Fault Lines Issue 2: Mass. Crackdown

Mass. Crackdown
Boston, Cambridge cops monitor and arrest dissenters in months leading up to DNC
By Steve Iskovitz

A protester is arrested for refusing to show identification to a federal officer. An MIT alumna is arrested for leafleting the entrance of this year’s commencement. A college student who dressed as an Abu Ghraib prisoner is accused of falsifying a bomb threat, charged with felonies and required to undergo psychological evaluation. Eight housing activists who enter an abandoned building during a protest are held at gunpoint and charged with multiple felonies.

These four incidents occurred in Boston and Cambridge between late March and early June. Political activists in the area are concerned that the arrests might be part of an overall attempt by law enforcement to discourage public demonstration during July’s Democratic National Convention.

The first of these incidents took place on March 25, as Richard Picarillo stood at a police barricade, non-violently protesting President Bush’s visit to Boston. A federal officer ordered Picarillo to show identification, and when he refused, he was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct. Picarillo already faces a felony charge of “tagging” for an earlier incident in which he allegedly placed a sticker on public property in order to cover up a swastika someone else had drawn.

In another incident, eight members of Homes Not Jails, a Cambridge housing advocacy group, entered an abandoned gas station in Lafayette Square on April 3 in a symbolic action during the arrival of the statewide March Against Poverty. Police observed the entry from across the street and did not interfere. Members of the group began an ongoing clean-up of the site over the next eleven days, planting a tree and flowers in the lot outside. On April 14, while the activists were sweeping up broken glass, two plainclothes detectives entered the building with guns drawn and arrested them. Although the activists had entered the building in a symbolic action-- normally a trespassing misdemeanor-- the eight were charged instead with felonies of breaking and entering, possession of burglarious materials, and intent to commit a felony.

On May 27, Boston College student Joe Previtera stood in front of a downtown Boston military recruiting center on top of a milk crate, wearing a black hood over his head and holding wires in his hands, re-enacting the notorious Abu Ghraib prison scene. Recruiters called police, who, after conferring with military officials in the building, called in the bomb squad. Although the building was never evacuated, and bomb squad members found nothing incriminating, police arrested Previtera and charged him with falsifying a bomb threat and possession of a hoax device, both felonies, and set a $10,000 bail. The bail was eventually dropped, but Previtera had to undergo psychological evaluation before being released. All charges against him were subsequently dropped.


Eight days later on June 4, four members of MIT’s Social Justice Co-operative handed out leaflets to people entering the school’s commencement ceremony. Campus police told them to move, although the sidewalk they stood on was public, not MIT property, and they relocated to another spot on the sidewalk. About two minutes later the police handcuffed and arrested one of the women, MIT alumna and former Cambridge city council candidate Aimee Smith, and threatened to arrest the other three if they didn’t leave the area. Their leaflets criticized the commencement speaker for supporting a proposed biological weapons research facility being planned in Boston.

Smith was charged with “disorderly conduct” and “disturbing a school assembly.” Soon after, the district attorney’s office offered to drop the charges against Smith if she agreed to pay court costs. She refused, is demanding an apology from MIT, and is considering suing the university.

“I think it’s a sign of the times, and not a positive one,” attorney Daniel Beck, who is representing the defendants in all four cases, said of the series of arrests. “Civil liberties are seen as dangerous. This whole terrorism thing is being as used as a way to suppress dissent, much as the threat of communism was used to suppress dissent in the Fifties…Anyone who is perceived as not agreeing with US foreign policy is perceived as dangerous, and I think that perception is really what’s dangerous.”

Evidence exists that police are also monitoring groups planning DNC actions. After the April 14 Lafayette Square arrests, Cambridge police told the local Fox TV news affiliate that the group was storing materials for illegal use during the convention, and implied a connection between Homes Not Jails and the Black Tea Society (BTS), a local anarchist group planning demonstrations during the convention.

A February gathering organized by BTS was monitored by suspected law enforcement agents, according to a story in New York’s Newsday. (Interestingly, the Newsday story reported that this information surfaced when the Massachusetts police, seeing New York license plates, suspected the New York police were "outside agitators" and attempted to arrest them.)

The infiltration was originally suspected by members of BTS. The alleged agents “gave strange email addresses which were the same except for the numbers at the end,” said Frank Little of BTS. “We traced the email addresses back to a domain space that was owned by the police.” After the National Lawyers’ Guild sent a representative to a recent BTS meeting to observe them, the suspected agents stopped attending.

Steve Iskovitz is a writer and activist living in the Boston area