Solidarity Demo for Jeremy Hammond at His Next Court Date

June 27, 2012 Anarchist News

On the 23rd July 2012, the Jeremy Hammond Support Network will sponsor a
rally in NYC to show support for the accused hacktivist. Friends, family,
and supporters of Jeremy Hammond will gather at Foley Square for a brief
march to the Metropolitan Correctional Center where we will pack the
courtroom in solidarity with Jeremy

We wish to make it clear our intent to peacefully fill the courtroom. We
are there to support Jeremy, and the more people that actually make it
into the courtroom, the better. In this light, we have also been informed
that sadly, individuals with any items identifying them as Anonymous have,
in the past, been denied entry to the court. This is not something the
Support Network agrees with, however, if you intend to actually sit in the
court room, you will need to take this into consideration.

The event will be covered live on irc.anonyops.net #freeanons courtesy of
the the Freeanons Solidarity Network.

Jeremy is accused of taking part in compromising the computer systems of
Strategic Forecasting, Inc. (aka “Stratfor”) and providing information
gathered to the website Wikileaks. This information, released by Wikileaks
under the name “The Global Intelligence Files”
(http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/ ) revealed even further corruption within
the U.S. Intelligence community – including plans to target and infiltrate
domestic popular movements such as Occupy.

A social activist himself, Jeremy was deeply in support of some of the
very movements targeted. A longterm anti-war, anti-capitalist activist,
Jeremy was arrested for involvement in the Stratfor hack on the testimony
and actions of FBI Informant, Hector Xavier Monsegur. Monsegur himself was
facing 105 years in a Federal Penitentiary if he could not assist the FBI
in identifying and apprehending other alleged members of Anonymous and
Lulz Security (http://dc406.com/Monsegur-Hector-Xavier-Information.pdf ).

We feel there is ample evidence to show that the Stratfor hack was
organized, planned, and allowed to happen by the FBI, through the agency
of Mr. Monsegur, for the expressed purpose of entrapping alleged Anonymous
hacktivists. We understand that Jeremy's years of organizing for social
justice show him to clearly possess a more noble character than that of
his accuser, Mr. Monsegur, best known as little more than a Twitter troll
and internet blowhard.

We demand that charges be dropped pending an investigation into the
methods used by the FBI to entrap all alleged Anons and Lulzsec members.
We demand that Jeremy be taken off lock down and be granted visitation. At
the very least, we demand that Jeremy be moved to a cell providing a view
of more than another wall.

Free Jeremy Hammond! Free all accused Anons! Amnesty for all political
prisoners!

Living In Two Cities: Tarif And Evelyn Warren

May 23, 2012 Gay City News

Tarif and Evelyn Warren at a May 14 press conference. | GAY CITY NEWS

BY SUSIE DAY | On May 14, Evelyn Warren and Michael Tarif Warren, attorneys at law, held a press conference. They stood outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse and announced that their case, Warren v. City of New York, had been settled. They had dropped their lawsuit against the city and the NYPD officers who had beaten and arrested them five years before.

Early in the evening of June 21, 2007, the Warrens were driving in Brooklyn when they saw police chasing a young man into a McDonald’s parking lot. The cops tackled the youth, handcuffed him, threw him to the ground, and began kicking him in the head. The Warrens pulled over, got out of their car, and respectfully asked one Sergeant Steven Talvy of the NYPD Street Narcotic Enforcement Unit why he and his officers were battering someone who was obviously helpless.

At the press conference, Tarif Warren, with his usual soft-spoken dignity, described how Sergeant Steven Talvy yelled at them to “get the ‘F’ back in your vehicle, stay the ‘F’ out of our business.” The Warrens got back into their car.

But, said Tarif, “because the police weren’t wearing identification or badges, we started taking down license plate numbers of what we thought were police vehicles. Sergeant Talvy saw us, came over, and began to punch me on the left side of my head, bursting both my lips. When my wife asked why he did that, he punched her in the jaw. Then he yanked me out of the vehicle with such force that he ripped all the buttons off my shirt and ripped the entire left pants leg of my suit. He slammed me up against the vehicle, handcuffed me, and shoved me in a police van, injuring my shoulder and my head. Something that will always be with me is the wild rage I saw in Steven Talvy’s eyes. Evelyn and I knew that if I had made one slight move, we would not be here today.”

Tarif and Evelyn were charged with resisting arrest, obstructing government administration, and disorderly conduct — offenses carrying seriously penalties. But after a year of court dates, prosecutors dismissed the charges, confessing to the judge that they had no evidence.

New York City, while admitting no wrongdoing in the settlement, awarded Evelyn and Tarif $360,000. And so a traumatic event upending the Warrens’ lives is resolved. Life for Evelyn and Tarif can return to normal. Right?

Have I mentioned that the Warrens are African-American? Did I need to? Do you need to ask the race of the youth whose beating they tried to stop?

China Miéville’s book “The City and the City” takes place in two cities occupying the same geographical space. One city is upscale and thriving; the other, in decline. What keeps the cities inviolably separate is the conscious perceptions, sculpted from birth, of their citizens. To travel between cities without a permit is worse than criminal; to be in both at once, unthinkable.
In New York, New York (they had to name it twice), there are also two cities.

On one hand is the city of Normal. Normal residents assume that, though unfairness may exist, their world is basically all right. Normal life allows one to ignore or “unsee” the city of Pogrom.
Pogrom, on the other hand, runs on fear and a paranoiac onslaught of police and the courts against mostly brown and black people. Pogrom operates impersonally, under the cool, reptilian assumption that atrocities are a useful way to manage a dangerous population. Pogrom’s stop-and-frisk practices, its beatings and arrests coexist alongside the hardworking, God-fearing people of Normal, who, given the benefit of the doubt, are simply trying to live their lives.

On June 21, 2007, the Warrens chose to transgress boundaries — they lived in both cities at once, without a permit.

At the press conference, Evelyn and I talked. “To witness Sergeant Talvy beating my husband, who was offering no resistance and doing nothing wrong,” she said, “has taken a mental and emotional toll on me. I’m no longer as open or receptive to people. I don’t nurture my relationships. It’s like I’ve gone into a shell.”

Though relieved the case is officially over, Evelyn described how disheartened she is that the NYPD hasn’t changed; that, after the incident, Sergeant Talvy was even promoted to lieutenant. In fact, Talvy and his officers were in court last week for jury selection, before the case settled.

“It was like they were at a ball game, laughing, kidding around like they had no real concerns. It’ll sound crazy, but the defendants’ table was behind ours, and it was just killing me that if we went to trial, Talvy would be sitting behind me.”

Later, I described this case to a friend. He’d seen a clip of the press conference on TV news; he was clearly upset that these upstanding people were treated unjustly. But when I mentioned two black men, Ramarley Graham and Kenneth Chamberlain — an 18-year-old in the Bronx and a 68-year-old in White Plains — who were recently shot to death in their own homes by police, my friend backed off a little.

“It’s always been this way,” he said, trying to Normalize the situation. “Maybe it’s worse under Kelly and Bloomberg, but things have always been this way.”

Tarif and Evelyn came of age during the era of civil rights and black nationalism. Different as Martin Luther King and Malcolm X were tactically, they shared a conviction in an inherent human goodness. They believed things don’t have to be this way.

That’s why Evelyn talks about “remaining vigilant.” “In spite of what’s happened to us,” she said, “I hope, if we were confronted with the same situation, we’d do the same thing.”

The point is, you usually don’t realize which city you live in until something like this happens to you.
“What they want is to frighten people so no one stops and bears witness,” Evelyn added. “If people have the courage to say, ‘No, what you’re doing is wrong and I’m not going to move on,’ then maybe one day, something will change.”

Then maybe one day, we will all live in the same city.

David Graeber: New Police Strategy in New York – Sexual Assault Against Peaceful Protestors

Thursday, May 3, 2012 Naked Capitalism

By David Graeber, a Reader in Social Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and an author and activist currently based in New York
A few weeks ago I was with a few companions from Occupy Wall Street in Union Square when an old friend — I’ll call her Eileen — passed through, her hand in a cast.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“Oh, this?” she held it up. “I was in Liberty Park on the 17th [the Six Month Anniversary of the Occupation]. When the cops were pushing us out the park, one of them yanked at my breast.”
“Again?” someone said.
We had all been hearing stories like this. In fact, there had been continual reports of police officers groping women during the nightly evictions from Union Square itself over the previous two weeks.
“Yeah so I screamed at the guy, I said, ‘you grabbed my boob! what are you, some kind of fucking pervert?’ So they took me behind the lines and broke my wrists.”

