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Unconventional Protests

With the cops cracking down on dissent, will the protests get out of hand?

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=6417586&pageid=rs.Politics&pageregion=single4
If you're a delegate attending the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden later this month, Jamie Moran knows where you're staying. He knows where you're eating and what Broadway musical you plan on seeing. For the past nine months, Moran has been living off savings earned as an office manager at a nonprofit and working full-time to disrupt the RNC. His small anarchist collective, RNCNotWelcome.org, runs a snitch line and an e-mail account where disgruntled employees of New York hotels, the Garden and the Republican Party itself can pass on information about conventioneers. So far, the collective has received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails with inside dirt on GOP activities. It's all fed to a cadre of activists desperate to unleash four years' worth of anger at the Bush administration. By dogging the delegates wherever they go, RNC Not Welcome hopes to make the Republicans' lives hell for as long as they're in New York.
"We want to make their stay here as miserable as possible," says Moran, the son of a retired Queens cop. "I'd like to see all the Republican events -- teas, backslapping lunches -- disrupted. I'd like to see people from other states following their delegates, letting them know what they think about Republican policies. I'd like to see impromptu street parties and marches. I'd like to see corporations involved in the Iraq reconstruction get targeted - anything from occupation to property destruction."

There's a showdown coming to Manhattan. Backed by the most intense security the city has ever seen, the Republicans are about to turn the blue-state bastion of New York City into the backdrop for George Bush's coronation. On one side are 36,000 cops -- a force that City Councilman Peter Vallone Jr. calls "perhaps the world's tenth-largest standing army." On the other side are at least 250,000 protesters expected to converge on the city from all across the United States and Canada -- a demonstration six times larger than the legendary anti-globalization protests that rocked Seattle in 1999. Protesters will descend on New York in chartered buses, sleeping on activists' floors and in church basements and camping out on the lawns of sympathizers in the suburbs. Marches and rallies, legal and illegal, are planned for every day the Republicans are in town. There will be street theater, a "poor people's march" by public-housing tenants and the homeless, and confrontations with police and delegates designed to stop traffic and capture headlines.

Tensions between police and protesters haven't been so toxic in decades. The cops, who expect to make as many as 1,000 arrests a day, have been spinning wild and unsubstantiated stories about "Internet-using anarchists" and "fringe groups" who plan to throw marbles under the hooves of police horses and pelt the animals with slingshots. Some protest leaders, for their part, have fueled the hysteria by issuing vague warnings of coordinated actions that will make Seattle look like a high school pep rally. "I want to see something so gigantic that it can't be misinterpreted," says Jason Flores-Williams, political writer for High Times magazine, who recently published a protest primer for activists. "This could be a total expression of seething hatred that will go down in history as a moment in time when people stood up to the worst administration we've ever had."

Activists certainly have reason to fear the worst from police. In recent years, cops across the country have been cracking down on dissent, treating protesters like criminals. In 2000, at the Republican Convention in Philadelphia, police infiltrated activist groups and made mass pre-emptive arrests. The Democratic Convention in Los Angeles that year was little better. "Even protests with the city's permission have been met by legions of heavily armed police officers dressed in full riot gear," CNN reported. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets into crowds of demonstrators, injuring protesters and journalists alike. "It looked like a re-enactment of a Civil War battle," said Al Crespo, a photographer who was shot with a rubber bullet.

Since September 11th, things have only gotten worse. In the past three years, protest in America has increasingly come to resemble that in countries such as Egypt, where demonstrations are allowed only within tightly controlled spaces and riot police rush in at the first hint of spontaneity or disorder. In April 2003, after the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center issued a bulletin about the potential for terrorist violence at an anti-war protest in Oakland, police opened fire on the peaceful crowd with wooden pellets. It later turned out there had been no real basis for the terrorism warning. In November, when some 10,000 union members and retirees demonstrated at a free-trade summit in Miami, they were met by 2,500 cops brandishing new crowd-control weaponry, paid for in part by a little-noticed $8.5 million appropriation tacked onto the Iraqi reconstruction bill. Videos taken at the scene show nonviolent protesters being beaten with wooden clubs, shocked with Taser guns, shot in the back with rubber bullets and pepper-sprayed in the face.

"For a brief period in time, it appeared as if Miami was in a police state," concluded a scathing report on police misconduct issued by a local panel charged with investigating the debacle. "Civil rights were trampled, and the sociopolitical values we hold most dear were undermined."

