DENVER POLICE HARASS JOURNALISTS, PROTESTERS
Denver Post - An ABC News producer was arrested outside the Brown Palace Hotel as he attempted to chronicle attendees at a private breakfast held by a Democratic Party campaign committee. ABC said in a statement that Asa Eslocker and a camera crew were "attempting to take pictures on a public sidewalk of Democratic senators and VIP donors leaving a private meeting."
"We're getting under their skin, I think," said Brian Ross, ABC News correspondent whose "Money Trail" reports are running every night this week and next from both nominating conventions.
Eslocker, a member of the investigative team, was charged with trespass, interference and failure to follow a lawful order. He was put in handcuffs and taken by police van to the downtown police station.
He was released after posting $500 bond.
On Tuesday, Ross and his crew were asked to leave Hotel Teatro when they tried to photograph a private function. On Monday, they shot pictures of a party at the Denver Art Museum through the glass.
ABC has video shot at the scene of the arrest, showing a hotel security guard, wearing the uniform of a Boulder County Sheriff's Office, ordering Eslocker off the sidewalk.
Denver Post - Denver police moved against a group of protesters, arresting two near the group's "convergence center" north of downtown. Police said they were drawn to the gathering place for the protest group Unconventional Denver at 4301 Brighton Blvd. after spotting what Lt. J. McDonald termed "suspicious activity." When police arrived, they determined there was no illegal activity "but they found some items that might be used as weapons," McDonald said.
Standing near the house, Michael Gonzalez, 20, of Seattle said he thinks the only suspicious activity was a man working on his mini bus in front of the house. The bus runs on vegetable oil.
Several officers approached the owner of the bus, who was working on the oil filter, Gonzalez said. The officers had Tasers in hand and ordered the van owner to put his hands above his head.
Seeing the police approaching, another person slowly walked toward the back end of the building, which has been rented by Unconventional Denver for the week, he said.
"The cops grabbed him and slammed him on his head," Gonzalez said.
The officers seemed suspicious of the bus, which has a giant drum in the back used to hold the vegetable oil, Gonzalez said.
The officers also said that bricks laying on the dusty ground could be used as weapons, Gonzalez said.
"The bricks were used to hold down banners that we were painting," he said. "They weren't weapons. They were paperweights."
The two men, whose names have not yet been released, were arrested for disobeying a lawful order. Police then discussed whether to seek a search warrant for the house but decided they did not have probable cause for further search.
5 Comments:
This is the tip of the iceberg. Civic Center Park, where the protest group Recreate 68 hosted poets and musicians under the racket and spotlights of excessive police helicopters, was fenced off last night. They were to move to Skyline Park and nothing of consequence was going on there this afternoon. Monday night approximately 100 people participating in the Anticapitalista march were arrested... for marching. The police busted out their fancy new pepper spray "supersoaker" on the marchers, bystanders, and a reporter. To paraphrase Jello Biafra's turn of phrase at the Nader rally this evening, freedom is being fried here.
"China’s Orwellian nightmare, like Freddy Krueger, is coming to a theatre (community) near you. In Helena, Arkansas, the city’s wealthier citizens have gotten the Mayor and City Council to impose a 24-hour curfew on the 10 square blocks of its poorer neighborhoods; creating de-facto apartheid based on class. The poor and working-class in this small precursor of municipal despotism are required to explain why they are on public streets and subject themselves to illegal interrogation.
Tijuana, likewise, has become a staging ground for the new fascism of a corporate-owned world. Like the Chinese fireworks, Mexico’s moves in reigning in the narcos are an illusion. The wealthy and their politicos need the drug lords as much as Bush needed Ben Laden free - bogeymen, to whip children and citizens into fear, validating oppression."
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/08/20/18528084.php
Any tool is a weapon if you hold it the right way. Ergo, never carry a tool with you in public or you can be arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.
Reminds me of the time I tried to use a colonial American folk tale about a magical axe in a performance for an elementary school. It was rejected on the basis that an axe (one of the tools that made this country possible) is such a violent weapon.
I'm tired of hearing about the "imgaginary" fireworks. One short sequence of the fireworks were simulated because of the near impossibility of coordinating the timing of cameras across the entire city of Beijing for the "footprint" section of the spectacle. While it was happening, the announcer said quite clearly that it was being simulated and why. There was nothing underhanded or unreasonable about this at all, quite unlike the little girl with the beautiful voice who was replaced by a lip-syncher without us being told until days later.
"Today, everywhere; human beings, either individually or in associations, such as governments, are increasingly incapable of calculating possibilities because the freedom to choose is an illusion. Like shoppers on an escalator or cattle prodded through chutes, there is no room to maneuver. Behavior is no longer innovative and spontaneous because consciousness itself [to stand apart, the ability to give things meaning] is hammered into a socially determined aspect of self. In a corporate-owned world, well-paid, well-meaning, pharmacists are as trapped as poor people by the lack of options [and increasingly, the ability to even imagine options].
Human praxis, the reflective process of thought and action, becomes stunted; liberty an illusion, and the notion of individuality a cruel myth. C. Wright Mills’ warnings, decades ago, about the continuing constraints on human freedom by those who have institutional and economic power has come to pass. Political and economic tyranny, even the manipulation of truth itself, has become commonplace, with little dissent.
Just this week, the vicious bastard children of corporate-owned globalization, China’s state-owned capitalism thugs, didn’t even attempt to hide their authoritarian presence. Because smog obscured the opening of the Olympics, they merely released a computer generated fireworks show and the media puppets of the world broadcast it as news footage of the actual event. The little girl who opened the games, lip sank the words; while another, much less pretty girl sang the words. Meanwhile they arrest a human rights activist on his way to church (the same one that Bush attended while sucking up to Beijing’s wealth).
China’s Orwellian nightmare, like Freddy Krueger, is coming to a theatre (community) near you. In Helena, Arkansas, the city’s wealthier citizens have gotten the Mayor and City Council to impose a 24-hour curfew on the 10 square blocks of its poorer neighborhoods; creating de-facto apartheid based on class. The poor and working-class in this small precursor of municipal despotism are required to explain why they are on public streets and subject themselves to illegal interrogation.
Tijuana, likewise, has become a staging ground for the new fascism of a corporate-owned world. Like the Chinese fireworks, Mexico’s moves in reigning in the narcos are an illusion. The wealthy and their politicos need the drug lords as much as Bush needed Ben Laden free - bogeymen, to whip children and citizens into fear, validating oppression.
The drug trade in Mexico is the hen that lays the Golden Eggs. Billions of U.S. dollars pass into private hands as Mexico pretends to fight a war on drugs. Ludicrous, ineffective road blocks so open and announced that even tourists know where they are, arrests of the hired help, while drug kingpins become mayors and governors, filling city jails with poor street kids and orphans while drug coyotes drive by in Hummers and Escalades. "
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