Actually, she quickly clarified, only one wrist was literally broken. She proceeded to launch into a careful, well-nigh clinical blow-by-blow description of what had happened. An experienced activist, she knew to go limp when police seized her, and how to do nothing that could possibly be described as resisting arrest. Police dragged her, partly by the hair, behind their lines and threw her to the ground, periodically shouting “stop resisting!” as she shouted back “I’m not resisting!” At one point though, she said, she did tell them her glasses had fallen to the sidewalk next to her, and announced she was going to reach over to retrieve them. That apparently gave them all the excuse they needed. One seized her right arm and bent her wrist backwards in what she said appeared to be some kind of marshal-arts move, leaving it not broken, but seriously damaged. “I don’t know exactly what they did to my left wrist—at that point I was too busy screaming at the top of my lungs in pain. But they broke it. After that they put me in plastic cuffs, as tightly as they possibly could, and wouldn’t loosen them for at least an hour no matter how loud I screamed or how much the other prisoners begged them to help me. For a while everyone in the arrest van was chanting ‘take them off, take them off’ but they just ignored them…”
On March 17, several hundred members of Occupy Wall Street celebrated the six month anniversary of their first camp at Zuccotti Park by a peaceful reoccupation of the park—a reoccupation broken up within hours by police with 32 arrests. Later that evening a break-away group moved north, finally establishing itself on the southern end of Union Square, two miles away, even sleeping in park—though the city government soon after decided to defy a century-old tradition and begin closing the park every night just so they would not be able to establish a camp there. Since then, occupiers have taken advantage of past judicial rulings to continue to sleep on sidewalks outside the park, and more recently, on Wall Street itself.
During this time, peaceful occupiers have been faced with continual harassment arrests, almost invariably on fabricated charges (“disorderly conduct,” “interfering with the conduct of a police officer”—the latter a charge that can be leveled, for instance, against those who try to twist out of the way when an officer is hitting them.) I have seen one protestor at Union Square arrested, by four officers using considerable force, for sitting on the ground to pet a dog; another, for wrapping a blanket around herself (neither were given warnings; but both behaviors were considered too close to “camping”); a third, an ex-Marine, for using obscene language on the Federal steps. Others were reportedly arrested on those same steps for singing a satirical version of the “Officer Krumpke” song from West Side Story. Almost no march goes by without one or two protestors, at least, being hurled against vehicles or have their heads bashed against the ground while being arrested for straying off the sidewalk. The message here is clear. Law has nothing to do with it. Anyone who engages in Occupy Wall Street-related activity should know they can be arrested, for virtually any reason, at any time.
Many of these arrests are carried out in such a way to guarantee physical injury. The tone was set on that first night of March 17, when my friend Eileen’s wrists were broken; others suffered broken fingers, concussions, and broken ribs. Again, this was on a night where OWS actions were confined to sitting in a park, playing music, raising one or two tents, and marching down the street. To give a sense of the level of violence protestors were subjected to, during the march north to Union Square, we saw the first major incident of window-breaking in New York. The window in question was broken not by protestors, but by police—using a protestor’s head. The victim in this case was a street medic named José (owing to the likelihood of physical assault and injuries from police, OWSers in New York as elsewhere have come to carry out even the most peaceful protests accompanied by medics trained in basic first aid.) He offered no resistance.

Here is a video of the incident. The window-breaking begins at 3:45.
Police spokesmen later claimed this incident was a response to a bottle that was hurled at a police vehicle used to transport arrestees. Such claims are made almost automatically when videos appear documenting police assaults on non-violent protestors, yet, despite the presence of cameras everywhere, including those wielded by the police themselves, no actual documentation of any such claims ever seems to appear. This is no exception. In fact numerous witnesses confirmed this simply isn’t true, and even if a bottle had been thrown at an armored vehicle, not even the police have suggested they had any reason to believe the medic whose head was smashed into the window was the one who threw it.
Arbitrary violence is nothing new. The apparently systematic use of sexual assault against women protestors is new. I’m not aware of any reports of police intentionally grabbing women’s breasts before March 17, but on March 17 there were numerous reported cases, and in later nightly evictions from Union Square, the practice became so systematic that at least one woman told me her breasts were grabbed by five different police officers on a single night (in one case, while another one was blowing kisses.) The tactic appeared so abruptly, is so obviously a violation of any sort of police protocol or standard of legality, that it is hard to imagine it is anything but an intentional policy.
For obvious reasons, most of the women who have been victims of such assaults have been hesitant to come forward. Suing the city is a miserable and time-consuming task and if a woman brings any charge involving sexual misconduct, they can expect to have their own history and reputations—no matter how obviously irrelevant—raked over the coals, usually causing immense damage to their personal and professional life. The threat of doing so operates as a very effective form of intimidation. One exception is Cecily McMillan, who was not only groped but suffered a broken rib and seizures during her arrest on March 17, and held incommunicado, denied constant requests to see her lawyer, for over 24 hours thereafter. Shortly after release from the hospital she appeared on Democracy Now! And showed part of a handprint, replete with scratch-marks, that police had left directly over her right breast. (She is currently pursuing civil charges against the police department):

I’d like to emphasize this because when I first mention this, the usual reaction, from reporters or even some ordinary citizens, is incredulity. ‘Surely this must be a matter of a few rogue officers!’ It is difficult to conceive of an American police commander directly telling officers to grope women’s breasts—even through indirect code words. But we know that in other countries, such things definitely happen. In Egypt, for example, there was a sudden spate of sexual assaults by security forces against protestors in November and December 2011, and followed a very similar pattern: while women activists affirmed there had been beatings, but relatively few specifically sexual assaults during the height of the protests, starting in November, there were dozens of reports of women being groped or stripped while they were being beaten. The level of the violence in Egypt may have been more extreme, but the circumstances were identical: an attempt to revive a protest movement through re-occupation is met by a sudden ratcheting up of tactics by the security forces, and in particular, the sudden dramatic appearance of a tactic of sexual attacks on women. It is hard to imagine in either case it was a coincidence. In Egypt, no serious observer is even suggesting that it was.
Of course we cannot how such decisions are made, or conveyed; in fact, most of us find it unpleasant even to contemplate the idea of police officials ordering or encouraging sexual assault against the very citizens they are sworn to protect. But this seems to be precisely what is happening here.
.
For many, the thought of police officials ordering or condoning sexual assault—even if just through a nod or a wink—seems so shocking that absolute proof would be required. But is it really so out of character? As Naomi Wolf has recently reminded us, the US security apparatus has long “used sexual humiliation as a tool of control.” Any experienced activist is aware of the delight police officers so often take in explaining just how certainly they will be raped if placed in prison. Strip searches—which the Supreme Court has recently ruled can be deployed against any citizen held for so much as a traffic violation—are often deployed as a tool of humiliation and punishment. And one need hardly remark on well-documented practices at Guantanamo, Bagram, or Abu Ghraib. Why target women in particular? No doubt it’s partly simply the logic of the bully, to brutalize those you think are weak, and more easily traumatized. But another reason is, almost certainly, the hope of provoking violent reactions on the part of male protestors. I myself well remember a police tactic I observed more than once during the World Economic Forum demonstrations in New York in 2002: a plainclothes officer would tackle a young female marcher, without announcing of who they were, and when one or two men would gallantly try to come to her assistance, uniforms would rush in and arrest them for “assaulting an officer.” The logic makes perfect sense to someone with military background. Soldiers who oppose allowing a combat role for women almost invariably say they do so not because they are afraid women would not behave effectively in battle, but because they are afraid men would not behave effectively in battle if women were present—that is, that they would become so obsessed with the possibility of women in their unit being captured and sexually assaulted that they would behave irrationally. If the police were trying to provoke a violent reaction on the part of studiously non-violent protestors, as a way of justifying even greater brutality and felony charges, this would clearly be the most effective means of doing so.
There’s a good deal of anecdotal evidence that would tend to confirm that this is exactly what they are trying to do. One of the most peculiar incidents took place on a recent march in New York where police seem to have simulated such an assault, arresting a young women who most activists later concluded was probably an undercover officer (no one had seen her before or has seen her since), then ostentatiously groping her as she was handcuffed. Reportedly, several male protestors had to physically restrained (by other protestors) from charging in to help her.
Why is all this not a national story? Back in September, when the now famous Tony Bologna arbitrarily maced several young women engaged in peaceful protest, the event became a national news story. In March, even while we were still hearing heated debates over a single incident of window-breaking that may or may not have been by an OWS activist in Oakland four months earlier, no one seems to have paid any significant attention to the first major incident of window-breaking in New York—even though the window was broken, by police, apparently, using a non-violent protestors’ head!
I suspect one reason so many shy away from confronting the obvious is because it raises extremely troubling questions about the role of police in American society. Most middle class Americans see the primary role of police as maintaining public order and safety. Instances when police are clearly trying to foment violence and disorder for political purposes so fly in the face of everything we have been taught that our instinct is to tell ourselves it isn’t happening: there must have been some provocation, or else, it must have just been individual rogue cops. Certainly not something ordered by the highest echelons. But here we have to remember the police are an extremely top-down, centralized organization. Uniformed officers simply cannot behave in ways that flagrantly defy the law, in full public view, on an ongoing basis, without having at least tacit approval from those above.
In this case, we also know precisely who those superiors are. The commander of the First Precinct, successor to the disgraced Tony Bologna, is Captain Edward J. Winski, whose officers patrol the Financial District (that is, when those very same officers are not being paid directly by Wall Street firms to provide security, which they regularly do, replete with badges, uniforms, and weapons). Winski often personally directs groups of police attacking protestors:

