“Interesting” information is coming out of the current spate of cases against protestors from the Republican National Convention — if by “interesting”, one means perjury, a term the Times assiduously avoids. It’s an odd, postmodern read because it seems like the script to every over-baked Norman Jewison film, until you realize that there will be no moment where Al Pacino delivers a withering diatribe and we will all be uplifted at the end. Even as they present what seems to be incontrovertible evidence that testimony was manufactured, the Times hesitates to characterize this as a developing scandal, and doesn’t press prosecutors, who may well have been complicit in the process.
The story is at the nexus of several important issues of civic experience: what many characterize as an increasingly intolerant attitude on the part of the police regarding public assembly, particularly the ongoing fight between the city and Critical Mass (most of the video evidence pertains to gatherings in Union Square, where the Critical Mass rides originate each month), the narrative power of video in providing very hard to refute evidence of the belief that police are arrogant and domineering their exchanges with those they are charged with serving (and protecting), and the conflicted role pervasive video plays in civic life (just as this scandal unfolds, police are using security video in hopes of solving a hit-and-run case on 45th Street).
The worst aspect of this is the unyielding attitude of the police in these situations — why would the police not disavow one of their own who quite clearly breaks the law? It creates the sense that the significant issue for them is solidarity, not respect for the law, and it starts to make our ‘finest’ look like a
goon squad in Brazil. My own opinions are formed by a couple direct experiences, including being loosely part of an ACT UP demonstration at the AIDS rally at the 1992 Convention, back when the use of cages and forcing marching groups to side wind over blocks were being deployed for the first time, and watching the response to a squatter revolt a couple years after that. Before I moved to the city, I remember watching
Do the Right Thing, and, even as a I sympathized in good white, liberal fashion, with the overall message, I also remember thinking the police invasion in the third act was presented in such a heavy handed and histrionic way that it made the film much less accessible to those even predisposed to think favorably of Lee’s thesis. Watching police tear the door off the front of my building (and then denying to my face), the next time I saw it, I was appalled when I realized that the scene was actually rather restrained compared to what I witnessed first-hand.
Lacking the ‘objective’ eye of a video camera, my comments could be dismissed as only an excited recollection of what was, to be sure, a dangerous situation — this was back in the day when East Village residents still thought throwing bricks at cops would lead to the anarchist paradise. Yet, the minute police arrived, they staked out an us and them situation, intensified by the presumption that they were under siege, even as they possessed all the weaponry and far outnumbered residents on the block. The result was that for many, every cop is like the prototypical football player on steroids at a party — you never know when he’s going to go off, and he has a clear physical advantage.
Now we have video — here, I’m not speaking specifically of arrest techniques last August, but of other
more notable examples — of the worst aspects of what can result from disproportionately empowering one segment of your populace. Even as the examples are few and far between, there will reach a point where it will become entirely irrational to allow someone to speak of the violent protestors when the images stand in contradistinction. It’s a strange affirmation of the proverbial Orwellian dystopia: his figured on control entirely divested from the people. Such was the fear of pervasive video cameras. But with some rather powerful and seemingly independent resources for aggregating and disseminating information, and the means to collect evidence — limited, granted, to the affluent digerati, who, nonetheless, look an awful lot like the enlightened bourgeois — it may well be that this makes no difference. Look, here is evidence that police fabricate testimony. And nothing changes. Protestors continue to be painted as somehow lesser citizens, when in fact they are proved to be upholding what were seen as crucial notions of speech and protest by the founders of the grandest experiment in democracy ever attempted.
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“All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
“Interesting” information is coming out of the current spate of cases against protestors from the Republican National Convention — if by “interesting”, one means perjury, a term the Times assiduously avoids. It’s an odd, postmodern read because it seems like the script to every over-baked Norman Jewison film, until you realize that there will be no moment where Al Pacino delivers a withering diatribe and we will all be uplifted at the end. Even as they present what seems to be incontrovertible evidence that testimony was manufactured, the Times hesitates to characterize this as a developing scandal, and doesn’t press prosecutors, who may well have been complicit in the process.
The story is at the nexus of several important issues of civic experience: what many characterize as an increasingly intolerant attitude on the part of the police regarding public assembly, particularly the ongoing fight between the city and Critical Mass (most of the video evidence pertains to gatherings in Union Square, where the Critical Mass rides originate each month), the narrative power of video in providing very hard to refute evidence of the belief that police are arrogant and domineering their exchanges with those they are charged with serving (and protecting), and the conflicted role pervasive video plays in civic life (just as this scandal unfolds, police are using security video in hopes of solving a hit-and-run case on 45th Street). The worst aspect of this is the unyielding attitude of the police in these situations — why would the police not disavow one of their own who quite clearly breaks the law? It creates the sense that the significant issue for them is solidarity, not respect for the law, and it starts to make our ‘finest’ look like a goon squad in Brazil. My own opinions are formed by a couple direct experiences, including being loosely part of an ACT UP demonstration at the AIDS rally at the 1992 Convention, back when the use of cages and forcing marching groups to side wind over blocks were being deployed for the first time, and watching the response to a squatter revolt a couple years after that. Before I moved to the city, I remember watching Do the Right Thing, and, even as a I sympathized in good white, liberal fashion, with the overall message, I also remember thinking the police invasion in the third act was presented in such a heavy handed and histrionic way that it made the film much less accessible to those even predisposed to think favorably of Lee’s thesis. Watching police tear the door off the front of my building (and then denying to my face), the next time I saw it, I was appalled when I realized that the scene was actually rather restrained compared to what I witnessed first-hand. Lacking the ‘objective’ eye of a video camera, my comments could be dismissed as only an excited recollection of what was, to be sure, a dangerous situation — this was back in the day when East Village residents still thought throwing bricks at cops would lead to the anarchist paradise. Yet, the minute police arrived, they staked out an us and them situation, intensified by the presumption that they were under siege, even as they possessed all the weaponry and far outnumbered residents on the block. The result was that for many, every cop is like the prototypical football player on steroids at a party — you never know when he’s going to go off, and he has a clear physical advantage. Now we have video — here, I’m not speaking specifically of arrest techniques last August, but of other more notable examples — of the worst aspects of what can result from disproportionately empowering one segment of your populace. Even as the examples are few and far between, there will reach a point where it will become entirely irrational to allow someone to speak of the violent protestors when the images stand in contradistinction. It’s a strange affirmation of the proverbial Orwellian dystopia: his figured on control entirely divested from the people. Such was the fear of pervasive video cameras. But with some rather powerful and seemingly independent resources for aggregating and disseminating information, and the means to collect evidence — limited, granted, to the affluent digerati, who, nonetheless, look an awful lot like the enlightened bourgeois — it may well be that this makes no difference. Look, here is evidence that police fabricate testimony. And nothing changes. Protestors continue to be painted as somehow lesser citizens, when in fact they are proved to be upholding what were seen as crucial notions of speech and protest by the founders of the grandest experiment in democracy ever attempted.