MANHATTAN, FEBRUARY 15--The major bourgeois media incorrectly reported police tactics at the February 15th rally against war with Iraq in New York City. The police started by blocking off exits between blocks ranging from the 40s to the 60s so that people on the east side highway called FDR Drive could not approach the demonstration. Hence all day long marchers streamed in from far southern and northern reaches of Manhattan toward the middle in the 40s and 50s.
By closing the FDR exits and the north-south avenues, the police had the effect of angering travelers while spreading out the demonstration into so many city blocks as to make the demonstration uncountable. In the experience of this reporter, there has never been a demonstration covering more city blocks. The Associated Press incorrectly reported: "City police provided no estimate of the crowd, which stretched 20 blocks deep and two blocks wide."(1) That must have been the view from the royal carriage. AP should send some more people into the streets to get a closer look. It's a lot easier to quote some police bureaucrat sitting in an office than to send several people into more than one hundred city blocks for several hours.
The New York Times correctly reported: "crowds ... filled the avenue from 49th Street to 72nd Street and spilled over into side streets and to Second, Third and Lexington Avenues, where thousands more were halted at police barricades, far from the sights and sounds of the demonstration."(2) In fact, demonstrators also streamed the whole length of 1st Avenue south of the UN.
Originally activists planned the rally for 1st Avenue, but the City government stigmatized the demonstrators by saying they could not prevent such a large crowd from attacking the UN building.(3) In connection to this, the actual tactics of the police were to create chokepoints by closing 1st Avenue except for themselves. Then they used "one-way valve" tactics by allowing demonstrators to go to 2nd, 3rd and Lexington but not the other way around.
One exception was at a checkpoint near the UN on First Avenue. Police let in a man draped in a Zionist flag. Later, horse-mounted police singled out those waving Palestinian flags for attack.
The New York Post reported attacks on police and not the other way around, but it did get one point right: "The mostly peaceful protesters clogged the avenues from the East Side to the Theater District."(4)
The Washington Post added one snippet that was correct as well. Police first clogged the sidewalks by closing various streets and then galloped in with horses to break up the clogs! The Washington Post quoted a police officer who said, "It's nuts. If the city gave them a set march route down an avenue, you wouldn't have these problems."(5)
Hence, the fact that police alternately clogged and opened the streets and even forced them open with mounted police is not in dispute in the mainstream media. As usual, the bourgeois media make it sound like the demonstrators attacked the police, and even told a story where a horse showing great political consciousness threw a cop off its back, thus causing police to wrestle and arrest more demonstrators.
In fact, witnesses saw police beating a man held down by four officers after he was handcuffed and arrested. The major media all quoted the police side of events that day but none mentioned that report, only one report of police firing pepper spray.(6)
MIM Notes witnessed two mounted officer attacks, while standing at 52nd and 2nd and again at 52nd and 3rd. There was also a variety of staged police incidents designed to intimidate the crowd and impress the general public as if demonstrations were some emergency that justified all the wasted money spent on police that day. While the police kept control of the streets and would not let marchers use them in most cases, they still managed to make a big show of being blocked in their travels by demonstrators. They kept driving emergency vehicles in all directions, even as they had control of the streets. In other words, they were using their many vehicles to intimidate people.(7) We saw one white police truck pushing a blonde womyn by driving too close behind her down the sidestreet. A cop grabbed the crying womyn who surrendered saying "all right, all right."
People who think the First Amendment applies in Amerika just don't have much experience. When it came to the demonstration, police admitted to breaking up the rally into smaller pieces and no one denies that thousands of people never got to the rally. That is called violating one's right to "freedom of association" as the "founding fathers" would say. It was the police who decided how big the demonstrations would be (by breaking it up into pieces) and what each demonstrator would hear from speakers, by preventing demonstrators from having their choice of speakers that spoke that day. Protesters did not have the "freedom of association" to congregate in one place with each other.
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