Winsky’s superior is Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, former director of global security of the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns:

And Kelly’s superior, in turn, is Mayor Michael Bloomberg – the well-known former investment banker and Wall Street magnate. The 11th richest man in America, he has referred to the New York City Police Department as his own personal army:

One of the great themes of Occupy Wall Street, of course, is the death of US democracy—the near-total capture of our political system by Wall Street firms and the financial power of the 1%. In the beginning the emphasis was on political corruption, the fact that both parties so beholden to the demands of Wall Street and corporate lobbyists that working within the political system to change anything has become simply meaningless. Recent events have demonstrated just how much deeper the power of money really goes. It is not just the political class. It is the very structure of American government, starting with the law and those who are sworn to enforce it—police officers who, as even this brief illustration makes clear, are directly in the pay of and under the orders of Wall Street executives, and who, as a result, are willing to systematically violate their oaths to protect the public when members of that public have the temerity to make a public issue out of exactly these kind of arrangements.
As Gandhi revealed, non-violent protest is effective above all because it reveals how power really operates: it lays bare the violence it is willing to unleash on even the most peaceful citizens when they dare to challenge its moral legitimacy. And by doing so, it reveals the true moral bankruptcy of those who claim authority to rule us. Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated this time and time again. What the current spate of assaults shows is just how low, to what levels of utter moral degradation, such men are really willing to sink.

Police: 73 detained after protesters marking 6 months of Occupy movement refuse to leave park

A closed Zuccotti Park

By Cristian Salazar, Associated Press | March 18, 2012

NEW YORK -- Protesters marking the six-month mark since the start of
the Occupy movement were taken into custody by police officers who poured
into the park after warning those who had gathered there that it was
closed.

Police said 73 people were detained. It was unclear how many were still in
custody Sunday afternoon.

Some demonstrators had locked arms and sat down in the middle of Zuccotti
Park near Wall Street after police announced on a bullhorn at around 11:30
p.m. Saturday that the park was closed. Officers then entered the park,
forcing out most of the crowd and surrounding a small group that stayed
behind. Police formed a human ring around the park to keep protesters out.

An unused public transit bus was brought in to cart away about a dozen
demonstrators in plastic handcuffs. One female under arrest had difficulty
breathing and was taken away in an ambulance to be treated.

For hours, the demonstrators had been chanting and holding impromptu
meetings in the park to celebrate the anniversary of the movement that has
brought attention to economic inequality, as police mainly kept their
distance.

But New York Police Det. Brian Sessa said the tipping point came when the
protesters started breaking the park rules.

"They set up tents. They had sleeping bags," he said. Electrical boxes
also were tampered with and there was evidence of graffiti.

Sessa said Brookfield Properties, the park owner, sent in security to
advise the protesters to stop pitching tents and to leave the park. The
protesters, in turn, became agitated with them. The company then asked the
police to help them clear out the park, the detective said.

"Most of the people, they left the park," Sessa said. "People who refused
to leave and were staying were arrested."

Many protesters shouted and officers took out their batons after a
demonstrator threw a glass bottle at the bus that police were using to
detain protesters.

Sandra Nurse, a member of Occupy's direct action working group, said
police treated demonstrators roughly and made arbitrary arrests. She
disputed the police assertion that demonstrators had broken park rules by
putting up tents or getting out sleeping bags.

"I didn't see any sleeping bags," she said. "There was a banner hung
between two trees and a tarp thrown over it ... It wasn't a tent. It was
an erect thing, if that's what you want to call it."

Earlier in the day, with the city's attention focused on the huge St.
Patrick's Day parade many blocks uptown, the Occupy rally at Zuccotti drew
hundreds of people.

Documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who had given a speech at a nearby
university, also made an appearance at the park, milling around with
protesters.

With the barricades that once blocked them from Wall Street now removed,
the protesters streamed down the sidewalk and covered the steps of the
Federal Hall National Memorial. There, steps from the New York Stock
Exchange and standing at the feet of a statue of George Washington, they
danced and chanted, "We are unstoppable."

As always, the protesters focused on a variety of concerns, but for Tom
Hagan, his sights were on the giants of finance.

"Wall Street did some terrible things, especially Goldman Sachs, but all
of them. Everyone from the banks to the rating agencies, they all knew
they were doing wrong. ... But they did it anyway. Because the money was
too big," he said.

Dressed in an outfit that might have been more appropriate for the St.
Patrick's Day parade, the 61-year-old salesman wore a green shamrock cap
and carried a sign asking for saintly intervention: "St. Patrick: Drive
the snakes out of Wall Street."

Stacy Hessler held up a cardboard sign that read, "Spring is coming," a
reference, she said, both to the Arab Spring and to the warm weather that
is returning to New York City. She said she believes the nicer weather
will bring the crowds back to Occupy protests, where numbers have dwindled
in recent months since the group's encampment was ousted from Zuccotti
Park by authorities in November.

But now, "more and more people are coming out," said the 39-year-old, who
left her home in Florida in October to join the Manhattan protesters and
stayed through much of the winter. "The next couple of months, things are
going to start to grow, like the flowers."

Some have questioned whether the group can regain its momentum. This
month, the finance accounting group in New York City reported that just
about $119,000 remained in Occupy's bank account — the equivalent of about
two weeks' worth of expenses.

But Hessler said the group has remained strong, and she pronounced herself
satisfied with what the Occupy protesters have accomplished over the last
half year.

"It's changed the language," she said. "It's brought out a lot of issues
that people are talking about. ... And that's the start of change."
__

Associated Press writer Samantha Gross contributed to this report.

FREE LYNNE STEWART !!!! Come and Support Lynne’s appeal February 29!

February 16th, 2012 Lynn Stewart.org

FREE LYNNE STEWART !!!! Come and Support Lynne’s appeal!

VIGIL – February 28, 2012 sundown until @ Tom Paine Park, NYC

OCCUPY THE COURTS February 29, 2012 – Lynne’s Appeal @ 500 Pearl Street, NYC 9am

Lynne says:

“A Large Outpouring of Support in Foley Square and Tom Paine Park and in the Courtroom will signal to these arbiters of “Justice” that attention must be paid, the 99% are watching them with suspicion and tallying up the roads not taken.”

Feb 28th & 29th - Lynne Stewart Support Events

Please come out to these events to support Lynne Stewart in her
appeal in the Second Circuit Federal Appeals Court. The following
information was confirmed with Ralph Poynter, Lynne's husband and
comrade. Note new times for all the events.

**********************************************************************

Tues., Feb. 28, from 6 PM to Wed., Feb. 29 at 5 PM at Tom Paine Park
(Foley Square Park), just beside the Federal Courthouse at 500 Pearl
Street in lower Manhattan: We will have a rally and OCCUPY the park.
Come with your banners, drums, poems, prayers, songs, raps, shouts.
Stay over night in the park to let the government know that we
dissent from the use of incarceration as a tool of political terror.

Wed., Feb. 29, at 8 AM at the Federal Courthouse, 500 Pearl Street in
lower Manhattan: the beginning of Lynne's appeal (hearing scheduled
for 9 AM, but arrive early to get into the courtroom). Come and RALLY
in support of Lynne and ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS. Let's let them know
that the 99% are unambiguously opposed to the state terror that
political incarceration represents!

Note: The "Artists and Poets Speak Out for Lynne Stewart" event
originally set for Feb. 27 has been cancelled.

For background on the case and Lynne's current situation, including a
slide show illustrating a recent interview with Lynne's husband Ralph
Poynter by Mya Shone and Ralph Schoenman of the "Taking Aim" show at
http://politube.org/show/3377.

**********************************************************************

From: http://lynnestewart.org/

Wed., February 29, 2012
Second Circuit Argument in Lynne's Case
Second Circuit oral arguments in Lynne's case will take place on
February 29, 2012, at the U.S. Courthouse in Manhattan, 500 Pearl
Street. Lynne will not be there but hopes for a massive turnout! More
information coming soon!

