Marchers Arrested on Arcata/Eureka 101 Corridor

What ever happened to the noble Paul Gallegos who was going to sue Maxxam corporation for fraudulent timber harvest plans? Maybe Maxxam huffed and puffed and blew Gallegos house down. Now he's being a good little DA and harrassing college students and other activists. Gallegos, like many other psuedo-political mouthpieces, spends his days charging and prosecuting young activists for walking down a road. No time to hold corporations like Maxxam accountable for fraud and ecological damage in Humboldt watersheds..

The police state at it's finest in Humboldt under fascist puppets like Gallegos..

No, the police state will be at its finest if Worth Dikeman wins the DA race. Dikeman is the pick of the cops because he never doubts that the cops are always in the right.

Gallegos has appealed the Maxxam fraud suit. It will surely be dropped if Dikeman (who loves Maxxam almost as much as he love the cops) wins.

Eye Editorial: Protest, police and politics – May 9, 2006

The latest activist/law enforcement clash along the freeway last week arrived on top of a heating-up election season marked by police involvement in politics, plus other heavily politicized law enforcement actions. It revealed a lot about the attitudes of various forces at large – protesters and civil authorities – and, alas, further polarized them and their respective political factions. But beneath the folderol lies a somber warning we ignore at our peril.

We’ve long regarded CHP Humboldt Area Commander Steve Pudinski as a cut above his predecessors and some of his contemporaries. That regard isn’t faring well, given the entirely avoidable confrontation he engineered last week.

Yes, the May Day protesters were breaking the law by walking along the three-tenths-of-a-mile between South G Street and the Safety Corridor, which is off-limits to pedestrians. They were committing an extremely mild, nonviolent form of civil disobedience, which itself is a grand American tradition. Key word: disobey. Other key word: civil.

The marchers were well under control, with a Caltrans light truck following behind, its big, blinking arrow directing traffic around them. They’d made their way from 14th Street past South G Street without incident, and were almost to the pedestrian-friendly Safety Corridor.

So, what’s the response of Pudinski’s CHP to these brazen jaywalkers? Confrontation. Inexplicably, the CHP brought the peaceful, well-controlled march to a halt and arbitrarily ordered the marchers to do the impossible: walk down train tracks covered in five-foot-deep blackberry brambles to get to the Safety Corridor.

Pudinski credits his department with notifying Caltrans of the march, but he never told the protesters, nor his City liaison, Councilmember Dave Meserve, what portion of the freeway was off-limits to marchers. And that million-dollar CHP helicopter overhead was never tasked to confirm that the train easement Pudinski was ordering people to walk on (without the railroad’s permission) was actually passable.

No, the protesters shouldn’t have linked arms and barreled through the CHP officers. No one should have touched anyone who didn’t wish for contact. And that wouldn’t have happened had Pudinski used his seven CHP cars and eight officers at the scene to actually provide public safety and assist the Caltrans truck for the five or 10 minutes it would have taken the marchers to get to the legal area.

But no. The CHP instead blocked the marchers’ only way out other than a humiliating reversal of course, which any smart cop would have known wasn’t going to happen. Any experienced cop should have known that the confrontation was a recipe for violence. And competent professionals in any field know enough to pick their battles. The evidence suggests Pudinski picked this one.

The next night came the spectacle of District Attorney Paul Gallegos answering to activists at the D Street Neighborhood Center. Unbelievably, on the heels of yet another over-the-top response to a non-situation by state police, Gallegos – despised by area cops and beloved by Arcata’s wine-and-cheese liberals – allowed the radicalized students to make him out as the embodiment of government oppression.

All those officers at the Dikeman fundraiser the previous weekend would have gotten some big belly laughs out of seeing Arcata’s radical contingent designating what cops see as our simpering-liberal DA as The Man.

The D Street gathering’s moderator warned that the meeting was not for speechifying or condemnations, so of course that’s what it quickly became, thanks to Gallegos’ mumbled, uncertain responses, full of vapor-lock pauses and scatterbrained non sequiturs.

The nadir of his night had to be when a skinny, friendly kid more or less prosecuted Humboldt County’s chief legal officer with a series of leading questions, each ended with a lawyerly, “Isn’t that correct?” And Gallegos gamely went along with the kid’s game, obediently answering each charge with a timorous “Yes,” much to the audience’s delight.

It’s no stretch to surmise that Worth Dikeman would have actually come off better before the embittered activists by offering the simple message, in a clear, audible voice, that, “Wrongdoers on either side of that confrontation will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Gallegos’ pandering suggestion that unnamed “third parties” other than local law enforcement personnel interview witnesses is the beginning of the end of our criminal justice system. Any police officers who can’t be trusted to fairly act on evidence that their colleagues have violated public trust are not living up to their oath to serve and protect and ought to resign immediately.

The activists’ bizarre strategem of not offering testimony and pretending to anonymity only ensures that the preponderence of evidence will come from police. The kooky-spooky tactic is reminiscent of the people who claim to be afraid to attend City Council meetings, thus relinquishing the floor to their political adversaries, or of the people who hired a lawyer to represent them anonymously at a Town Hall meeting.
All these forms of selective withdrawal from our system of public participation represent a tragic abandonment of the social contract – nothing less than the piecemeal unraveling of civilization.

Sadly, last week’s ugly clash further polarized the community, with those who feel their side’s forward troops can do no wrong steeling their positions. That’s just what we don’t need.

But the worst may be to come. The activist community is now fully radicalized thanks in part to police overreaction. Police, involved to an unprecedented extent in county politics, clearly have little affection for the noisy folk they encounter on roadsides who consider Paul Gallegos too conservative.

Clearly, there are hard feelings on both sides of the recent clash, and we'll go out on a limb and say that there are those who are anticipating another showdown for score-settling purposes.

With warm weather at hand, the activists are not going to stop marching and biking and the police indicate little interest in avoiding confrontations, so the stage is set for yet another encounter. The way things are going, it’s going to escalate beyond pushy-shovey fun-and-games, and Humboldt County could easily see bloodshed and a hugely divisive, multimillion-dollar incident.

What’s needed is some political leadership, an intervention if you will, to lower the temperature, work out some ground rules and avert disaster. We'll wait and see whether any of our local or regional elected leaders manifests the initiative to try and resolve atters, and report back.