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What happens after you’re arrested at a protest in New York
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Quizz 11y agoYep and people are surprised when violence suddenly erupts against the police.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- therobot24 11y ago>> I was never read my rights I thought this was only necessary if the police are going to question you.
- mod 11y agoI thought when arrested and charged with a crime. IANAL obviously.
- privong 11y agoIt appears that it is only necessary when there is going to be questioning/interrogation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning Though, it seems as though the police can skip the miranda rights bit and interrogate, if they don't want to use subsequent statements or information in court. There's also the "public safety exception", which doesn't seem to apply for the situation in this particular account.
- joshstrange 11y agoI honestly didn't think you could be arrested for protesting like this without at least a warning and even then if only if it turned violent...
- mcantelon 11y agoYeah, it's pretty bizarre. Protesters are often arrested, held for 12 hours or so, then released without charges. Another thing I don't think the author mentioned is they often make you sign a form certifying your belongings are OK before giving you your belongings, so if you piss off a cop they can, for example, smash your smartphone and get away with it.
- hurin 11y agoWell you could refuse to sign that form -- though they'll probably find some excuse to hold you for an extra 6 hours.
- mschuster91 11y agoIt's intimidation, imho. Classic scare tactics, scare off those who can be scared off - and no one cares about those who have nothing to lose (i.e. poor black people). Fuck you, NYPD.
- crusso 11y agoI was curious about this. I guess the protesters were blocking traffic? Maybe the people following in the back didn't realize what the people in the front had done in terms of blocking off the street. The followers then were among the arrested.
- Johnie 11y agoFrom what I've read, there had been plenty of warnings all day. >The group was on East 17th Street about halfway down the block when police took a stand and ordered protesters to get on the sidewalk. Before the march, while the group was in Union Square, police handed out flyers and used loudspeakers to warn protesters that they would be arrested if they didn't stay on the sidewalk. http://7online.com/news/more-than-140-protesters-arrested-in-new-york-marches-/687689/ http://7online.com/news/more-than-140-protesters-arrested-in... Here is the flyer that they were handing out: https://twitter.com/Azi/status/593536703324905473/photo/1 https://twitter.com/Azi/status/593536703324905473/photo/1 I mean, look at it that other way. People should not be able to openly obstruct traffic. If I were to go run out in the middle of Broadway and block traffic, I would probably be arrested. Just because someone is "protesting" doesn't give them free reign to violate the laws. This is why public marches/protests require a permit. These guys did not have a permit to do so. See: http://www.nyclu.org/content/know-your-rights-demonstrating-new-york-city http://www.nyclu.org/content/know-your-rights-demonstrating-... > You may be able to march in a public street (as opposed to on a sidewalk) in some circumstances. To march in a street, you must obtain a permit from the Police Department. If you expect to have fewer than 1,000 people in your march, you can apply for a permit at the precinct in which the march will originate. If you expect 1,000 people or more or you prefer to use mail, send your application to: NYPD Investigation Review Section, 300 Gold St., Room 305, Brooklyn 11201. You can download a permit application from the front of the NYPD’s website
- revelation 11y agoNYPD needs to be disbanded. If you have officers repeating the same conduct one just got charged with depraved heart murder for, it's out of control. This stuff is simple enough. Get out of your escort, stand among the other normal people and do some dogfooding of the police experience. I guess nobody higher up wants to spend the day doing that, because at the end of it there wouldn't be anyone still employed at NYPD.
- kw71 11y agoWhen they expressed insubordination by turning their backs on the Mayor, that signalled to me that they have no respect for authority. This is exactly the kind of people that do not belong on a police force. I can't imagine why they weren't all fired. They certainly don't deserve any of the respect that they get, nor their pensions.
- icelancer 11y agoWhat? They are allowed to express their right to free speech and expression as well, just as the protestors should be able to.