Write Lynne
To send Lynne a letter, write:
Lynne Stewart #53504-054
Federal Medical Center, Carswell
PO Box 27137
Ft. Worth, TX 76127
For more information e-mail us at 1lawyerleft at gmail.com

Jazz Hayden and the Fight Against Stop-and-Frisk

An unlikely activist's battle with the NYPD's frisky business

By By Graham Rayman, Photographs by Lyric Cabral Wednesday, Feb 8 2012 Village Voice

Jazz Hayden might be the most unlikely character in the long-running controversy over the NYPD's stop-and-frisk campaign, which has affected more than 4 million New Yorkers since 2004.

Lyric Cabral

Jazz Hayden stands where he alleges police illegally searched his car in December 2011. After the search yielded a penknife, Hayden was arrested on a felony weapons charge.

Lyric Cabral

Hayden, a longtime Harlem community activist, films stop-and-frisks and then posts the videos to the Internet as part of his Copwatch program. Hayden plans to sue the NYPD for improper stop and arrest after he was pulled over by police in December.

The 70-year-old Hayden, whose given name is Joseph, is a longtime community activist in Harlem. In a past life, he was a street hustler who served three years in prison in the late 1950s for drugs, was falsely accused in the late 1960s in a high-profile shooting of two police officers in the politically turbulent year of 1968, was convicted of money laundering in the 1970s, and served 13 years in prison from 1986 to 2000 for manslaughter after a traffic dispute turned fatal.

Hayden has spent the past four years irritating police officers by videotaping them as they stop and frisk people in Harlem in a program he calls "Copwatch." He often posts the videos on the Internet. For most of that period, he encountered little more than annoyed cops, but recently, his activities might have caught up with him.

Last summer, Hayden filmed two plainclothes officers during an evening car stop. The exchange between Hayden and the officers was contentious, even though the two motorists who were stopped were let go without charges.

At least one officer was aware of Hayden's past, because at one point, he can be heard saying: "You done selling drugs yet or what? I know your rap sheet." And then later, the tape shows, the same officer can be heard saying: "Go sell some more drugs, sir. We know your background. I know who you are."

Then, on December 2, as Hayden drove away after a meeting at Riverside Church, the same two officers stopped him, searched him, and arrested him for possession of a penknife. "We know you," one of them said.

"These guys knew who I was," Hayden says, calling it "NYPD officers taking revenge on me. . . . It was clear retaliation."

Chris Woods, a 35-year-old security guard, happened to be walking by and witnessed the police stop Hayden. "He didn't say anything offensive or abusive to the officers, but that wasn't good enough for them," Woods says. "That he was talking with them seemed to make them more furious. The whole thing shouldn't even have been a criminal matter."

What probably should have been a minor incident became 48 hours in holding cells and a felony weapons charge against the activist. Hayden's arrest has also become something of a cause in Harlem.

Among other events, Hayden's allies organized a protest at the Manhattan Supreme Court on January 19, one of his court dates. The protest was attended by elected officials and activists. The board of the radio station WBAI, where Hayden was once a producer, passed a resolution in support of him.

In 2010, the NYPD, in a campaign touted by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as a key element in the war on crime, stopped more than 600,000 people throughout the city. From 2004 to 2009, police stopped 2.8 million people; the largest age group is males 15 to 19, following by males ages 20 to 24. Just 9 percent of the stops resulted in an arrest. And in 2011, the police were on pace for 686,000 stops—a new record.

In the 2010 Voice series "The NYPD Tapes," police supervisors in the 81st Precinct in Bedford-Stuyvesant order cops to make a quota of one or two stops per tour. Police Officer Adil Polanco, who was assigned to a Bronx precinct, said similarly that there was a stop-and-frisk quota there. If those orders are typical for most precincts—and that appears to be the case from the tapes and Polanco's statements—then quotas are a key factor in fueling the rise in stops.

Even so, Kelly has said repeatedly that the stops keep people from carrying weapons, drugs, and other illicit items on the street. He said it again most recently in a December 11 affidavit filed as part of a lawsuit: "Stops serve as a deterrent to criminal activity."

He has been backed on this by Mayor Bloomberg, the New York Post and Daily News editorial pages, and commentators including the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald, who tied the stops to the crime decline and declared that the campaign "saves minorities' lives."

And yet the campaign has spawned ongoing opposition not only from elected officials and activists but also from regular New Yorkers. Last September, police stopped and handcuffed Councilman Jumaane Williams and an associate at Brooklyn's West Indian Day Parade.

Williams raised a fuss, which led police spokesman Paul Browne to claim that someone had punched a police officer during the incident. Williams called that claim a "bald-faced lie," and Browne hasn't uttered another word about it since.

But aside from public opinion, there's a major cost to the campaign in actual dollars. Over the past couple of years, the number of lawsuits filed by New Yorkers alleging improper stop-and-frisks has continued to grow. There might be some element of lawyers seeing a new area in the always-busy police-litigation business, but the rise also indicates a frustration among New Yorkers with the practice.

In the month of January alone, more than three dozen lawsuits alleging improper stop-and-frisks were filed, based on a Voice reading of the complaints. Extrapolated, that means that the city could be sued more than 400 times this year alone just on improper stops.

If each case settles for a minimum of $10,000, that's at least $4 million in cost to taxpayers, not including the cost to the police department in work hours assembling the documents and removing cops from the street to be deposed, and the cost to the corporation counsel in paying lawyers to defend those cases. One wonders how much money the city is willing to spend on this litigation just to stick with the police commissioner's campaign. (We asked the city law department this question but did not receive a response.)

The people who filed suit last month appear to come from all walks of life—an auto mechanic, two high school students, a commuter, a Transit Authority worker, a guy walking home with a bag full of dog food. In all of the cases, the criminal charges, if any, were dismissed.

Lyric Cabral

The majority of New Yorkers targeted in stop-and-frisks are young black and Hispanic males. “Harlem is turning into an open-air prison, a minimum-security prison, and the people think it’s normal,” Hayden says.

Lyric Cabral

Hayden visits the 32nd Precinct in Harlem, where his arresting officers work.

Take Francis Destouche, for example. Destouche, a 53-year-old auto mechanic with a clean record, was walking home in the Bronx in October 2011 when he was stopped for no apparent reason by police. They searched him, found nothing, and then accused him of "throwing something away." He was arrested, held for 20 hours, and missed his granddaughter's birth. The charges were dismissed. Destouche's lawyer, Paul Mills, alleges that the stop and the arrest were a result of the NYPD's "quota policy."

"This arrest cannot be explained by any of the common categories of false arrest," Mills says. "He's not even smoking a cigarette. So, if you eliminate the other possibilities, there's no other way to explain it other than it was for the quota."

Mills says Destouche decided to sue because missing his granddaughter's birth was significant. "There are people out there for whom at his advanced age, after a lifetime of respect for the police, to suddenly be abducted and jailed for 20 hours is very upsetting. It was a big deal to him."

Or consider the case of "M.S.," a 16-year-old Staten Island youth who says he was stopped for walking down the street, detained, and searched. His backpack was searched. He was physically restrained. Charges were eventually dismissed. The lawsuit goes on to quote at length from stop-and-frisk studies, which suggest a bias against young black and Hispanic males.

Scott Joyner was waiting for a bus in Brooklyn in June 2011 when he saw cops arresting two other people. An officer walked over and grabbed his arm but released him when he realized Joyner was just standing at the bus stop. Joyner walked to a pay phone to file a 311 complaint, and there he was arrested, he alleges, for trying to make a complaint. Charges were dismissed.

In January 2011, Jamie Jarrett was walking down a Brooklyn street when a van of cops rolled up and began searching him. They found no weapons or drugs. The officers refused to explain why they were placing him under arrest. The charge of marijuana sale was dismissed, but not before Jarrett spent 48 hours in custody.

Kenrick Gray, 32, of Staten Island, claims he was falsely stopped, searched, and detained twice in late 2010, the second time resulting in false arrest. His lawyer alleges racial profiling led to the stops.

Likewise, Jarrett Savage claims he was illegally stopped and frisked in October 2010 in Brooklyn. He was pushed against a wall, searched, and taken to the precinct, where he was strip-searched in front of another prisoner. The charges were dismissed eventually. "This is not an isolated incident," the lawsuit alleges. "The city is aware that many police officers are insufficiently trained to stop, detain, arrest, and strip-search individuals."

Ramon Morales says he was cleaning his car outside his sister's house on Cabrini Boulevard in Manhattan in August 2009 when cops stopped him for no apparent reason, accused him of drug possession, and searched him and the car. They found no drugs but charged him with a DWI, even though he wasn't driving. Eighteen court appearances and nearly two years later, the charges were dismissed. And Morales claims someone stole stuff from his car while it was in police custody.

