. But, from my reading, it just seems like a law that will hobble the police in their work at trying to solve crimes. (And I'm not going to look up the bill - if you want to get the actual wording, be my guest - I doubt I could get a much clearer idea from reading a bunch of legalese designed to keep people from truly understanding what's being enacted anyway.)

One thing the article does do, however, is to label this an "anti-cop" law. That's a little over the top, and it might not be the best way to present it in a positive light, especially considering the police action in Miami this week. I might be willing to vote for an "anti-cop" law if I thought it would limit that kind of police state brutality. Which this gun law wouldn't.

I used to be a proponent of strict gun control, even so far as to banning private ownership of guns. Not any more. I no longer trust our government administrators, our law enforcement agencies, or our justice system. I truly think the last thing that will stand between us and total tyranny is the fact that we can own guns. I sincerely hate it, but I think that's the reality of the situation. And, in the end, even that wouldn't be enough. The guns we can own are no match for the type of arms the police have. Just check some of those Miami photos. I don't know. But I'm not ready to disarm the citizenry yet. And I have to agree with that old cliché if we outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns.

I know there is a tremendous amount of deadly crime (and even deadly accidents) due to that same fact - that we can own guns, and I hate that, too. But the underlying reasons for the crime need to be addressed, and we don't do that. We are real good on after-the-fact action, and very poor on preventive activity. Because we'd have to address very real social injustices, and that will never happen.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

P.S. Where were those recent urban military maneuvers? They're getting ready for an assault on our own cities. Pretend it's exercises to combat terrorists if you want. The terrorists they're preparing for are Americans. Whole armies of foreign terrorists on the order of what would make war in the streets of America have no way of getting into the country. Are they already here?