- privong 11y agoYes, they should be free to express their opinions. But free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. One could make a case that that sort of behavior could be considered insubordination and grounds for termination.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- agwa 11y ago> Yes, they should be free to express their opinions. But free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences. That's bad analysis. Free speech means freedom from government-imposed consequences, and since their employer is the government, being fired would be a government-imposed consequence. (For the same reason, public universities cannot discipline students for their protected speech.) Rather, the correct reason these cops should be fired is because they legally do not have the right of free speech when in uniform - see my other comment up-thread.
- spodek 11y ago> for every one of the 120+ of us in holding, there was also a cop who was waiting there too, being paid overtime and trying to get our paperwork processed so that they could go home Cops being paid overtime is a tremendous conflict of interest motivating them to arrest and to process slowly.
- wheaties 11y agoI doubt very seriously that any cop does not find the manual paper entry and time wasted a good thing. More than likely they wanted to go home just as bad as the "perps."
- arsenide 11y agoBut it is a potential conflict of interest, hence it is something worth addressing, no? Especially it's in the best interests of both the cops and the people.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- vacri 11y agoIt's better than encouraging them not to fill out paperwork.
- pyre 11y agoThen again, you could be seen as punishing the cops for making a (possibly good) arrest by forcing them to spend long hours processing paperwork and not getting paid. Though, I do agree that the current situation is stacked in a bad way.
- golemotron 11y ago> I just got back from 12 hours in NYPD holding. If I can get arrested (with all of my white privilege and generally perceived non-threatening stature), so can anybody. ... Obviously I don’t know what happened in each person’s actual arrest, but I do know that the criminal charges overwhelmingly fell to people of color and those with more masculine gender presentations. One of the most distressing things I find about the language of 'privilege' is that it denies that women can have it as a group. In this last sentence, she recognizes that women can be privileged over men in some situations.
- waqf 11y agoAnd even then she avoids connecting it with the word "privilege". You can almost see the cognitive dissonance in those sentences.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- PhasmaFelis 11y agoPrivilege theory generally asserts that everyone has some privilege in some situations. It's just that there's a lot of imbalance between groups in terms of how often and how much your personal privilege benefits you. I think you're attacking a strawman here. I'm sure there are people who say that women have no privilege ever and men have all of it all the time, you shouldn't judge the entire concept based on the angriest 15-year-old Tumblrers.
- waqf 11y agoWhy are you so sure that the 15-year-old Tumblrinas are not the true Scotsmen? I mean, it's clear that you're defending a more reasonable version of the claim and GP is attacking a more unreasonable one, but it's not clear to me which of those is going to win out as the common understanding associated with the expression "privilege theory".
- 11y ago
- MarkG509 11y agoPerhaps it time someone built a web site where the opinions, comments, and especially actions/votes, of every politician running for office, from City Council on up, were tracked. Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.
- Johnie 11y agoHow about try to increase voter turnout first? No amount of public education and politician tracking will be useful if only 1/3 of eligible voters actually vote. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11/10/voter-turnout-in-2014-was-the-lowest-since-wwii/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11...
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoLow turnout is an acceptable response to an inefficient system where majoritarianism, gerrymandered districts, ballot access laws, etc. culminate in a meticulous engineering of the odds being stacked against the voters. Though, for some reason, voting and "democracy" elicit such warm conditioned feelings that people are willing to desperately scrape for examples of whatever small local victories they've secured in order to justify that it's worth going through the whole jungle. Electoral reform, though? Dead end.
- rhizome 11y agoThese things are not so separate as you portray, voter turnout can increase when people learn the people governing them are total dipshits and bullies. There are a lot of motivating reasons, and people are different.
- aggie 11y agoIn my mind the issue is not absolute turnout but representative turnout. If only 1% of people voted but they were a good representation of the varied interests of the population, that would be just fine. The problem today is that certain groups (poor, young, ethnic minorities) are less likely to vote and thus have less of a voice as a group. There are systematic changes that could be made to encourage more representative voting, such as easier voter registration practices and a national voting holiday. Australia even imposes a small fine for not voting, which surely would not sit well with many in America but would probably be a good thing for our republic.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- voltagex_ 11y agoI'm not from the States - when this kind of thing happens, does it affect your future employment opportunities? Will it turn up on background checks?