Daryl George, a 36-year-old transit worker who had never been arrested, sued this month following a questionable stop in January 2011. George says he was talking with a friend about buying an iPod in the lobby of a Brooklyn building when police came in, ordered everyone against the wall, and searched them. George didn't have any contraband, though someone else in the lobby did. George was arrested anyway, and though the charges were dismissed and the case was sealed, he was suspended by the Transit Authority and lost five months' pay and benefits.

Kevin Adams claimed he was illegally searched and arrested in February 2010 in the lobby of the Brooklyn building where he lives with his mother. Later that day—the arrest took place at 10 a.m.—they released him because the district attorney declined to prosecute, but not before he was roughed up and strip-searched in a police van.

Gregory Pope also sued last month. He claims he was walking on Coney Island in August 2011 when he was jumped by four plainclothes officers. They searched him. He told them they couldn't just search him for no reason. After that, they arrested him and strip-searched him at the precinct. The police also took his car to the precinct, where they searched it and caused a range of damage. Pope was held in the precinct for a day and then, inexplicably, released without charges.

Schedrick Campbell was walking home with a bag of dog food in March 2011 in Brooklyn when three plainclothes officers grabbed him, accused him of swallowing drugs, and tackled him. Despite a strip search in the precinct and a series of forced and invasive medical tests over two days at Interfaith Hospital, no contraband was found. The hospital billed Campbell $9,500 for the concocted arrest.

And in April 2011, while Keenan Baskerville was walking down a Brooklyn street, he was stopped by police, accused of smoking marijuana, which he denied, and arrested. He was strip-searched, but no contraband was found. Baskerville also sued.

Monique Williams sued as well. She says that when she asked why she was stopped, a police sergeant said to her, "Because I can," a statement that doesn't appear in the NYPD's official stop-and-frisk policy.

On rare occasions, police officers can get into deep trouble for improper stops. Michael Daragjati stopped and frisked a man on Staten Island. The man complained about the stop, as the search found no contraband. Daragjati then arrested him and claimed the man had flailed his arms and kicked him.

That arrest was proved false, and Daragjati was indicted on federal civil rights violations. It didn't help that investigators caught him using racial slurs to boast about the arrest. Daragjati lost his job, pleaded guilty, and had to agree never to work as a cop again. He faces a year in jail and a $100,000 fine.

Chris Woods, the witness to Hayden's arrest, compared improper police stops here to the burgeoning scandal in East Haven, Connecticut, where the police chief had to resign after four officers were indicted for targeting, harassing, and even beating black and Latino males who threatened to report misconduct. The case grew out of a federal civil rights investigation.

"Officers are doing the same thing over here," Woods says. "It's a similar situation, but no one's doing anything about it."

Meanwhile, the endless saga that is Floyd v. City of New York continues to lumber through federal court. Floyd is a class-action lawsuit filed in 2008 by four citizens and the Center for Constitutional Rights that alleges that the NYPD's massive stop-and-frisk campaign routinely violates the civil rights of New Yorkers. (One citizen is the first named plaintiff, David Floyd, of the Bronx.)

In the latest legal maneuvering in nearly four years of litigation, the plaintiffs have asked the judge for "class certification," which would open the door for hundreds of thousands of additional plaintiffs. The city, on the other hand, is trying to block expert testimony from Jeffrey Fagan, a Columbia University professor who wrote a study of the strategy, by claiming that his use of the data was "misleading," ignored police crime-fighting innovations, "ran counter to accepted statistical practices," is "fatally flawed," "irrelevant and unreliable," and offers "speculation and conjecture."

Darius Charney, lead attorney for the plaintiffs, says the city has refused to engage in any substantive settlement talks, despite the fact the issue is "of great public concern," the judge in the case wrote. There were a couple of meetings before a magistrate judge, but Charney calls them "a complete waste of time."

Asked whether he thought the Bloomberg administration is seeking to delay an outcome until after the mayor leaves office in two years, Charney said: "I don't know what they are thinking. I do find it odd that given all the press on this, they have been completely unwilling to address these issues."

As for the NYPD's claim that the campaign acts as a deterrent to crime—the city uses the Orwellian term "pre-emptive policing"—even though it produces relatively few convictions, Charney says there is "no empirical proof" of that. "There's no study that shows that aggressive stop-and-frisk deters crime," he says. "And you have to have reasonable suspicion under the Fourth Amendment. If they did 700,000 stops a year legally, we wouldn't have a complaint. But we contend the vast majority are illegal."

The Floyd case actually suffered a blow earlier this year, when U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that police had enough reasonable suspicion to frisk Floyd himself. Floyd had been stopped while entering his apartment building in February 2008.

Scheindlin based the decision on the city's claim that officers were acting on an ongoing pattern of burglaries in the area.

The CCR lawyers, however, went back and looked at the crime statistics for the preceding two months and found, instead, that there had been just one burglary in that area during the period. They filed a new motion based on that.

In November, Scheindlin granted the motion. She noted the new evidence was "deeply concerning to the court."

"Shockingly," Scheindlin wrote, police use the justification of "high-crime area" in stops even in low-crime areas. Fifty-five percent of stops are justified with that notation. The city justified its stop of Floyd with the high-crime notation.

"Plaintiffs have now raised severe doubts about the existence of that [burglary] pattern," Scheindlin wrote, adding that "it would be a miscarriage of justice" to deny Floyd's legal claim as a result.

Jazz Hayden, it certainly can be said, has lived in interesting times. He didn't really want to talk about the old days in a recent interview, but it's all chronicled in detail in crime journalist T.J. English's book The Savage City, which examines New York in the 1960s and 1970s. Hayden also appears in a documentary about Harlem drug kingpin Nicky Barnes titled Mr. Untouchable.

As a youth, Hayden supported himself by collecting bottles for pennies outside the Polo Grounds, shining shoes, and working for a barbershop, English writes. He became a hustler, first gambling in dice games and then running his own games. His uncle introduced him into the numbers game, and eventually, he was the person taking the bets.

English writes that in the late 1950s, Hayden, at age 16, was arrested for possession of 11 bags of heroin. He was sent to state prison for three years. He emerged from those abusive years embittered and angry, English writes.

Hayden fell into selling marijuana and heroin to survive. Meanwhile, the streets were filled with political discontent, personified in the Black Panther Party, which was at war with the police. But Hayden avoided the Panthers because survival was more important.

On September 27, 1968, a black male fired a rifle on two police officers sitting in a patrol car on 114th Street. The officers were wounded but survived. The police mobilized to catch the shooter.

Walking home with a friend, Hayden saw police around his apartment building. He had become a suspect in a high-profile crime that he had nothing to do with. He fled, until days later when the police caught up with him at a girlfriend's apartment. Hayden eventually learned that a person he knew had blamed the shooting on him under pressure from the police.

English notes that the shooter was described as about six foot four. Hayden is five foot five. Hayden was convicted anyway and sent to Attica state prison. Eighteen months later, the conviction was overturned, and Hayden was released, but he says he became a energetic critic of police tactics.

"In a time of war between the NYPD and the black liberation movement, [Hayden] was collateral damage," English writes.

The money-laundering conviction followed several years later, a result of Hayden's association with Barnes, and then the traffic dispute with a sanitation worker landed him in prison for 13 years. After he was released in 2000, he pursued several civil rights campaigns, the first being a class-action lawsuit over the fact that prisoners were denied the right to vote. In 2008, he founded Still Here Harlem Productions, a company that he envisioned offering an outlet for events the mainstream media ignored, and a website, allthingsharlem.com. Around then, he began filming stop-and-frisks. "It turned out to be the major issue in Harlem," he says.

Hayden has worked for various nonprofits since his release, done quite a bit of traveling to speak on civil rights issues, and is currently on Social Security. He has a wife of 40 years, eight children, 15 grandchildren, and one great-grandchild. He has been a hustler, a prisoner, but also a teacher and a scholar, even though as he says, he has been kicked out of every school he went to. He has had a summer fellowship at Harvard. "People tend to see you for one chapter in your life, but it's much more than that," he says.

One of the things Hayden does is videotape police officers performing stop-and-frisks. "I decided to tell them: 'I'm on your side. I'm here to observe you provide courtesy, professionalism, and respect,'" Hayden says. "What response could they make to that? Ray Kelly is the replaceable part. The person really upholding and sanctioning the policy is Bloomberg,"

Paolo Walker, a freelance videographer who has worked with Hayden for more than three years, says filming police "can be an intimidating experience."

A wealth of legal precedent and of course the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution makes photographing in public areas legal, but that memo apparently didn't make it to a lot of members of the NYPD.

