Photo: Ben Heine
In this instructive video, New York-based artist Merrill Kazanjian conducts a tutorial in how to draw an Occupy Wall Street protester.
“All you will need is a pencil, some paper, a global recession and some corporate anger and you’ll be able to draw this handsome fellow.”
The other day, whilst looking for something else in the garage, I happened across some old photographs taken by me in 1984 during a major demonstration that I participated in, in London, called “Stop The City.” The idea, for what was described as a “Carnival Against War, Oppression and Destruction,” was to put enough bodies in the way to effectively cut off the routes whereby the bankers and stock brokers would get to work, block the entrances to the office buildings themselves and stop business activity in “The City” (as London’s financial district is known) for a day.
The 1984 demo that I was at was the second such “Stop the City” event. The first had taken place six months before, but the second demonstration was a lot bigger. I don’t know exactly who was behind it, or organized it, but certainly the vast majority of the young people taking part could have been described as “Crass punks” or anarchists. I heard of it via my friend Ron, who was at one point in a punk band either called “The Living Legends” or “The Apostles” with Ian Bone of Class War infamy. Class War, as well as London Greenpeace, were certainly involved in getting out the troops. There were many anti-nuclear protesters and an anti-vivisection contingent which formed a significant subset of the demo. An item on the excellent Kill Your Pet Puppy blog posted by editor Al Puppy reads:
What I can add is that the idea for Stop the City came from Dave Morris – of McLibel trial fame, longest trial in English legal history – and London Greenpeace. It was organised from a house on Ickburgh Road, Upper Clapton, Hackney. Dave and others (including my future wife Pinki) had been given the house by the GLC so they could organise an anti-nuclear march from Faslane in Scotland to Greenham in Wiltshire.
The tactic to “occupy” London’s financial district was inspired by the heroic anti-nuclear weapons blockade of the RAF Greenham Common by the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.
Protesters met at 6am outside one of the underground stations. I got there five minutes early (I am nothing, if not punctual, even for a riot). At first it looked like nobody was going to show up. Then it went from almost no one there, to hundreds and hundreds of people streaming into the area within a matter of just minutes. In France they call uprisings of this nature “manifestations” and that’s what it felt like was happening that morning as the numbers of spiky-haired anarcho-punks and squatter-types arriving in the area grew very, very suddenly. It was an absolutely magical moment to partake in as people seemed to “materialize” in the light London rain that morning. It’s worth pointing out to the (ahem) younger generation that this was long before cell phones, Facebook and Twitter. Most of the people at this demo, I’d wager, didn’t even have land-line telephones because they lived in squats (as I did then). This was basically a word of mouth thing.
For a long time it was just a bunch of young punks milling about, trying to be threatening to stock brokers and bankers and yelling stuff at them. The cops had already partially prepared the area and there were crowd control fences everywhere, but they’d underestimated the size of the crowd. The metropolitan police were badly out-numbered for the first few hours of the protest as the lobbies of several office buildings were occupied and a general “mild” ruckus was caused.
It got pretty nuts pretty fast when a hot-headed stockbroker-type actually decided to try to run some of the protesters over with his car, which was then upended by furious onlookers. That’s what ignited the next phase of what happened when a small faction started tossing smoke bombs and balloons filled with paint. A friend of mine chucked a trash can through a bank window. I spray-painted “Smash Capitalism” on the side of a building. Good times!
At a certain point, hundreds of police reinforcements, including some on horseback, arrived and surrounded the epicenter of the activity and started squeezing about 3000 of us into a pedestrian area near the Stock Exchange. Several military trucks blocked the streets completely. I got stuck in that maneuver and had to stay there for several hours. The tactic the cops used to neutralize and disperse the rioters was pretty clever, or at least it worked: The street grid made it easy for them to herd perhaps as many as 25% of the protesters into this cordoned-off area which they surrounded with metal fences and a line of Old Bill standing shoulder to shoulder staring defiantly into the protester’s eyes as they moved them tighter and tighter together. Several people on my side of the barricades covered the police officers and their horses with “Silly String.” (There was a LOT of “Silly String” around that day). After five or six hours, everyone who had been squeezed into that spot really had to pee.