- pcurve 11y agoit depends on the states. Some states offer more protection for applicants than others. It also depends on position too. Basically, any arrest record will stay on your record for number of years including ones where the charges were eventually dropped. But in many states, employers are either disallowed or discouraged from looking at it. If there was conviction, it will stay with you. There is no way getting around that and that will jeopardize your future employment prospect.
- ianferrel 11y agoNo, and and probably not. Being arrested at something like this is likely to result in a fine at most. The author notes that he was eventually charged with a traffic obstruction violation. Basically, jaywalking. The arrest may show up on a background check. I think it would depend on state-level laws about how public the proceedings are. But no one would give it much weight. Of course, if you're arrested every weekend for something like this, they might.
- mschuster91 11y ago> This was super distressing for a lot of people, as those belongings usually included wallet, phone, and keys. So after you are done at Central Booking, you are basically left with no possessions or money, and no way to get into your home or contact anyone. Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.
- task_queue 11y agoThis is standard fare for any police department ever. It took me about 4 months to get my phone back from the NYPD, which was fun. I love it when white people are shocked by their first arrest, because it (unfortunately) means something might get done. The system sucks. Now please scare other white people about it.
- ryanmarsh 11y ago> I love it when white people are shocked by their first arrest This. My arrest taught me that there is zero humanity and zero fucks given in "the system".
- mgraczyk 11y ago"I love it when white people ..." It's unclear to me why race has anything to do with this. Are you implying that you expect non-white people to handle "their first arrest" more casually, as if it is something they are familiar with and know will happen? If we really want things to improve, we need to stop complaining about how "white people don't see how bad it is for the rest of us." Focus on what we have in common, not what you arbitrarily perceive as what makes us different. The system is shitty for everybody. Your argument would have been just as informative and a lot more pleasant to read if it didn't begin by partitioning your readers by race.
- themartorana 11y agoI don't think it's entirely unfair. I'd venture that in the US, black people (and likely other minorities) are much more likely to have heard about and clearly understand what's in store for them if they get arrested. Most probably have a family member or close friend that has dealt with this injustice. Almost none of my white friends understand the terrible truths in the system beyond reading accounts like this in the media. I include myself among them. Part of it is probably population realities - when a minority segment of the population suffers the majority of indignities, it's more likely to hit close to home. Yeah, I'd like to remove black and white from many conversations. White guilt feels almost vogue, I have to hear about it so often from white friends and colleagues. But when it comes to the criminal justice system...
- pcurve 11y ago"My arresting officer walked me out the door and down the street past the barricade, where there were volunteers from New York Lawyers Guild waiting to provide information on legal resources, as well as donuts and coffee." That must've been a sight of relief. What a horrible experience everyone had to go through. This is nothing short of intimidation tactic.
- GhotiFish 11y agoI don't know how I feel about that. I mean on the one hand, it feels like ambulance chasing, but on the other, they're providing the exact thing everyone leaving those cells needed. Food, drink, legal advice. Do you think turf wars start with competing law-firms over that spot?
- pcurve 11y agoAs long as the work is pro-bono (which I assume it would be), I welcome this kind of ambulance-chasing. I see it as a checks and balance mechanism against police power abuse. On the other hand, tax payers are always the losers because they have to pay for both police salary, prosecutor salary, and any legal settlement money for lawyers.
- tomjen3 11y agoWhat is wrong with ambulance chasing though? If some drunk bastard smash into me I want to sue him - and that generally requires a lawyer.
- hanumantmk 11y agoIt's nothing like ambulance chasing. Their work is pro-bono and the engagement technically starts a bit earlier than leaving jail. The lawyers guild is also the group that fields observers to record what demonstrators/police have actually done in protests. Also the coffee/donuts are usually a separate set of people, lay volunteers up in the middle of the night trying to keep track of people to make sure they're processed quickly enough, or to give them said coffee/donut or a couple of bucks to catch the subway home. The keyword you're looking for is "jail support" http://organizingforpower.org/jail-support-solidarity/ http://organizingforpower.org/jail-support-solidarity/
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoI have a really basic question: What crime was she being charged with? Protesting?
