Lockdown New York

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MotherJones.com / News / Update

Lockdown Manhattan
New York during the Republican National Convention has been a town of strong elbows. NYPD's orders translate to “No mercy,” and following orders is the job -- as the author found Tuesday night, when she was thrown in the slammer at Pier 57.

JoAnn Wypijewski
September 03 , 2004

I knew it was going to be a bad week when it began with my being thrown to the ground by the NYPD. This was last Thursday, before the Republicans had even arrived in town. A ruddy band of radicals called No Police State was using a bullhorn in Union Square without a sound permit. The last one of its members to be arrested was mashed to the paving stones by half a dozen cops while his confederate, a little guy with Magic Marker slogans scrawled on a T-shirt and an American flag pinned to his shoulders, read out the Declaration of Independence. Twenty years ago these guys were proclaiming proletarian revolution on the Lower East Side; now they’re all about the Constitution and Jeffersonian democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly. They never could organize even a neighborhood committee, but that morning the New York Daily News quoted the police identifying No Police State as one of the city’s most dangerous anarchist groups. Its bullhorns seized, its leaders snatched, all that was left was for the police to shove around the group’s audience, which they duly did, sending me tumbling down the park’s low stairs. It was an instructive preview. By the following Tuesday, I would be arrested—one of 1,187 persons swept off the streets that night to reassure the Republicans that the city would truly be the fortress they were banking on.

New York during the Republican National Convention has been a town of strong elbows. In midtown Manhattan around Madison Square Garden, police direct pedestrians as if we were hamsters in a maze. This way, that way, “No, this is closed.” Why? Reasons needn’t be given, or apparent. No stopping, no congregating, “Keep moving!” Warnings come without context, threats of enforcing laws that may or may not exist. Civilians step lightly, warily. Police are on foot, on scooter, on bicycles, on horseback, under floodlights or amid shadows. Where they are not in uniform, they are “undercover”—in one particularly menacing display, dressed as somebody’s idea of a biker gang, one of their number sporting a helmet with a bumper sticker pasted to it declaring, “Loud Wives Lose Lives.” Individual uniformed officers may be jovial or tired or intimidating; it hardly matters. As one of them told me later, their orders translate to “No mercy,” and following orders is the job. City buses have been commandeered as prisoner transport vehicles. Police have deployed their vans and cars and motorcycles as barriers where concrete blocks and iron grating and more familiar wood or metal stanchions are not already in place. Their helicopters fly overhead, as does the blimp advertising Fuji film and bearing the letters NYPD in smaller type on the underside. We are all given to understand that where no police appear to be, many could materialize in an instant.

The night I was arrested, August 31, began with one of the few breech moments of the week. A protester wearing a black hood Abu Ghraib-style jumped onto the set of Chris Matthews’ Hardball, broadcasting live from Herald Square just opposite Macy’s. By the time I arrived, the hooded man had been hustled off, along with the civilian audience meant to give the show its flair of immediacy. The Hardball panel was then flanked by horses’ asses. Occasionally one of the beasts would swish a tail, wafting the fragrant air. Memento of the pastoral, it was quickly erased by the martial aspect of helmeted riders trotting into position across 35th Street and Sixth Avenue, at the backs of about a dozen protesters, nine of them in black hoods, who were blocking traffic to the Garden. Facing the protesters was a thick semicircle of reporters and camera people, clicking and listening as those who were about to be arrested explained that they were there to symbolize the violence and disruption of everyday life in occupied Iraq. After the protesters were led away in handcuffs and traffic resumed, the rest of us waited to see if anything else would happen.

August 31 had been announced as Direct Action Day. Already some of us knew that protesters had been arrested at the Public Library, at Bryant Park, down at Fulton Street. A girl I met in front of Macy’s told me she’d seen police drop an orange net over people, gathering up everyone within its reach—bystanders scooped up with protesters, like dolphins with tuna in a dragnet. Soon a small group of chanters marched down 35th Street. Police formed a line moving in the opposite direction, and the reporters and others followed the action on the sidewalk. About mid-block another line of police had formed, parking their motorcycles from wall to wall across the street as a barrier. By then the first group of police had stretched their line across the sidewalks as well. No way out.