After they were able to disperse much of the crowd outside of this area, they started to let people out a few at a time. A long line of London bobbies brandishing truncheons made sure everyone kept moving along a narrow path cut via the crowd control barricades. Gagging for a piss, I, like my wilted anarchist comrades, was only too happy to wuss out without much of a fight to seek out the nearest pub for a slash.
Revolutionary fervor has its limits when nature has been calling for hours on end and keeps getting a busy signal…
Stop the City was one of those mythical events that if you weren’t there it’s almost as if it never happened. I saw little major coverage in the London newspapers the next day. Only The Evening Standard, The Times and Sounds really covered it, if memory serves and it simply disappeared into the mists of history. There’s hardly anything on the Internet about it, but when you do see it referred to—and I stress that this is rare—it’s usually in the context of how the “Stop The City” demos were, historically speaking, the very first major anti-globalism/anti-capitalism demonstrations, and the precursor to the Poll Tax Riots of 1990, the Battle in Seattle demonstrations of 1999 and the London Carnival Against Capitalism that same year. As those events, in turn, are referred to as being the precursors to Occupy Wall Street, then Stop The City would be the granddaddy of them all. Still, it doesn’t even have a proper Wikipedia entry, just a couple of Flickr slide shows.
I can’t recall how many people were there over twenty-five years-ago, but I do recall that a pregnant friend of mine who did not attend STC told me that BBC radio reported all day long that there were approximately 12,000 demonstrators in the City, but then late in the afternoon they changed their tune and said there were but 3000 protesters. I think it was certainly closer to the original, higher number as there were close to 3000 of us trapped like sardines in the cordoned-off area alone.
Here’s one of the fullest accounts I was able to find of Stop the City, on the LibCom website:
The idea of the “Stop The City” (STC) demonstrations was hatched by three London anarchists at a party in the early eighties. At around the same time people in Australia and America had had the same brainwave. The plan was to bring together the radical end of the peace - ecology - “third world” - and anarchist movements to attack the root cause of all their problems - Capital - by attacking the heart of finance. It took a lot of work to promote the idea of STC and then hold together an uneasy alliance of radical liberals and anarchists. The main problem was the issue of “violence” - many pacifists were worried that people might defend themselves against police attacks/arrests and buildings could be damaged by “violence (sic) against property”. Pat Arrowsmith, veteran CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) labourite did her best to successfully sabotage CND involvement.
Police freaked
The police were freaked out by the idea of an organised demo which wouldn’t consult/inform them - very rare in modern Britain. They repeatedly tried to contact the organisers and on one occasion two plain clothed senior cops turned up to a London anarchist meeting pleading to meet with people only to be met by an angry silence and sent away.On the day of the first STC the phone of one of the main organisers was ‘mysteriously‘ cut off, and on the night before a large number of riot cops stormed the ‘peace centre’ near the Angel in Islington (a large anarcho-pacifist squat where many of the demonstrators were crashing, searching for weapons - none were found).
Several Stop The Cities were held in London and caused a lot of disruption in the square mile - the first caused and estimated £100 million losses. A number of ‘Stop Business as usual’ demos also occurred Numbers involved ranged from 3,000 in the first STC, dwindling to 500 odd at the last one as energy and enthusiasm were sapped by arrests, greater police sus, etc.
Repression
A repressive Public Order Act was passed in response to STC and the activities of hunt saboteurs, etc. Close to 1,000 arrests were also made over an 18 month period.
Comedian David Baddiel was apparently in the same penned-off pedestrian area with me. He told The Mirror on April 9th, 1997:
“I used to joke: ‘At least when you’re being beaten up by skinheads, you can pray that the police turn up. But when you’re being beaten up by police, there’s no point thinking some skinheads will save you’.””