- goodhueytactic 11y agoHave you considered that reading the article might give you an answer to this question?
- GhotiFish 11y agoIt's easy to miss things. Sticking a piece of information in the middle of the 10th paragraph is a great way to hide it.
- lloyd-christmas 11y agoI respect that things need to be done, but I couldn't breath through the stench of an agenda/propaganda while reading half the article.
- GhotiFish 11y agoCould you tell me what the agenda was? I didn't catch it... Other than making the NYPD look bad of course. That I got.
- lloyd-christmas 11y ago"...and the metal bench was designed to be cold and uncomfortable." Yep. I'm sure they went out of their way just to make her uncomfortable. From reading the article, I picked up on a person that steps outside just hoping to be offended.
- GhotiFish 11y agoAh, you're saying that her objective from the start is to make the NYPD look bad, so she's ham handedly complaining about things that are innocuous. That's fair, I got the sense from your first post that the article had some kind of mystery undercurrent of anti-abortion sentiment or something.
- JDiculous 11y agoIt's ridiculous that they're allowed to waste so much of our time, taking hours to fill out paperwork with pen and paper as if it's the 20th century. That needs to change. And police officers taking selfies with the people they arrested and boasting about it on social media should be arrested. So fucking unprofessional.
- tzs 11y agoIt's out of print and kind of hard to find, but if you can get a copy of "Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner [1], it is well worth it. (Don't confuse it for the at least 10 other books whose titles start with "Rough Justice"...). Heilbroner was a fresh law school graduate who took a job as a New York D.A., and then wrote this book about his time there. He started out handling misdemeanors, and there are a LOT of those. There's basically an assembly line, running all day and all night, to bring in those who have been arrested, get their paperwork to a D.A. for charging, get the arresting officer in to make a statement, and getting a hearing before a judge where the defendant usually pleads guilty and gets a fine. The Public Defender has a similar assembly line going. When his shift would start, he describes walking into the office, stepping over or around all the officers sleeping in the hall waiting to have their statements taken, then picking up all the cases that the previous shift was working on when their shift ended. Often he'd end up in court with a stack of cases he'd never seen, and have to frantically work to read the notes from the previous shift and skim the officer's statement as the case was being called. When his shift ends, the cases he's working on are handed off to someone on the next shift, and almost always will be resolved by the time his next shift comes around. So there is no engagement with the case, he's just a cog in the machine, processing his pieces of paper as the pass through, and occasionally taking statements from officers, and reading from these pieces of paper in front of a judge. Eventually he gets to handle felony cases, which for both the D.A.s and the Public Defenders are more like what they had in mind when they were in law school imagining what their jobs would be like--taking a case all the way from charging through to a trial, and actually making serious legal arguments. It's quite an eye opener. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-Young-D/dp/0394581911/ref=la_B001KDVXT8_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430629926&sr=1-1 http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-Young-D/dp/039458...
- comrh 11y ago> The police officers in the front of the wagon were taking selfie videos of the crazy race-car style driving and posting to Snapchat stories that they shared with each other and boasted about openly in front of us, laughing. Mind blowing. The behavior part of the nation is completely up in arms about, they still see fit doing.
- gayprogrammer 11y agoThis sounds like a totally positive experience compared to how it could have gone. Not to mention, a giant waste of money.
- anon4 11y agoThe system is beyond saving, it's only a matter of time until the people start rioting and killing cops as a personal vendetta... oh wait.
- puppetmaster3 11y agoFor the data driven types, here is some data from the Economist: http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/594593671661641728 http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/594593671661641728
- joshkpeterson 11y agoMaybe the accelerometers in people's devices could be used to record rough-riding incidents. There should probably be "black box" devices in all police cars to prevent incidents like the one that allegedly killed Freddie Gray.