Dennis Fox’s Weblog

Last summer I reported on my participation in protests at the Republican National Convention in New York City. I briefly described cops instigating a confrontation on the steps of the New York Public Library.

So it’s satisfying to read this in today’s  New York Times:

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue. “We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,” the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. “I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention. For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

I doubt Officer Wohl will be charged with perjury for lying about the arrests he claimed to make. Prosecutors and judges who know cops lie rarely do anything about it. Stretching the truth to maintain their own version of order is just one of many common police practices.

Even though these cases are being dismissed, that’s after seven months of activists being embroiled in the legal system — finding lawyers, going to hearings, spending money. It was clear during the convention itself that most of the arrests were bogus, but city authorities were less concerned with arrests holding up later in court than they were in preventing demonstrators from straying past officially approved boundaries and learning not to do it again.  In that they were mostly successful.

I’ve referred frequently in my Brookline, Massachusetts newspaper column to the misuse of police discretion even in a police department that’s “modernized” and “professionalized” over the years. We too have dishonest court testimony and racially biased cops. We even had a bogus political arrest a few years ago, when police arrested Palestinian activist Amer Jubran on trumped-up charges. Those charges were later dismissed, but the town never acknowledged the arrest should never have taken place.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 12th, 2005 at 10:50 am and is filed under Anarchism, Law/Justice, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.