"It is typical for the cops to give you a hard time and make threats to you to stop filming," he says. "Seeing a video of an incident and being able to put a human face on what's happening lets people see what's truly going on."

On one occasion, Walker says, officers filmed him filming them. An officer demanded his credentials and identification and insisted that he move along or else he would be arrested. In another incident, Walker says he was told "I'll get you" by an officer who told him to stop filming. Several times, Walker says cops pushed his camera and claimed they couldn't tell it was a camera.

One evening last summer, Hayden was out and came across a car stop in Harlem. Hayden videotaped the officers, who seem from the video to be fairly irritated that he was there. They not only shined their flashlights at him repeatedly, but they also told him they were aware of his prior arrests.

On December 2, Hayden left Riverside Church and was soon pulled over by the same two officers from the incident over the summer. He asked them why he was being stopped, and they eventually told him a brake light was not working. He provided his license and registration and was asked to step out of the car. Hayden claims one of the officers said: "Hey, we know you. . . . You're that murderer."

Hayden, unlike most people, was aware of his rights under the Fourth Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure. He told the officers they could pat-frisk him, but they couldn't search him or his car. The officers told him to stand at the rear of the car, and they began searching it—illegally, Hayden alleges, because he hadn't consented to the search.

"They ignored me and went right into my car and began searching it," Hayden says.

The search yielded a penknife, and rather than confiscating it, the officers arrested Hayden on a felony weapons charge, and took him to the 32nd Precinct in upper Manhattan. He was held in the precinct for the next 48 hours, except for a visit to Harlem Hospital for a blood-pressure check.

In the criminal complaint, the police didn't mention the brake light. Instead, they claimed they saw him suspiciously "moving his hands on the console of his car." Hayden's supporters call that a fabrication. He also wasn't charged with any traffic violations.

"That summer, NY1 had posted some coverage of me," Hayden says. "Maybe the cops saw that, when they see me out there filming."

For now, as his case winds its way through the court system, Hayden says he'll continue videotaping police. He is also preparing to go down the same road as so many other New Yorkers and sue the NYPD for the improper stop and arrest. One of his lawyers is Sarah Kunstler, the daughter of another firebrand from the old days, civil rights attorney William Kunstler. His next court date is April 17.

NYC EVENT AND RAFFLE - THIS WEDNESDAY 12/7!

WHAT: Red to Green: Political Panic from McCarthyism to ‘Eco-Terrorism’ Panel
discussion with Robert Meeropol, Will Potter and Jenny Synan with an introduction by
Rachel Meeropol plus an AMAZING raffle

WHEN: 6:30-8:00, Wednesday, December 7th
WHERE: Community Church of New York (40 East 35th Street, between Park and Madison
Avenues)

COST: Free entry; raffle tickets are $2 each or three for $5.

Every year we commemorate Daniel’s arrest with an event on or around December 7th.
This year’s event will link advocates, activists and concerned individuals to think
critically around the Red and Green scare, and ongoing repression of political
dissidents in the United States. On the sixth anniversary, Family & Friends of
Daniel McGowan, The Rosenberg Fund for Children, Will Potter of GreenIsTheNewRed and
the Center for Constitutional Rights are hosting this panel discussion. In addition
to the panel, we’re planning on doing a raffle to raise money which goes to Daniel’s
commissary account in prison and any future legal expenses.

PURCHASE RAFFLE TICKETS NOW! You may change the quantity on the next page to
purchase as many packs of tickets as you’d like. You do not have to live in NYC to
participate in the raffle, but you do need to be in the U.S. because of shipping
costs. If you cannot make the event, we will mail you your prize.

****GO HERE TO GET YOUR RAFFLE TICKETS!****
http://supportdaniel.org/blog/?p=41

RAFFLE PRIZES:
IFC Membership (The Cineaste Plus One) ($120 value)
BORF signed limited-edition Support Daniel print ($100 value)
Bluestockings membership & t-shirt
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If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front DVDs
Livescribe Echo 4GB smartpen + 4-pack of Livescribe Dot Paper ($150+ value)
1/2 Gallon Wilder Brook Farm Maple Syrup
Art by Elektra KB ($250 value)
Sparrow Media Shirts: One, Two, and Three
Fingerless mitts hand-knitted by Sarah Paul (mother of Jonathan Paul, Daniel’s
co-defendant!)
Support Daniel McGowan T-shirt
Support Daniel McGowan Water Bottle
Green is the New Red book donation and signed posters
A pair of tickets to the Spectacle Theater
Two gift certificates to Book Thug Nation
1 acupuncture session with Famous
Pie Any Means Necessary: The Biotic Baking Brigade Cookbook
$75 worth of Books from Justseeds
Let Freedom Ring, edited by Matt Meyer
Eco-Warriors by Rik Scarce
Subscriptions to Fifth Estate
The Will of the Many by Marrianne Maeckelbergh
Books by Brian Tokar (“Toward Climate Justice” and “Agriculture & Food in Crisis“)
2012 Justseeds/Eberhardt Press Organizers
Books from Crimethinc. (Recipes for Disaster and Work), Eberhardt Press, Combustion
Books, Burning Books (Buffalo, New York)
Wind(s) from below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible
Team Colors Posters
DVDs from Whispered Media (Boom and We Interrupt This Empire)
Certain Days: Freedom For Political Prisoners 2012 Wall Calendar
One year subscription to 4StruggleMag

Event Co-Sponsored by:
The Center for Constitutional Rights
The Rosenberg Fund for Children
Green is the new Red
Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan

New York City to Sharply Increase Solitary Confinement on Rikers Island

November 21, 2011 Solitary Watch

by Jean Casella and Dina Levy

Over the past year, the New York City Department of Corrections (NYCDOC) has quietly implemented a massive expansion in the number of solitary confinement units on Rikers Island. By the end of 2011, the number of “punitive segregation” cells at Rikers will have grown by 45 percent, from 681 to a total of 990 cells. Some of these cells, in which prisoners are isolated for up to 23 hours a day, hold juveniles, inmates with mental illness, and pre-trial detainees not yet convicted of any crime. Once the expansion is complete, New York City’s island jail will have one of the highest rates of solitary confinement in the country.

In increasing its use of solitary confinement at this time, NYDOC is bucking a national trend. A growing body of academic research suggests that solitary confinement can cause severe psychological damage, and may in fact increase both violent behavior and suicide rates among prisoners. In recent years, criminal justice reformers and human rights and civil liberties advocates have increasingly questioned the widespread and routine use of solitary confinement in America’s prisons and jails, and states from Maine to Mississippi have taken steps to reduce the number of inmates they hold in isolation.

In New York City, in contrast, the Department of Corrections is doing everything possible to expand its use of solitary confinement. “Every bed that can be converted is being converted” to punitive segregation, NYDOC Commissioner Dora Schriro said at a November 17 meeting of the City Council’s Criminal Justice Committee. Schriro was grilled about a spike in violence on Rikers, both at the meeting and in recent run-ins with the Rikers guards’ union. The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association attributes an increase in inmate attacks on the large backlog of prisoners waiting to serve their time in “the Bing,” as the punitive segregation units are commonly called. Schriro promised that punitive segregation at Rikers is increasing dramatically, although it costs the NYDOC “thousands of dollars to convert jail cells into solitary sections,” according to the Daily News, and “The so-called ‘bing’ cells also require extra staffing because guards must escort these inmates everywhere.”

Sentences in the Bing range from days to months, and multiple sentences can add up to a year or more. During this time, inmates leave their cells only for short periods of segregated exercise and in order to bathe, attend religious services, or receive visits. “Punitive segregation is one of several management strategies for preventing and reducing violence in the jails,” Sharman Stein, Deputy Commissioner for Public Information at the NYDOC, said in an email to Solitary Watch. She added that the NYDOC also utilizes a reward system “to incentivize pro-social behavior.”

Nevertheless, inmates can end up doing time in the Bing not only for violent offenses, but for nonviolent infractions ranging from insolence toward guards to testing positive for drugs to possessing contraband of any kind. (In a recent high-profile case, rapper Lil Wayne received a month of punitive segregation for having a smuggled iPod in his cell.) Schriro said that the backlog of inmates awaiting Bing time is made up of nonviolent offenders only.

Critics believe that solitary confinement is overused, rather than under-utilized, on Rikers. “DOC should find methods that are rehabilitative not punitive,” says Jennifer Parish, Director of Criminal Justice Advocacy at the Urban Justice Center. Advocacy groups including the Urban Justice Center, Legal Aid Society, and Correctional Association are convening a strategy session on December 1 to discuss the problems at Rikers, including the dramatic growth in solitary confinement.