David, then a 19-year-old student with a radically big haircut, had travelled to the City of London to join a Stop The City demonstration run by a fringe anarchist group called Class War.
What followed was an eight-hour encounter with the strong-arm of the law that saw him hurled around a police van and thrown into a crowded cell.
“There were quite a few of those demonstrations in the Eighties,” says David, 32, who was studying English Literature at Kings College, Cambridge.
“There were no proper political motives. The intention was just to cause a disruption. I went along only because I thought it would be a laugh.
“At the time, I had really big hair and everyone else did so I fitted in and looked the part. Basically, the demo was people walking up and down shouting slogans. ”
“But the police tried to get us all into a small pedestrian area off Threadneedle Street where we were bounded in by railings.
“I was up against the railings and thought I was going to get crushed. So I climbed over and tried to get through the police cordon.
“The police wanted to throw me back into the crowd but I said: ‘No, I’m not moving.’ When I said I was going to be crushed they ran me off into their van.
“Inside the van about five of them started throwing me around. I didn’t suffer any serious injury but basically they were beating me up. “One of the policemen put his fist in my face and told me if I caused any more trouble, it would be going through my head. They filled the van with some other people then took us off to the police station.
“We were put in a cell with about 25 other blokes and one toilet in the middle of the floor.
“We were there for hours and I was bursting but I couldn’t face having a pee in front of all these other men just in the middle of the floor.
“Right at the end, after hours in there, the police gave us one polystyrene cup of water to drink - between all of us. By the time it got to me, it was just spittle.””
David was accused of trying to lead an aggressive charge and charged with obstructing the police and the highway. But when his case came before a magistrate, he was cleared.
“A young junior barrister took on my case for free. He pointed out that the police evidence contradicted itself and the case was dismissed.
And finally, here’s the description from Punk Torrents of a long out of print documentary film, Stop the City: 1984 made by Mick Duffield and members of Crass that came out in the mid-90s. I had no idea this even existed:
The Stop the City demonstrations of 1983 and 1984 were described as a ‘Carnival Against War, Oppression and Destruction’, in other words protests against the military-financial complex.
Activities that formed part of these events were separate day-long street blockades of the financial district (‘The City’) of London — which supporters of the protest argued are a major centre for profiteering and consequently a root cause of many of the world’s worst problems.
One blockade involved 3,000 people, which succeeded in causing a $100m shortfall on the day according to The Times. Around 1,000 arrests were subsequently made by the police over 18 months.The first demo took place on the 29 September 1983 and involved hundreds of protestors, but six months later on 29 June 1984, thousands brought the City to a standstill. This rare documentary by Mick Duffield and Andy Palmer of Crass offers unique footage of the day’s events. Stop the City is widely regarded as being the precursor of modern protest such as the J18 Carnival Against Capitalism in 1999 and the birth of the Anti-Globalisation movement in the 21st century.
Stop The City in its entirety:
UPDATE: More on Stop the City from History is Made at Night
This is a video from today’s Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, at Citibank near Washington Park Square. Protesters were at the bank to close down their accounts and this shows a female customer of the bank, in a business suit, being manhandled and then arrested with what is quite clearly excessive force. She doesn’t appear in the video until 1:24. I wonder if the woman in this clip is the person mentioned as “resisting arrest” in this Associated Press report?
24 people were arrested at a Citibank branch when they refused a manager’s request to leave. Activists had entered the bank to close their accounts in protest of the role big banks played in the nation’s financial crisis.
Police say most of the people arrested were detained for trespassing. One was arrested on a charge of resisting arrest.
Thanks to Paul Shetler.
Stephen King warns his younger self not to do recreational drugs. Alice Cooper writes “Trashy girls are exciting for about five minutes…Keep your eye out for a good-lookin’ church girl. Then you’ll have the best of both worlds.” While Gillian Anderson says, “You are completely and utterly self obsessed. If you spent a quarter of your time thinking about others instead of how much you hate your thighs, your level of contentment and self worth would expand exponentially.”