Since the free-trade demonstrations, activists have come to refer to a militarized response to protest as the "Miami model" -- and it's a blueprint that police forces across the country are eager to follow. Law-enforcement officials from Georgia traveled to Miami during the free-trade summit to learn tactics for dealing with protests in their state. They were quick studies. In May, shortly before the G-8 economic summit was scheduled to take place on Sea Island, in Georgia, the state's Republican governor declared a state of emergency, citing a danger from "unlawful assemblages." That enabled him to call out the National Guard, flooding the streets with soldiers in full camouflage. Protesters who tried to attend a candlelight peace vigil had to pass through a checkpoint manned by armed troops.

Officials from New York also visited Miami during the free-trade protests to study ways to crack down on dissenters -- and they plan to meet demonstrators at the Republican Convention with a massive police presence. There will be 8,000 officers providing security around Madison Square Garden at all times. The police force, Vallone adds, has received $50 million in federal money to prepare for the convention, and $18 million is being used "for the latest in crowd-control devices," including nonlethal weaponry and "high-tech video surveillance devices."

Overseeing it all will be the Secret Service, which is in charge of the convention site. Under Bush, federal agents have proved particularly hostile to protest. They often set up "free-speech zones" to corral demonstrators far from the president, and they ask local police to arrest anyone who strays from the designated areas. In October 2002, South Carolina activist Brett Bursey was arrested for trespassing when he waded into a crowd of Bush supporters waiting to greet the president and held up a no war for oil sign. On July 4th of this year, police say, the Secret Service directed them to arrest a couple for wearing anti-Bush T-shirts at a presidential speech in West Virginia -- despite the fact that the speech was open to the public.

The NYPD doesn't need much encouragement to shunt protesters away from the public. They've attempted to control demonstrations against the war in Iraq by using interlocking metal barriers to create pens around groups of demonstrators, making it difficult to get in or out. The New York Civil Liberties Union sued to stop the practice, but on July 19th a federal judge ruled that police can continue to use the pens as long as they make it easier for protesters to enter and exit. The city's security plan provides for a "designated protest area" on the southwest corner of Madison Square Garden. Those who want to protest the convention legally will be confined to this corner and probably sealed off in pens flanked by deep walls of men in blue.

All of this has alarmed local Democratic politicians, many of whom are planning to take to the streets with the demonstrators. "I am very concerned that activities during the Republican Convention will be silenced or pushed out of the way, supposedly for the 'comfort' of those participating at the convention," State Assemblyman Richard Gottfried said in a statement. "Our civil rights cannot be sacrificed for political purposes."

The get-tough stance by police is intended to keep protests from turning violent -- but the crackdown may actually have the opposite effect. As activists feel themselves squeezed, some say, the urge to rampage grows. "I think people will fight back if they're provoked," says Moran of RNC Not Welcome, whose buzzed hair and goatee make him look younger than his thirty years. "Usually a riot is an explosion of energy and anger at a situation. The cops create a situation where people's desires are completely foiled, so they lash out."

The city's reluctance to issue protest permits has engendered especial bitterness. Groups that applied for permits to hold legal marches during the convention were stalled for so long -- sometimes more than a year -- that the Democrat-dominated City Council held hearings to investigate whether the mayor and the police department were deliberately stifling free speech. In July, the cops finally relented and issued a few permits, but by then many activists had given up on the system and resolved to break the law. "In the last couple of months, the conversations have started shifting toward direct action," Moran says. "People are like, 'We've voted, we've asked for permits, we've played nice.' "

The city's delay in issuing permits is also making it tougher for protest organizers who are trying to make sure things stay peaceful. United for Peace and Justice, the largest organizing group in New York, had its plans for a big, traditional march on August 29th frustrated at every step. UFPJ is headed by Leslie Cagan, a squat woman with short silver hair, who helped bring more than half a million people to Central Park in 1982 for a record-setting disarmament rally. Cagan is a radical, but she's also a professional, the kind of person who knows her way around the permit process and is willing to work with police and city officials. In the past year, though, the NYPD has done much to undermine her and UFPJ. Cagan wanted the march on August 29th to culminate at Central Park's Great Lawn, one of the largest public spaces in the city, but the parks department refused to issue a permit on the grounds that protesters might destroy the lawn's newly planted grass. UFPJ offered to put up a bond to cover any damage, but the city wouldn't relent.