Some critics argue that large-scale punitive segregation is a misguided response to prison violence. “Prison officials often cite a decrease in violence after expanding the use of solitary,” said Stuart Grassian, a psychiatrist who served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School and has conducted studies on the effects of solitary confinement. “I think this needs to be placed in context. Of course when inmates cannot interact with each other or with staff they simply cannot engage in violent behavior. But this does not mean that the problem of violence is thereby addressed. You can put a dog in a cage and beat it and starve it and kick it all you want. It certainly won’t be violent as a result. Until, that is, you open the cage.”

As Grassian pointed out in an interview with Solitary Watch, “The cages at Rikers will, someday, open.” A majority of inmates in the island jail are in detention awaiting trial, and the rest are serving short sentences of up to one year, mostly for nonviolent crimes. So “virtually all the inmates confined in that way will, someday, get out, and be among us,” Grassian continued. “Then the pent up violence their confinement caused will be unleashed, not in solitary, but out among us–in the community.”

According to Sharman Stein, adolescent male inmates are among the most prone to violence, which is why the NYDOC has chosen to add 60 new isolation cells to Rikers Islands’ scandal-ridden Robert N. Davoran Center, the facility that houses male teens. Stein stated that since expanding the number of solitary units at Davoren, fights have decreased by 39 percent over a six month period. At the same time, critics contend that isolation is especially damaging for teenagers.

“I couldn’t believe they would treat a child this way,” said Lisa Ortega, a single mother and community activist in the Bronx, whose 16-year old son was sent to Davoren last year on charges of possessing a firearm. In an interview, Ortega said her son suffers from extreme hyperactivity and other psychological problems, though he has not been clinically diagnosed. He was placed in solitary confinement within a week of arriving at Riker’s for “cursing at a guard.”

Ortega said that her son suffered terrible anxiety attacks while in solitary and talked openly about harming himself to escape the isolation. He was released from punitive segregation after about 10 days, but soon was accused of “inciting a riot” after getting into a fist fight. This time he was sentenced to 20 days in the Bing, and his physical health deteriorated along with his mental condition. “I was shocked when I saw him,” Ortega said. “He had lost 20 pounds, and his hair was falling out. A sixteen-year-old boy whose hair is falling out!”

Ortega’s son is now facing an 80-day sentence in solitary confinement, once again for fighting. Ortega believes strongly that her child would benefit greatly from a thorough medical evaluation, a formal diagnosis, and an appropriate course of treatment. So far she has been unable to get Riker’s to provide that level of care. “They gave him some anxiety medicine after he threatened to hurt himself. That was the end of it.”

One-third of the prisoners on Rikers have been diagnosed with mental illness, making the island jail effectively the largest in-patient psychiatric facility in New York State. While the NYDOC maintains several special mental health units, it also has two punitive segregation wings designated specifically for inmates with mental illness–and advocates say that the mentally ill are found throughout the Bings.

Solitary confinement has been shown to cause psychological damage to prisoners without underlying psychiatric conditions. (One study showed reduced EEG activity after as little as one week in solitary.) For those with mental illness, isolation can be particularly devastating. According to Terry Kupers, a clinical psychiatrist and professor at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, solitary confinement is “an extreme hazard to the mental health and wellbeing” of inmates who are suffering from or prone to serious mental illness. “It causes irreparable emotional damage and psychiatric disability as well an extreme mental anguish and suffering, and in some cases presents a risk of death by suicide.”

Yet by exhibiting the symptoms of untreated or inadequately treated mental illness, these very inmates are more likely than others to land in the Bing. The fractured system creates a perpetual cycle of crime and punishment which can be extremely difficult to break.

Randi Sinnreich, a social worker at Bronx Defenders, related one example of how this paradox plays out. Several years ago she represented a young man who had been clinically diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Charged with stealing a cell phone and unable to afford bail, her client was forced to wait for his trail on Rikers Island. When he arrived at the jail, he was misdiagnosed and then denied the necessary medication that would control his disease. As a result, his behavior became erratic and he was soon serving time in punitive segregation. Living in extreme isolation triggered more outbursts, and following each episode his sentence in solitary was extended.

Sinnreich spent countless hours working through the administrative red-tape at Riker’s in attempt to get her client a psychological re-evaluation. She ultimately succeeded, and his condition was re-classified, but not before he had served almost a full year in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. Sinnreich said she worries that with more than 300 new solitary confinement beds to fill, a growing number of prisoners in need of mental health treatment will instead be spending more time in 23-hour-a-day lockdown.

In September, the Bloomberg Administration announced a new initiative designed to address the high rate of mentally ill prisoners in the city’s jail system. According to a press release, the initiative’s steering committee is “committed to investigating the specific challenges this population faces and ensuring their needs are in fact being addressed.”

While encouraged by the announcement, advocates for prisoners with mental illness are perplexed by the NYCDOC’s decision to simultaneously undertake the largest expansion of solitary confinement units in recent memory. According to the Urban Justice Center’s Jennifer Parish, the two initiatives are directly at odds, since “it is well documented that solitary confinement has a negative impact on mental health.”

Once the expansion of punitive segregation at Rikers is completed and the cells filled to capacity, close to 8 percent of the island’s average daily population of 12,700 inmates will be in 23-hour-a-day lockdown. This exceeds even the rate of disciplinary segregation in New York State’s prisons, which at 7.6 percent is the highest in the nation, according to a report by the Correctional Association. Nationwide, the rate of solitary confinement is thought to be between 2 and 4 percent, which itself far exceeds the rates of solitary confinement in other industrialized countries.

The American Civil Liberties Union, American Friends Service Committee, and National Religious Campaign Against Torture are among the national groups that have taken a strong stand against what the ACLU calls the “dangerous overuse of solitary confinement in the United States.” In October, Juan Mendez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, called on UN member nations to ban nearly all uses of solitary confinement. Mendez criticized precisely the kinds of practices that are alive and growing on Rikers Island, stating that the isolation of prisoners should never exceed 15 days, and that it “can amount to torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment when used as a punishment, during pretrial detention, indefinitely or for a prolonged period, for persons with mental disabilities or juveniles.”

Beyond concerns about its innate cruelty, Grassian argues that solitary confinement is bad for society as well as for the prisoners themselves. Inmates who have spent time in solitary on Rikers “will someday leave prison,” he says, “and our prison system will have succeeded in making them as out of control and dangerous to the community as it possibly could. Rikers will not have gotten tough on crime. It will have gotten tough on us–on the community to which these individuals will someday return.”

Note: This story includes an updated number for the total punitive segregation cells Rikers will hold once the expansion is complete. This number was provided today by the NYDOC in response to our story. It differs slightly from numbers the NYDOC previously provided to Solitary Watch, and more dramatically from the numbers reported earlier today by the Daily News. (The News cited Schriro saying they would increase 45 percent over the current level of 862 units, which would have brought the total to 1,250 cells. The NYDOC, however, says the 45 percent increase is over earlier levels, and will bring the total to 990.)

NYC: Solidarity Action with Pelican Bay Prisoners

On the night of November 18th, we attacked the Downtown Brooklyn Parole Office with paint. We did this in solidarity with Johnny Owens Vick, Hozel Alanzo Blanchard, and a third currently unnamed prisoner: hunger strikers in California who died in struggle against their daily conditions of modern slavery.

TOTAL SOLIDARITY WITH PRISONERS IN REVOLT EVERYWHERE

FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF ALL PRISONS AND THE SOCIETY THAT NEEDS THEM

Occupy Eviction News

Image from Zuccotti Park

Police dismantle Oakland camp, protesters on march

By Laird Harrison | Reuters – Nov 14, 2011

OAKLAND, Calif (Reuters) - Police forcibly evicted anti-Wall Street
protesters from their camp in downtown Oakland early on Monday, setting
the stage for possible showdowns with some demonstrators who vowed to dig
in after marching through the streets.

Throngs of protesters headed back to Frank Ogawa Plaza in the late
afternoon, regrouping hours after officers in riot gear cleared the area
and arrested 33 people as they removed about 100 tents. But the police
action avoided clashes that marked a previous attempt to shut down the
encampment.

"This movement cannot end!" a speaker told the crowd as the march began
outside a downtown library. Police largely stood back, and at one point
even stopped traffic for the marchers, who authorities said could return
to the plaza so long as they did not camp there.

The march ended peacefully with activists huddling in a "general assembly"
meeting, with speakers divided between those who urged rebuilding their
camp in defiance of police and those who advocated various other tactics.

Recent unrest surrounding the Oakland encampment has helped rally
nationwide support for Occupy Wall Street, a movement launched in New York
in September to protest economic inequality and excesses of the financial
system.