Police ordered everyone on the sidewalks. The crowd complied. There seems to have been some minor altercation involving one or two demonstrators, which I couldn’t see, and when a videographer from our side of the street filmed their arrest, police spun him around against the wall and arrested him too. “He’s press,” I shouted. “Turn around and walk,” police commanded the rest of us, but there was no place to walk. No one had been chanting for some time. A tall, thin man raised his arms and gently told the crowd to remain calm. He was promptly arrested. Officers then eyed our group, slowly, as if some method were at work. Systematically they pulled one person after the other out for arrest, sometimes reaching into the group roughly—“You!”—sometimes plucking from the edge. Why this person? Why that one? “What has he done?” people asked. They got no answer. Police instructed the press and legal observers to cross the street. We did, watching as everyone who remained on that sidewalk was handcuffed. There had been no warning, no enunciation of a law being violated, no order to disperse. There was no way to disperse, in any case.

More police arrived, and it seemed we stood there on the sidewalk for a long while, waiting. Even among the reporters, there was a mystified silence. Finally police told reporters and legal observers to come out of the group. It was clear the others would be arrested. I was walking out, taking the name of a young woman who seemed scared and a bit shaky and her mother’s phone number. I told her I would give her name to the “legals” and call her mother when one Sgt. Myers, a huge man wearing sunglasses though it was dark, ordered an officer, “Cuff her!”

“I’m press!” I said, flashing the badge that hung round my neck.
“Cuff her!” he repeated.

“Don’t worry, we won’t hurt you,” Officer Ojeda said as he put the plastic cuffs on me. I seem to remember him saying “I’m sorry” too, but maybe it was just in his tone.

“But why are you doing this?”

“We just got here; we didn’t see what happened. I’ll take care of you; you won’t get hurt.” It was about 8:40 PM when he sat me down on the curb. I’m not sure how many people police arrested there that night—maybe seventy. A journalist who was there told me the next day that after leaving the scene she walked to 36th Street, where exactly the same scenario—two barriers of cops with people trapped between and under arrest—was playing itself out. Eventually fifteen of us were photographed and loaded into a paddy wagon. Lianne, 18, from Brooklyn, had been out front the Public Library earlier that evening when, she said, half the people were arrested and half (her half) allowed to go free for no apparent reason. Police had elevated arbitrariness to an art by then. Like Susanna, 19, who was scheduled to have teacher conferences the next morning at Sarah Lawrence College, she and a friend from England had been on the sidewalk watching as the marchers came down the street. Gena and her husband or boyfriend, both in their twenties from Maryland, had been in the Hardball audience when police dispersed it and directed them, they said, first to one corner, then the next and ultimately to 35th Street. A legal observer with a bright green National Lawyers Guild cap was also in the wagon. He said he had stepped out with the other legals and reporters but was chucked back among the arrestees without explanation. A few days earlier my friend Scott Handleman, a lawyer from the Bay Area also wearing the green cap, was arrested while taking the names of detainees, as is standard legal-observer procedure. Police told Scott he was obstructing traffic, which they had closed off. The Guild reports that legal observers were consistently targeted.


They say you feel powerless when you’re arrested, and shocked by the sudden loss of freedom. For me, I think the shock came earlier, feeling powerless while ostensibly free, negotiating the streets of this Garrison Manhattan, knowing anyone is potentially a target for arrest. For those actually arrested during the convention, police had fashioned a detention center out of an old municipal bus garage at Pier 57 on the Hudson River. That morning of the 31st, United for Peace and Justice had called a press conference, stating, “The building very likely contains asbestos and there are large areas where oil has spilled…. Whether the building has an operable fire-suppression system is an open question…. While the red carpet is being rolled out for the RNC, the situation for arrestees is so bad that many are calling Pier 57 ‘Guantánamo on the Hudson.’”