In June, Cagan told a City Hall hearing that the NYPD was "creating the potential for chaos" by refusing to let demonstrators use the park. Bill Perkins, the deputy majority leader on City Council, had convened the hearing to investigate the city's response to convention protests. He was worried, he said, that "overzealous anti-terrorism policing is creating an unnecessary burden on New Yorkers' rights to assemble." The city's refusal to let protesters use the Great Lawn left him angry and incredulous. "I am very concerned," he said at the hearing, "that we have such high regard for the rights of grass."

In the end, the rights of grass prevailed. On July 21st, UFPJ reluctantly accepted the city's offer to let them rally on the West Side Highway instead, far from shops and pedestrians. "This was not a happy decision to make," says UFPJ spokesman Bill Dobbs. "It reflects the bullying of Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg." Since the compromise, UFPJ has been condemned by anarchists online. "I'm almost glad the city has decided to deny us a permit for Central Park and that UFPJ caved," wrote one. "Now, we will take the park in defiance of both the capitalist bosses and the self-appointed leaders of the 'movement.' "

This kind of anger delights those who fear nothing more than peaceful, orderly protests. "There comes a time when you have to have an appropriate response," says Flores-Williams of High Times, an intense man in his thirties with a shaved head and a silver earring. "If nothing happens, that's going to be used as a sign of complicity and acceptance of the Republicans' presence here."

Although activists are reluctant to spell out the specific actions they're planning, a variety of tactics have been discussed in recent months. Radical organizers talk about chaining themselves to the hotel doors of convention delegates, occupying rooftops and throwing tofu cream pies at ideological enemies. Some are determined to do whatever they can to bring the city to a standstill. One popular technique goes by a variety of names: tubing, sleeping dragon, locking down. Protesters chain their arms together inside sections of metal pipe, making it tough for police to pry them apart. "When the cops come, they have to saw through these steel tubes," says Flores-Williams. "You get thirty people, and you lock down a street for six hours. While this is happening, it gives other protesters a great opportunity to make their statement, to be further disruptive. They can lie down with these people, they can chant at the police, they can sit down where they are and be arrested for that or block further public space. They can disrupt the normal flow of society."

Moran and three other members of RNC Not Welcome recently put out a "position paper" urging radicals to make an effort to blend into crowds by leaving their nose rings at home. "Outside of marches, all-black clothing is rather conspicuous, so our dress code should be 'business casual,' " they wrote. "Sunglasses are suggested, the bigger the hipper. And hats are always in. Would you make the small sacrifice to cut your hair or take out your septum ring to stay out of jail?"

Activists know the cops will be out in force -- but some seem to relish the prospect of chaos. "There will be so many protests," says Flores-Williams, snapping his fingers. "Here, 5,000. Here, 500. Popping off in all these different places. The cops will be stretched thin. Tempers will rise. All hell will break loose. That's what everybody wants -- they just won't admit it."

That's not entirely true. Plenty of Bush opponents worry that violence on the streets of New York, while cathartic for some activists, will actually help the Republicans by making them look like Middle American moderates besieged by nutty radicals. They note that the violence at the Chicago Democratic Convention in 1968 helped cement Richard Nixon's reputation as the law-and-order candidate. "The wilder and more disreputable the demonstrators look, the better for the Republicans," says Paul Berman, a former student organizer and author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968. "At the height of the anti-war movement, Nixon specifically directed his motorcade to go through the middle of an anti-war riot in California in order to have people throw rocks at him or shout obscenities so that the TV would pose the question that night to the American public: 'Whom do you prefer, President Nixon or a dope-smoking hippie communist rock thrower?' And the country had no doubt. This was just genius on his part. If Bush ends up winning the election, it will be because of this kind of tactic."

At this point, though, many activists are simply too furious to heed such warnings. "The last four years definitely created a lot of rage in people," Moran says. "People may decide to unleash that rage on war profiteers. Our collective isn't going to condemn that. It's not our objective."

And what is their objective?

The Republicans should leave New York, Moran says, "knowing it was a really bad mistake to come here."

ROLLING STONE AND SALON.COM: This report was produced in collaboration with Salon.com, the award-winning Web site of politics and culture. Working together, Rolling Stone and Salon are providing in-depth coverage and analysis of the campaign through Election Day.