By late evening, Oakland crowds had largely dissipated after a consensus
emerged to join a march and rally planned for Tuesday by students and
faculty on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.

The daylong Berkeley strike was called in response to a confrontation last
week with campus police who cleared out a short-lived encampment there and
arrested 39 protesters. Organizers said their rally on Tuesday would
culminate with the "reestablishment" of their "Occupy Cal Encampment."

The move to clear out Ogawa Plaza, after nearly a month of indecision on
how to handle the Oakland protests, came days after a fatal shooting near
the encampment fueled renewed pressure on the city to close it down.

Acting Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan said the shooting death of
Kayode Ola Foster, 25, last Thursday left him no choice but to again
dismantle the encampment.

"We had to take action. I tried to do it the next day (following the
shooting) but I didn't have the resources ready. I was going to go all
in," he said.

Jordan said it was unclear if Foster had been living in the protest camp
but that the suspected gunman had been there for several weeks. Occupy
Oakland organizers have said the incident was unrelated to their movement.

Officers in the early morning raid on Ogawa Plaza appeared to take a less
aggressive approach than in a similar action three weeks earlier, and were
met with less resistance from Occupy Oakland demonstrators.

"We had to bring the camps to an end before more people got hurt," Mayor
Jean Quan told a news conference later.

Monday's action saw officers sometimes smiling and talking with protesters
as they took down tents while a helicopter overhead illuminated the area.
A separate line of officers kept a chanting crowd from entering the camp.

Meanwhile, several blocks away from Ogawa Plaza, some 40 tents remained
standing at a separate park where a smaller group of demonstrators said
they have been camping with relatively little attention paid for the past
few weeks.

Protesters there said they too had received eviction notices from the
police on Sunday but that no move had been made to force them to leave the
park.

MOVE PROMPTS RESIGNATION

The decision to evict the camp at Ogawa Plaza prompted the resignation of
a top adviser to Quan, whose handling of the protests has come under
withering criticism. The adviser, Dan Siegel, called the move a mistake.

"I don't know if it will remain calm or if it will become very volatile,"
Siegel told Reuters in an interview.

Quan, asked about Siegel's resignation, said only: "He's moving on, I'm
moving on."

City officials said there were no injuries to citizens or officers and
that Ogawa Plaza, where protesters had camped for about a month, would
reopen for peaceful demonstrations.

Taxi driver Brad Newsham, holding a placard with the slogan "Re-Occupy,"
said: "We were moved off by the 1 percent and the powers that be."

A previous attempt to clear the square on October 25 had sparked
confrontations between protesters and police that evolved into one of the
most violent episodes since the anti-Wall Street movement began in New
York.

Former Marine Scott Olsen was critically injured during those
altercations, galvanizing protests nationwide. In the aftermath of the
confrontations, Oakland protesters were able to return to the plaza.

Oakland is one of just several cities where authorities have acted in
recent days to shut down Occupy camps, saying they have become sources of
rising crime.

In Eureka, California, early on Monday, police arrested 33 people in
dismantling a protest camp there.

The weekend saw police clearing operations in Portland, Oregon; Salt Lake
City, Utah; Denver, Colorado; and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as well as
threats of action in other cities if protesters did not clear out on their
own.

In St. Louis, where 27 anti-Wall Street protesters were arrested on
Saturday, attorneys for members of Occupy St. Louis planned to take their
battle to regain a downtown campsite to federal court on Tuesday.

They were seeking an injunction that would allow an overnight presence in
Kiener Plaza, the downtown city park near the Gateway Arch where
protesters against economic inequality maintained a camp for six weeks.

Meanwhile in New York, protesters said they would seek to shut-down Wall
Street on Thursday by holding a street carnival to mark the two-month
anniversary of their campaign.

Organizers acknowledged that the move could be the group's most
provocative yet and could lead to mass arrests and further strain
relations with city authorities.

(Additional reporting by Emmett Berg, Jim Christie, Noel Randewich, Dan
Levine, Peter Henderson, Mary Slosson, Dan Whitcomb, Bruce Olson and Chris
Francescani; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing by Jerry Norton and Cynthia
Johnston)


New York police evict anti-Wall Street protesters

By Michelle Nichols | Reuters – Nov. 15, 2011

http://news.yahoo.com/ny-police-try-evict-anti-wall-street-protesters-064557041.html

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Police wearing helmets and carrying shields moved to
evict protesters with the Occupy Wall Street movement early on Tuesday
from the park in New York City's financial district where they have camped
since September.

Authorities declared that the continued occupation of Zuccotti Park --
which had become a sea of tents, tarps and protest signs with hundreds of
demonstrators sleeping there -- posed a health and safety threat.

Scores of police barricaded streets around the park, which had been lit up
with spotlights, and were keeping people about a block away. More people
were arriving at the scene to support Occupy Wall Street after the
protesters sent out a mass text message alerting followers to the raid.

"They gave us about 20 minutes to get our things together," protester Sam
Wood said. "It's a painful process to watch, they are sweeping through the
park."

The protesters had set up camp in Zuccotti Park on September 17 to protest
a financial system they say mostly benefits corporations and the wealthy.
Their movement has inspired similar protests against economic inequality
in other cities, and in some cases have led to violent clashes with
police.

The office of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the protesters
should "temporarily leave" the park and remove their tents and tarps.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said the city and the owners of the park,
commercial real estate corporation Brookfield Office Properties, issued
fliers to the protesters saying the park would be cleared for cleaning
shortly after 1 a.m. (0600 GMT).

Browne said 15 people had been arrested for disorderly conduct and
resisting arrest.

The flier said the city and Brookfield had decided "that the continued
occupation of Zuccotti Park posed an increasing health and safety hazard
to those camped in the park, the city's first responders and the
surrounding community."

Browne said most people had left peacefully, but there was a small group
of people in the middle of the park refusing to leave. He said the
protesters can return if they want after the park is cleared but without
their tents and belongings.

The protesters had set up a kitchen in the middle of the park and they
also had a medical tent, a social media headquarters and a library.
Protesters have said several hundred people had been regularly sleeping in
the park.

Some protesters said police had used pepper spray while clearing the park
and journalists at the scene said they smelled the substance.

'SWEEPING THROUGH THE PARK'

Police were using a loudspeaker to tell protesters still at the park that
if they did not leave they would be arrested.

Wood, an unemployed 21-year-old from Farmingdale, New York, said he had
been living at the park since the protests started on September 17. "They
weren't disassembling anything nicely. ... They trashed our library," Wood
said.

Wood said there were still about 50 to 80 people in the park, many of whom
had linked arms and were sitting around the kitchen area in the middle of
the site. He said he saw some people who had chained themselves to trees.
Wood said dozens of sanitation workers were helping police clear the park.

Samantha Tuttlebee, 35, from the Brooklyn section of the city, said she
was volunteering at the protesters' medical tent when the raid happened.
She said she had not been living at the park.

"I'm shocked. They put my arms behind my back. They are really violent,"
Tuttlebee said. "We were trying to leave and they threw us out."

The protesters issued a statement by e-mail that said, "You can't evict an
idea whose time has come."

"Some politicians may physically remove us from public spaces -- our
spaces -- and, physically, they may succeed. But we are engaged in a
battle over ideas. Our idea is that our political structures should serve
us, the people -- all of us, not just those who have amassed great wealth
and power," the Occupy Wall Street statement added.

Police on Monday moved into an encampment by anti-Wall Street protesters
in Oakland, California, clearing out occupants and taking down tents,
while in Portland, Oregon, police confronted an estimated 1,000 protesters
on Sunday.

The protesters in Wall Street had said they hoped on Thursday to shut down
Wall Street -- home to the New York Stock Exchange -- by holding a street
carnival to mark the two-month anniversary of their movement.

(Editing by Will Dunham)


Police with Assault Rifles Raid Newly Established Squat, Crowds Gather

Nov. 14, 2011 Anarchist News

In one of the largest coordinated police responses in recent Carrboro
Chapel Hill history, dozens of SWAT team members raided the newly
established squat in the 10,000 square foot Chrysler building. With guns
drawn, they blocked off the surrounding streets. Eight people were
ultimately arrested, likely on trespassing charges or break and entering.
A large crowd gathered outside, booing the cops, screaming, and vowing to
return. Two town aldermen from Carrboro even took part, ironic considering
Carrboro police were involved.

A benefit show is being held tonight and bail money is being raised as
this is typed. Solidarity actions everywhere are appreciated; the cops
here have seriously overstepped their normal bounds, and have been
captured on film by mainstream press with guns drawn on old ladies and
legal observers.

This is only the beginning of this effort, and we already have found more
comrades than ever before through this struggle.

More updates coming asap...

[Note the beautiful juxtaposition w/ the banners?]