These biographical snap-shots are from the book, Dear Me: More letters to my 16-year-old self. The Guardian has published a selection of these celebrity letters from which the following by Alan Cumming, Kathleen Turner and John Waters are taken.
Alan Cumming
Dear Alan,
First of all, you’re right. You’re right about who you think is wrong. You’re right to trust your instincts and to be your own person.
Second of all. slow down. Before you know it you’ll be away from home and you’ll be living your own life. Don’t waste energy trying to make time move faster, because it won’t until one day when you don’t want it to and you’ll wonder if all those nights spent longing for the future are now being paid back by making a beautiful present more fleeting. So please, if only for my karmic peace of mind, chill out about it, ok?
You’re going to be really, really happy one day and you’re going to have a life that is so far from your comprehension right now that I’m not even going to try to explain how it happens. I can hardly work it out for myself. You just have to go with the flow, Alan. Just let go and tumble through life. It will all be okay.
But it’s not a commercial. There are really shitty bits. You don’t even know it but right now there are things happening to you that are too painful to process and so, like the adults around you, you’re just not dealing with them, suppressing them, locking them up in a box in your mind. When you’re 28, that box is going to explode open and tear your life apart. Everything will change and there will be much pain and it will take you a long time to recover. But recover you will, and it will ultimately make you a better person, and those you love will benefit too.
You’re going to have lots of sex and you’re going to feel sexy. Don’t worry. Just try and remember that it’s better for you to feel sexy about yourself than for other people to tell you you are. It’s going to be okay.
In 1997 you’ll meet someone in New York at the party for the opening of ‘Titanic - the Musical’. Now, I am not one for regrets, Alan, and I truly believe that everything you experience between 16 and now all contributes to make you the really happy person that you become, so how could I wish any of it to be different? But, come on, the show is called ‘Titanic’, that should be an omen. Walk away from this person. You’ll never make them not be angry. Later on you’ll see a pattern of you trying to fix angry people and you’ll be able to break it, so do yourself a favour and walk away, let this one be the first. He will try to destroy you. He won’t, but he’ll try very hard.
You will love and be loved and be rich beyond your wildest dreams, and the best thing about this richness is that it has nothing to do with money. It’s all going to be okay.
A teacher at drama school is going to tell you that’ll you’ll never make it as a professional actor. He is wrong. Wrong to say it, and just wrong because you do okay. Try not to let it dent you too much.
You’re never going to have children, Alan. You’re going to try, in relationships with both women and men, but it doesn’t happen, and that’s okay too. Right now you have the happiest family anyone could wish for.
It really is all going to be okay. I’ll see you in 29 years. Enjoy it.
Alan x
More letters from Kathleen Turner and John Waters, after the jump…
Via the Guardian
Demonstrations for Global Change are taking place today, October 15.
The demonstrations are against financial mismanagement and government cut-backs, and it is expected that 951 demonstrations will take place in 82 countries world-wide.
A statement on the 15october.net reads:
“From America to Asia, from Africa to Europe, people are rising up to claim their rights and demand a true democracy. Now it is time for all of us to join in a global non violent protest.
“The ruling powers work for the benefit of just a few, ignoring the will of the vast majority and the human and environmental price we all have to pay. This intolerable situation must end.”
At the biggest rally In Rome, tens of thousands marched on the street and were involved in skirmishes with the police.
In Belgium, 7,000 marchers brought Brussels to a standstill. Smaller protests took place in Paris.
5,000 demonstrators also gathered outside the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, Germany.
In Berlin, 4,000 marched demanding the end of capitalism.
In Madrid, Spain, thousands of all ages have gathered for an evening rally in the Puerta del Sol Square, the site of May’s “Indignant” demonstration.
400 people marched through the streets of Dublin, towards a hotel where delegations from the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank are currently resident.
A thousand demonstrators occupied London’s financial district and Wiki-Leaks founder, Julian Assange addressed a rally of around 500 outside St. Paul’s Cathedral.
