police on my back

he New York times is reporting on the implications of a series of recently declassified reports on the NYPD's tactics at the 2/2/2002 protests against the World Economic Forum's decision to exploit the legacy of 9/11/2001 by holding its ministerial in NYC rather than Davos. Particularly interesting is the discussion of the events surrounding the entry of black bloc protesters into the Another World is Possible march staging ground in the "green zone" at 59th and 5th ave on Saturday morning.

The same tactic is cited in another report, dated Feb. 8, 2002, and signed by Capt. Robert L. Bonifaci, commander of the Queens North Task Force. Captain Bonifaci wrote, "It should be noted that a large part of the success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters."

Elaborating on the report, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that plainclothes officers saw a group of demonstrators put on masks as they drew near the Plaza Hotel, then take out metal pipes and try to rush police lines.

"In addition to mainly peaceful protesters, the W.E.F. attracted hard-core, violent elements that were surveilled by the N.Y.P.D.," Mr. Browne said, citing the incident at the Plaza. "Yes, we used surveillance techniques to track and hopefully disrupt violent elements. That's proactive."

About 30 people were arrested there, and virtually all their cases are now sealed, indicating that the charges were either dismissed by prosecutors or dropped after six months without further incident.

I was standing in the crowd on Saturday morning next to a friend from high school and another friend from college when the riot cop charged hundreds of people with nightsticks out. We'd been doing nothing other than idly standing around. All of the sudden the crowd parted and we were pulled back towards the curb as the police came in, indiscriminately grabbing protestors who had done nothing wrong, based, i think, primarily on whether or not we looked anarchisty or not. When the chaos was over, i couldn't find my friend from high school (though she later turned out to be fine) and my other friend had been pepper sprayed in the mouth by a police officer and was in a great deal of pain. None of us, and few of the people in the crowd had "metal pipes," and the woman who was snatched away from right next to where my friend from college had been standing cetrainly was no more a potential rioter than the rest of us. The people who were directly targeted, as opposed to those of us who appear to have been simply acceptable collateral damage, were carrying, if I remember correctly, not metal pipes but rather plastic shields with images of revolt displayed on them. They were not charging the riot cops but rather marching in a loose formation through the throng of protestors towards the front of the march that the NYPD had refused to allow forward for more than an hour after our scheduled start time.

The claim made by the police in Dwyer's article that the NYPD's actions and its violent repression of nonviolent protestors were aimed at and necessary for protecting the civil rights of demonstrators is frankly obscene. The attempt to draw a preemptive line between violent "potential rioters" and a pliant, complacent, orderly mass is tautological, transparent, and fallacious. The NYPD brutalized all of us. It made us all "potential rioters." It made us all targets, all potential criminals simply by our very oppositional presence to an event held to celebrate the plutocratic power of capitalist governments and transnational corporations like the one presided over by an economist named Richard Charles Levin, who hobnobbed, I imagine, with the likes of Jeff Sachs and Ken Langone while the rest of us tried not to get the shit beaten out of us for daring to take action to demand a better world and a better New York.