BOSTON — Protesters who were in Philadelphia would later remember the four burly men — who went by the names Tim, Harry, George and Ryan — as kind of suspicious, not quite fitting the bill as political activists. Still, the men were hard workers and put their carpentry skills to work making floats, giant puppets and stages for the street demonstrations during the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in August.
However, as the activists learned later, the men were not the union carpenters they had claimed to be. They were cops.
This infiltration, revealed in affidavits unsealed on September 6, is part of a disturbing pattern of police misconduct toward people who choose to express their views in the streets of the United States. Law enforcement agencies in Seattle, Washington, DC, Philadelphia and Los Angeles responded to legal and peaceful protests by running roughshod over constitutional rights of free speech and assembly and resorting to unacceptable levels of violence.
In Philadelphia, courts are to decide whether police violated the law in carrying out their undercover work at the protesters' warehouse. A 1987 mayoral directive restricts the ability of Philadelphia police to infiltrate political groups, so Pennsylvania state troopers were planted among activists.
But Philadelphia police, informed in advance of state troopers' plan to infiltrate activist groups, used intelligence gathered from the operation to obtain a search warrant for a raid on the warehouse. The 75 people arrested in the raid intend to challenge the legality of their arrests, and may be awarded punitive damages because of the authorities' dubious end run around the mayoral directive.
'Red scare'
The affidavits not only hint at police wrongdoing in Philadelphia; they also shed light on a bizarre "red scare" mentality behind the undercover work.
Caught in a Cold War time warp, state police alleged in affidavits that funds for the protests came from "Communist and leftist parties and from sympathetic trade unions".
To add a little extra McCarthyite spice to their work, police cited a research report by an obscure right-wing group, the Maldon Institute, to back their allegations. The institute, which is funded by reactionary Pittsburgh multimillionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, tracks leftist political groups and provides intelligence to police departments and the FBI.
This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding how police deal with the mass protests that have been staged in the US since the Seattle protests last November.
In July, just before the Republican convention, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a report that detailed how Seattle police were "out of control" during the protests against the World Trade Organisation. Under orders from the mayor, police suppressed free speech and assembly by creating a 25-square-block militarised "no protest" zone in which people were prohibited from expressing views critical of the WTO.
This response, according to the ACLU, "violated fundamentals of our free society which require that any governmental restriction on speech be as narrow as possible to accomplish its legitimate purpose and be 'content-neutral'".
Police violence
Inappropriate and excessive police violence was rampant during the protests, the ACLU found.
Although the demonstrators in Seattle "were overwhelmingly peaceful", this was not true of police, the report stated. With the permission of their commanders, police used "tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and clubs against people who were demonstrating peaceably, against demonstrators who had not received or who were trying to obey police orders, against bystanders, and to quell disturbances the police themselves had provoked".
Employing a tactic that other authorities would adopt in handling future protests, Seattle police made hundreds of arbitrary arrests and detained people for several days even though they would never stand trial.
The ACLU report stated that many of those who were arrested "were mistreated and witnessed others being mistreated by jail officers. Some of the mistreatment was directed at protesters who made demands to see their lawyer. Some officers singled out, threatened and assaulted individuals for exercising or demanding their constitutional rights."
Washington
Police in Washington, DC, gave activists more of the same treatment during protests against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in April. The cops infiltrated activist meetings; circumvented search warrant procedures; got the fire department to shut down the protest organisers' headquarters; confiscated anti-globalisation literature; viciously beat and pepper-sprayed protesters and bystanders; arbitrarily arrested 600 people; and physically and verbally abused a number of people in custody.
Journalist Terry Allen, describing the police mayhem in Washington, wrote in an article for In These Times (May 29): "Witnesses stood aghast when officers dragged a protester out of a crowd and beat him bloody or doused peaceful activists with pepper spray. Some demonstrators ended up in the hospital with broken bones and other injuries. Associated Press photographer Heesoon Yim was hospitalized for a concussion and scalp wound after being clubbed."
Once in jail, Allen reported, a number of those arrested "were left in unheated spaces in wet clothes, without blankets; some were not fed for 24 hours or went long periods without water; despite nonviolence some were shackled ankle to opposite wrist; others endured homophobic and racist comments. Two people were taken to the hospital."
Against this backdrop, the live televised footage of Los Angeles riot cops clubbing protesters and shooting them in the back with rubber bullets seems almost tame. But those inappropriate actions are part of the pattern of police misconduct, too.
No matter how we characterise these police responses — as fits of 1950s-style anti-red hysteria, as evidence of the contemporary anti-terrorist zeal, or as timeless examples of police thuggery — the threat to the citizenry is the same: an erosion of civil liberties and an increasing risk of serious injury — or worse — at the hands of those who are supposed to protect the public and preserve the peace.
BY RICK MERCIER
[Mercier is a freelance journalist based in Boston. He attended several of the protests in Philadelphia during the Republican National Convention in August.]