The paddy wagon waited in line to deposit us at this place. There were, Officer Ojeda said, “800 or 900 people ahead of you,” and out the barred window I could see a city bus ahead filled to standing room only with protest prisoners. In front of that was another bus. We waited in the heat of the closed wagon. Police were turning in their weapons. A pizza delivery had arrived, and stacks of boxes were being rushed inside. I had a wild notion that perhaps detainees were being fed pizza. It was 11:30 by the time we were released from the wagon to see the full craziness of the place.

A female officer by the name of West took me through. “Oh my god, they’re arresting working press now?” she said. A real New York accent, a roll of the eyes. I seem to remember her saying, “This is insane,” but then so many cops I’d meet in this cocked-up jail said something to that effect that I can’t be sure. We walked past rows of tables where officers were filling in forms, past a little shed for online booking, where cops were in a long line waiting to use the computers. The pizza, the boxes of Dunkin Donuts and coffee were kept discreetly out of general view. The place was enormous, and filthy. A young woman was being led, cuffed, to the medics’ area, and I noticed her back, legs and arms were striped black. I thought she’d been involved in some dirty street theater, realizing later that she had merely lain down on the floor of the detention cage—decades of layered dirt and grease and diesel carbon dust. Days later a detainee, Peter Chapman from Whitefish, Montana, told me that a captain on duty at The Tombs, the city holding center where people were transferred prior to arraignment, told him that the city had hoped to power-wash the floors before using the building as a place of detention but was prevented by environmental concerns. The slop would have been too toxic to run off into the Hudson. By Wednesday afternoon, the city would lay carpeting at Pier 57; by then detainees said their chests were on fire. .

Around the perimeter of the garage, police had set up these large chain-link cages for us, topped with razor wire. Each cage had two smaller ones, one for men, one for women, with a water cooler and two portable toilets. There were no chairs, no benches, and everyone in our cage was still cuffed. With each new arrival of detainees, a cheer went up among those who’d become denizens by then, those, Officer West told me, who had been arrested that morning or late the previous night. She said it was unlikely I’d be freed, what with the number of people, the paperwork, the trip to court, before 11:30 the next night—twenty-seven hours after my arrest. The legal limit someone can be detained without arraignment in New York is twenty-four. As it turns out, people were held far longer.

I had to surrender my things, everything but a pillbox, which I, dressed in a little lady’s outfit without pockets, stuck in my bra. My picture was taken again and attached with my name to a plastic bag holding my notes, my wallet, my phone, my daily calendar, my pen and lipstick, my keys. Plastic bags like these were in heaps. Officer West said it might be a while between freedom and reclaiming my things, maybe days. They still had a couple hundred bikes from arrests on Friday that hadn’t yet got back to their owners. How would I get into my apartment without my keys? She figured I was resourceful and would find a way.

Once in the cage, women were supposed to go to the back but could mingle with the men. Two lines had formed for the toilets and water, but this prospect posed an exquisite choice. My original handcuffs had been cut off when I was surrendering my things, and Officer West had good-heartedly given me a new pair that I could slip in and out of. Other cops had been similarly kind, because many people in the cages were walking around with hands free. Some girls were in there with their handbags, and a few people were talking on their cell phones, which had been in their pockets. It was too crowded for the police to monitor all this, and in any case cops were so busy with paper work that they were facing the prospect of twelve, eighteen, maybe more hours in this dirty, possibly asbestos-tainted shed and weren’t looking to extend it by needless watch over prisoners. For those of us in the cages, though, using the toilet or getting water meant being searched, uncuffed and cuffed again by new cops, who might not be so lenient. I never did get in that line, and quickly put the cuffs back on each time I saw a new cop whom I wasn’t sure of. I quickly regarded them as a perverse treasure, but never got an answer as to why we were cuffed at all in there, and why the writ of habeas corpus and other legal guarantees had apparently been suspended. People were asking to make their one phone call, to see a lawyer, to be informed of the charges. Most of them never would. I’m told the police got more testy, even cruel, with time. There had never been such a big mass arrest in Manhattan, or anywhere in the city. At one point, silly with exhaustion, I said to a police official, “You’ve arrested tons of people by mistake.”

