Jonas Phillips is the third resident of Asheville, North
Carolina to be arrested in recent weeks for displaying a pro-impeachment
sign.
Unlike Mark
and Deborah Kuhn, who were targeted for official abuse because
of a display erected on their own property, Phillips was arrested
for "freeway blogging" – that is, displaying a
sign on an overpass spanning the interstate near his workplace.
While different
considerations apply to protests on "public" property,
it's significant that Asheville authorities are finding it difficult
to identify a specific offense with which to charge Phillips.
That difficulty is symptomatic of institutional dishonesty: The
Asheville Police Department can't afford to admit that it arrested
Phillips because of the content of his sign, rather than because
of some danger he protest posed to the public.
Last Wednesday
(August 15), Phillips was "standing alone with my [Impeach
Bush-Cheney] sign for about 10 minutes, when I was approached
by Police Officer Russell Crisp," he
recounted. "He asked me how long I was planning to stay
there and I told him just a few more minutes because I had to
go to work at 8:00. He asked for my ID and I obliged. I asked
him if I was doing something wrong, and he said that his Sergeant
was on the way and he was going to wait for him. So, I went back
to my sign holding over the interstate."
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If
Phillips had been obstructing pedestrians, or imperiling motorists,
Officer Crisp could have addressed the problem by warning the
cooperative protester to leave. He didn't issue such a warning.
A few minutes
later the Sergeant, Officer Randy Riddle, "showed up with
a paper in his hand," continues Phillips. "He spoke
briefly to Crisp, then walked over to me and told me to put down
my sign, put my hands behind my back, and that I was under arrest!
I was shocked and almost thought he was joking until he told me
again to put down the sign and put my hands behind me and I was
under arrest. So I peacefully agreed and he cuffed me. I asked
him why I was being arrested, he told me I was in violation County
Ordinance 16-2 (the print out in his hand that he didn't bother
to read to me or show me). He told me I was obstructing the sidewalk.
I told him I was not and that officer Crisp had witnessed a guy
walk by me moments before."
"Riddle
yelled at me, 'You were obstructing the sidewalk!' and 'I'm sick
of this sh*t!' then he said, 'Here's your 15 minutes of fame buddy!'
I looked back to see his name plate and he said in a mean condescending
tone, 'Yea, that's "Sergeant Riddle" get it right!'
He then put me in Officer Crisp's police car. Riddle took my sign
with him and I was taken downtown and booked by Crisp. I was never
read my Miranda rights."
Two days
later, the charges
against Phillips had mutated from the relatively innocuous
offense of "obstructing the sidewalk" – which would
hardly merit being handcuffed and stuffed into a police car –
to "endangering motorists."
"The
intent [behind arresting Phillips] was public safety and the banner
being a hazard," insisted Asheville police Capt. Wade Wood.
"That’s basically to the benefit of the motoring public,"
which ran an imperceptibly small chance of being endangered should
the activist lose control of his 5'x1' sign. It's likelier that
motorists would be killed in a bridge collapse, or perhaps in
an accident involving falling space debris. But Wood had to pull
some charge out of his emunctory aperture, and this was the best
he could do.
Similar dishonest
ingenuity has been on display in Kent, Ohio, where City Law Director
James Silver announced plans to charge activist Kevin Egler with
"littering" – an offense carrying a fine of up
to $500 – for posting an "Impeach Bush" sign in
a public garden. The original charge, advertising in a public
space, proved useless because Egler's sign had no commercial content.
The littering
charge is obviously an instance of content-based selective prosecution:
Egler has presented dozens of photographs documenting the display
of other posters – including commercial advertisements and
military recruiting pitches – that were displayed without
incident.
As I've
noted before, many police departments increasingly operate
under the "we'll find a reason" standard – meaning
that when given an opportunity officers will contrive some excuse
to cite or arrest individuals who have committed no immediately
recognizable offense. Cases like those of Jonas Phillips, Kevin
Egler, and the Kuhns – remember: three or more instances
constitute a pattern – suggest that police are particularly
prone to display their creativity when dealing with certain forms
of political protest.
In his valuable
new book You
Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression,
Matthew Rothschild, editor of The Progressive, has compiled
dozens of accounts from Americans who endured harassment, arrest,
and various forms of official mistreatment after exercising their
right to protest peacefully.
In May 2004,
Joe Previtera, a student at Boston College, staged a protest of
the Abu Ghraib abuses outside a military recruiting center. He
chose to mimic the iconic photograph of a hooded detainee standing
atop a box with his arms outstretched and electrodes attached
to his body.
Previtera
was surrounded by four policemen who told him the bomb squad was
on its way. He was arrested an jailed overnight on $10,000 bond,
accused of making a "false bomb threat"; obviously,
he hadn't made a bomb threat, but because one of the heroes in
blue (they're all heroes, don't you know?) claimed to think the
milk crate and wires could be a bomb, Previtera was charged with
making a false threat. In the middle of his night in jail, Previtera
was awakened by police who tried to catechize him about the virtues
of the Iraq war: They "showed me pictures of U.S. soldiers
with smiling Iraqi children," he recalled. "The officers
told me these were pictures I'd never see in the media...."
Eventually
the charges were dropped, but the point is that Previtera, like
a growing number of others, spent time in jail for conducting
a peaceful, legal protest the local police didn't like.
Rothschild
describes how police in Miami, with $8.5 million in federal funding
tucked into an $87 billion war appropriation, waged a literal
street war against protesters during the December 2003 Free Trade
of the Americas Summit. Police eagerly used tasers, pepper spray,
rubber bullets, billyclubs, and other "non-lethal" weapons
against peaceful and largely cooperative protesters.
At one point,
riot police firing rubber bullets shot a female protester several
times in the back; during the next morning's briefing, the black-clad
champions of public order enjoyed a giddy laugh at the victim's
expense:
According
to Rothschild, Miami Police Chief John Timoney, who insisted that
his troops had acted with proper "restraint," won praise
nation-wide "for what is being called the 'Miami Model'"
of protest management.
The "Miami
Model" could be described as Tiananmen Square minus the tanks,
with non-lethal ammo ... for now:
With those
images of our heroic local police in action fresh in your mind,
please review this trailer for the 1986 ABC mini-series "Amerika,"
which portrayed the USA as a Soviet-dominated vassal state in
which public order is maintained by Soviet-controlled UN peacekeeping
troops in Imperial Stormtrooper outfits:
Adjusting
for present geopolitical circumstances and relatively minor differences
in the dominant ideology, "Amerika" in 1997 (as shown
in the program of that name) is often not that radically different
from America, 2007. Life is still relatively normal, despite the
Terrorist Event That Changed Everything (a Soviet-engineered Electromagnetic
Pulse in the television program, 9-11 for us).
Jonas Phillips is the third resident of Asheville, North
Carolina to be arrested in recent weeks for displaying a pro-impeachment
sign.
If
Phillips had been obstructing pedestrians, or imperiling motorists,
Officer Crisp could have addressed the problem by warning the
cooperative protester to leave. He didn't issue such a warning.