500 people gathered at a rally in Stockholm, holding up banners that read “We are the 99 percent”.
In Sarajevo, Bosnia, hundreds marched behind a flag that read, “Death to capitalism, freedom to the people.”
Poland’s former President, Lech Walesa announced he supported Occupy Wall Street
Hundreds of people have marched in New Zealand, and over 2,000 demonstrators, including union leaders and Aboriginal groups, occupied outside of the Reserve Bank in Sydney, Australia, waving signs that read “You Can’t Eat Money”.
Demonstrations also took place in Melbourne and Brisbane.
“Occupy” protests were also held in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Home is where the art is for four different groups of writers, who lived and worked together under one roof, experiencing a cultural time-share that produced diverse and original works of literature, art, and popular entertainment.
The February House
Between 1940 and 1942, “an entire generation of Western culture” lived at 7 Middagh Street, Brooklyn. The poet W. H. Auden was house mother, who collected rents and doled out toilet paper, at 2 sheets for each of his fellow tenants, advising them to use “both sides”. These tenants included legendary stripper, Gypsy Rose Lee, novelist Carson McCullers and a host of other irregular visitors - composer Benjamin Britten, singer Peter Pears, writers Jane and Paul Bowles and Erika and Klaus Mann, Salvador Dali, a selection of stevedores, sailors, circus acts and a chimpanzee.
Auden wrote his brilliant poem New Year Letter here and fell obsessively in love with Chester Kallman, and attempted to strangle him one hot, summer night - an event that taught Auden the universal potential for evil. On the top floor, Carson McCullers escaped from her psychotic husband, and wrote Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, while slowly drinking herself to an early death.
On the first floor, Gypsy Rose Lee created her legend as the world’s most famous stripper, wrote her thriller The G-String Murders, offered a shoulder to cry on, and told outrageous tales of her burlesque life.
Known as the “February House”, because of the number of birthdays shared during that month, 7 Middagh St. was a place of comfort and hope in the desperate months at the start of the Second World War.
The Fun Factory
The scripts that came out of 9 Orme Court in London, changed world comedy. And if Spike Milligan hadn’t gone mad and attempted to murder Peter Sellers with a potato peeler, it may never have all happened.
Milligan was the comic genius behind The Goons, and the stress of writing a new script every week, led to his breakdown. The need for a place to work, away from the demands of family, home and fame, brought Milligan to share an office with highly successful radio scriptwriter, Eric Sykes.
The first Fun Factory was above a greengrocer on the Uxbridge Road. Here Sykes, Milligan, comedian Frankie Howerd and agent Scruffy Dale, formed the Writers’ Bloc Associated London Scripts. The idea was to bring together the best and newest comedy writers under one umbrella. Milligan saw ALS as an artists’ commune that would lead to political and cultural change. Sykes saw ALS as a business opportunity to produce great comedy. Frankie Howerd saw it as a source of finding new material.
When Milligan asked two young writers, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to come on board, the central core of ALS was formed.
This merry band of writers expanded in the coming years to include: Johnny Speight (Till Death Us Do Part); Barry Took and Marty Feldman (The Army Game and Round the Horne); Terry Nation (Dr Who and the Daleks); John Antrobus (The Bed-Sitting Room); and with a move to the more suitable offices of 9 Orme Court, ALS was established as the home of legendary British comedy.
Milligan continued successfully with The Goons, before devising the groundbreaking Q series for television. Sykes began his long and successful career with his own TV show. While Galton and Simpson created the first British TV sitcom, Hancock’s Half-Hour, and then the massively influential Steptoe and Son.
9 Orme Court was once described, as though Plato, Aristotle, Galileo and Leonardo Da Vinci were all living in the same artist’s garret.
The Beat Hotel
A run-down hotel in the back streets of Paris was unlikely setting for a Cultural Revolution, but the Sixties were seeded when poet, Allen Ginsberg William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Bryon Gysin moved into the Beat Hotel, at 9 Git le Coeur, in the late 1950s.