“Not by mistake,” he corrected me. “They shouldn’t have been arrested, but it wasn’t by mistake. It was by design.”

Most of the detainees were quite young, some 16- and 17-year-olds, but there were grannies and grizzled men too, from New York but also Wyoming, California, Connecticut. According to a police breakdown issued later, 1,135 of the 1,735 protesters arrested over the week were from out of state. Here and there I spotted someone else with a badge from the Independent Media Center. Stories began to repeat themselves:

The police told us to get in a single line and we’d be fine. We got in a line, and then they arrested every one of us.

We were told as long as we stayed on the sidewalk and kept a pedestrian lane we could march. We stuck to the sidewalk and kept a lane open, but we were arrested anyway.

The police said Go this way and you’ll be fine. When we did, there was another line of cops: it was a trap.

They said you can’t put the banner there but you can hold it here; when the guys held it where they were told they were arrested. Then half of us who were there were arrested, and half were not.

For a while we thought we ought to go out dressed like reporters because then we’d be safe—but look at you!

Or, as one of the cops said, “My commanding officer says ‘Arrest her’, I have to arrest you. But somebody’s told him that that’s got to be the order. ‘Arrest them all’—that’s the line from the top.” The top, for this particular national security event, as the RNC has been labeled, is the Secret Service. “They’re in charge of this whole thing,” a bicycle cop told me on the street the next day, but Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly made sure to take his full portion of credit. Manhattan was like ice that day and night after the mass arrests, lockdown. The Republicans loved it. They waved their “Let Freedom Reign” signs while Dick Cheney spoke, and set out afterward on near-deserted streets, a breezy style to their walk for the first time.

I didn’t stay in detention for twenty-four hours, and I never was charged. I was lucky. The people arrested with me and elsewhere Tuesday night didn’t get out in twenty-four hours. Those who spent time in The Tombs reported frightful overcrowding and brutish, threatening corrections officers, some of whom themselves hadn’t slept in days. By 8 AM on Thursday, September 2, the day George Bush was to speak, 120 people had been in police custody for more than thirty-eight hours; 440, for a day and a half. It seems clear that the ‘design’ was to keep everyone locked up until the grand old party at the Garden was complete. At noon that Thursday a State Supreme Court judge ordered the city to process the detainees immediately. By 6 PM, seeing a snail’s progress, he held the city in contempt, fining it $1,000 for each person still held, and demanding their release. Some had been in custody for as long as sixty hours. The 22-year-old woman whose name I took on the street just before I was cuffed, Emily Sloane, a grad student at NYU, didn’t get out until 7:30 PM on September 2, forty-seven hours later.

I was more than lucky actually; “blessed,” as they’d say in the South, or privileged. At about 1:30 AM on September 1 one decent cop referred me to another decent cop, a Sgt. Whiteman, who let me go to the medics. Since college I’ve had what some doctors call a seizure disorder and others call epilepsy; I take a barbiturate for it but the rule for staying healthy is that I have to sleep. I wasn’t going to sleep on the cage floor. After I took the barbies, extracted from the pillbox, and there was some conjecturing in the medics’ office about how bad it might be if I had a seizure as long as I was sitting down propped against the chain link fence, a Doctor Joseph Hederman, who works part time for the police department, noticed my press badge and recognized my name. “You write for CounterPunch and The Nation,” he said. “Those are the country’s major progressive publications,” he told no one in particular in the office. “I’ve read your stuff all over.” After a bit of a chat, he got a woman from NYPD legal affairs in on the case, and a man from public information. They studied the Indy Media Center badge quizzically. I told them I was on assignment for Mother Jones, had written for Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian of London, and by 2:30 they were hurrying to get me out of there.

The night seemed all a-glitter outside, freshened by the wind off the river and the fragrant herbs in a little garden across the street. A Yemenite taxi driver whisked me home, curious about conditions at the lock-up. He was so empathic for the detainees, he said, so grateful to the protesters who were doing what he and so many of his immigrant friends felt they could not do, that he didn’t feel he should even charge me. He took $6 for the fare, and gave me a donut.


JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer based in New York.

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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2004 The Foundation for National Progress

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