The literary revolution that started with Ginsberg’s Howl in America was formalised and expanded in the cramped, leaky, piss-smelling hotel rooms at 9 Git le Couer.
Ginsberg wrote part of Kaddish here, as he came to terms with the madness and death of his Mother. First to arrive, Ginsberg was also be first to check out, travelling in search of enlightenment to India.
The wild and romantic Corso produced his best books of poems “Gasoline” and “Bomb”, whilst living the life of an American abroad.
But it was Burroughs who gained most from his four-year on-and-off stay in Git le Coeur. Here he completed Naked Lunch, and wrote the novels The Soft Machine, The Nova Express, The Ticket that Exploded, and together with Bryon Gysin devised the cut-up form of writing, indulged in seances, Black Magic and tried out Scientology.
Like Middagh Street, the Beat Hotel was a cultural and social experiment that sought to inspire art through shared experiences.
Passport from Pimlico
It started with a bet. Three young writers sitting watching Mick Jagger on Top of the Pops, in a flat in Pimlico during the 1960s. The bet was simple, which of the 3 would make the big time first?
It was the kind of idle chat once made soon forgotten, but not for these 3 young talents, Tom Stoppard, Derek Marlowe and Piers Paul Read.
Read and Marlowe believed Stoppard would hit the big time first, but they were wrong, it was Marlowe in 1966 with his cool and brilliant spy thriller A Dandy in Aspic, made into a film with Laurence Harvey, Mia Farrow, Tom Courtney and Peter Cook.
Stoppard was next in 1967, with his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Then Read with Alive the story of Andes plane crash in 1974.
All 3 were outsiders, set apart from their contemporaries by their romanticized sense of Englishness, which came from their backgrounds. Read was a brilliant Catholic author, favorably compared to Graham Greene; Stoppard, a Czech-émigré, and Marlowe, a second generation Greek, who was for “heroes, though if not Lancelot or Tristan, heroes” who appeared “out of the mould of the time.” All three writers were to become the biggest British talents of the 1970s and 1980s.
Previously on Dangerous Minds
A Dandy in Aspic: A letter from Derek Marlowe
Excellent “Ozzy Osbourne as Frankenstein” cake by Charm City Cakes.
(via Super Punch)
Brooklyn-based comedy outfit POYKPAC put together this witty homage to Christopher Walken and parody of zombie movies. Nicely done.
POYKPAC are Jenn Lyon, Maggie Ross, Ryan Hall, Ryan Hunter and Taige Jensen
More cowbell!
Well, if this is true then, 100% of the men in the world who have ever lived since the dawn of human existence, are in fact, gay:
“Masturbation can be a form of homosexuality because it is a sexual act that does not involve a woman. If a man were to masturbate while engaged in other forms of sexual intimacy with his wife then he would not be doing so in a homosexual way. However, any man who does so without his wife in the room is bordering on homosexuality activity, particularly if he’s watching himself in a mirror and being turned on by his own male body.” - Pastor Mark Driscoll of Seattle’s Mars Hill Church, from Porn-Again Christian: A Frank Discussion on Pornography & Masturbation for God’s Men
I suppose one can draw certain conclusions about how “Mirror Man” Driscoll likes beat his own meat, can’t one?
What is his book about anyways? Is it a “how to” kind of thing?
David Schmader at The Stranger had a great quip about this:
Every day, in every way, Mark Driscoll seems more and more like one of those devoted heterosexual husbands who begins the love-making process by holding a copy of Mandate over his wife’s face.
Damn, I wish there was a video of this. What a missed opportunity! Think of the potential for “remixes”!
As we all know by now, Mayor Bloomberg blinked and the “cleaning” of Zuccotti Park was postponed. Allison Kilkenny writes at The Nation blog:
Brookfield Properties, the owner of Liberty Park, which had planned to schedule a cleaning of the property where protesters have been camped out these past weeks, cancelled its maintenance plans suddenly last night to the surprise of many.
Reportedly, Brookfield handed down the decision to the city late Thursday, though the announcement didn’t reach Liberty until Friday morning when two thousand activists erupted in cheers as they huddled at the center of the camp. I’m sure Brookfield and the Mayor will stick with the story that this decision was made late last night, but the presence of thousands of determined occupiers probably sealed the deal if there was any indecision left in the board room.
Confused murmurs served as a prelude to celebrations – a haze of disbelief best articulated by a fellow reporter, who stumbled from the surging crowd to exclaim, “We don’t WIN! We’re the ones who get the shit kicked out of us!”
This was the first protest I’ve ever covered where the activists won – if only a battle, and not the war, and if only temporarily. And the victory is definitely temporary. Major problems have not been resolved and large questions remain: Will the protesters be able to bring their sleeping bags back into Liberty Park? Will they be able to sleep on the ground? Fourteen hours ago, Mayor Bloomberg declared protesters wouldn’t be able to return their gear to the park, and now the decree came down to postpone the cleaning entirely. Why the change of tune?
Considering the sorts of electronic images that would have been instantly transmitted to the rest of the world had a bunch of NYPD riot cops tried to evict 5000 committed citizens from Zuccotti Park this morning, Mayor Bloomberg dodged a seriously stupid bullet that he was threatening to shoot into his own foot.
This is an important victory. It shows you that they’re afraid and it also shows you the limits of what they think they can get away with.
You can see the jubilant moment when the news was announced early this morning, in the video below.
There have been a number of great short films and moving moments of video vérité being created by supporters of Occupy Wall Street and uploaded to YouTube, but this might be the best one so far.
It’s a very eloquent warning to the powers that be to get on the correct side of history.
This needs to be spread far and wide. I think it probably will be! Put together by Corey Ogilvie.
Thank you, Glen E. Friedman!
The eyes of the the entire world are on Zuccotti Park right now. Watch the action live at Occupy Wall Street as activists from all walks of life come together in lower Manhattan to protest the mess that the elites have made of America. Livestream feed via the Global Revolution network (Note that every once in a while it streams something else, but it’s usually coming live from Manhattan).
At the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny, a former NYPD narcotics detective also snared in the scandal testified that it was common practice to fabricate drug charges against innocent people.
In the astonishing testimony from Stephen Anderson, a former NYPD narcotics officer who’s testifying under an agreement with prosecutors, Anderson told of how he participated in false arrests and planted cocaine in order to meet arrest quotas and prevent a colleague from being put back on street patrol. The scandal hanging over the Brooklyn South and Queens narc squads has led to the arrests of eight police officers. Via the New York Daily News:
“Tavarez was ... was worried about getting sent back [to patrol] and, you know, the supervisors getting on his case,” he recounted at the corruption trial of Brooklyn South narcotics Detective Jason Arbeeny.
“I had decided to give him [Tavarez] the drugs to help him out so that he could say he had a buy,” Anderson testified last week in Brooklyn Supreme Court.
He made clear he wasn’t about to pass off the two legit arrests he had made in the bar to Tavarez.
“As a detective, you still have a number to reach while you are in the narcotics division,” he said.
Anderson, who worked in both the Queens and Brooklyn South narcotics squads, was asked by Justice Gustin Reichbach if such practices were widespread and if he’d observed them with frequency.
He replied:“Yes, multiple times.”
The judge pressed Anderson on whether he ever gave a thought to the damage he was inflicting on the innocent.
“It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators,” he said.
“It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway.”
The city paid $300,000 to settle a false arrest suit by Jose Colon and his brother Maximo, who were falsely arrested by Anderson and Tavarez. A surveillance tape inside the bar showed they had been framed.
Anyone currently in prison for drugs-related felonies in New Your State might want to start an immediate appeals process to get their sentences overturned… whether they are guilty or not!
This is all kinds of wrong. If the exposure of this cancer on the NYPD isn’t a good excuse to end the drug war, what ever would be?
Thank you Glen E. Friedman!
