 |
Photo By Jymi Bolden
|
Cincinati Bell doesn’t own the meters, but got police to
shut them down.
|
If you watched the terrorist attacks on television in horror on Sept. 11, you should also watch what's happening with police and security in your own city with the same concern.
The Patriot Act, passed by Congress to battle terrorism, is raising concerns about civil liberties across the country. But even without that new law, Cincinnati has seen warning signs of a change in civil society:
· After the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, management of the Carew Tower confiscated newspaper racks and boxes from sidewalks surrounding the building.
"We just wanted, for security reasons, to take any precaution we can," says Scott Northgraves, Carew Tower manager. "When things cool down, we'll stick them back out."
Carew Tower management told distribution personnel at CityBeat it does not want walk-up delivery, parking or anything blocking exits.
Where does Carew Tower get the authority to move private property from public sidewalks?
"To be honest, I don't have an answer for that," Northgraves says.
· A heightened sense of danger seems to have justified other kinds of intrusion by private business on public property. Blue bags have covered city parking meters in front of Cincinnati Bell's office on Seventh Street since the terrorist attacks.
As of Dec. 3, a total of 32 meters were bagged, prohibiting drivers from parking in front of the building. Tressie Long, spokesperson for Cincinnati Bell, says the meters will be bagged indefinitely.
"We did that at the time of the Sept. 11 events, because we did go to a higher state of security," she says.
The Cincinnati Police Division bagged the parking meters at the company's request, according to police spokeswoman Kathy Tscheiner.
Long says the company had not received any bomb threats but took increased security measures to protect Cincinnati Bell's employees, facilities and network.
"Certainly it's the responsible thing to do," she says.
The inability to pick up a newspaper outside Carew Tower or to park on the street near Cincinnati Bell might be small inconveniences, but they point to the kinds of compromises that some say benefit security at the expense of freedom.
The return of King George
The new Patriot Act -- "Patriot" is an acronym for "Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" -- is the opposite of patriotic, says attorney Alan Graf, co-chair of the policy board of the Portland Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild.
Graf is even suspicious of the timing of the law, which he says appeared to have been written prior to Sept. 11. The law contains so much information that it seemed to be in the works for a while.
"It was that complex," Graf says.
Graf, whose practice consists mostly of social security disability law, does civil rights work pro bono. He is concerned about the impact of the Patriot Act.
"It really affects the attitude and tenor of law enforcement," he says. "There's already been a slant toward taking away power from the judiciary and giving it to the police. The judiciary is a lot less corruptible. They don't have guns strapped to their sides -- they have black pajamas."
Graf says the Patriot Act allows police to delay notice of a search if they tell a court the investigation would be jeopardized, effectively preventing suspects from challenging warrants or being present to make sure police don't exceed the authorized search.
"Now law enforcement agents can search your house and/or office along with your files and are not required to inform you that they were there until much later," Graf wrote. "They can then share that information with the CIA if it relates to 'foreign intelligence' or information that 'concerns the foreign affairs of the United States.' "
The measure essentially legalizes a repeat of the notorious COINTELPRO, whereby the FBI spied on peace groups and other dissidents.
According to Graf, the act limits judicial oversight of wiretapping and Internet surveillance and permits a vast array of information gathered on U.S. citizens from school records, financial transactions, Internet activity and telephone conversations to be shared with the CIA.
Graf says the act encourages financial institutions to disclose possible violations of law or "suspicious activities" and prohibits them from notifying the persons involved.
In May the FBI presented a congressional statement on the threat of terrorism.
"The FBI views domestic terrorism as the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual that is based and operating entirely within the United States or its territories without foreign direction and which is committed against persons or property with the intent of intimidating or coercing a government or its population in furtherance of political or social objectives."
Some have argued that definition is too broad, making a terrorist of any anti-globalization protester who throws a rock at a government building. In fact, the FBI report points to exactly that kind of interpretation.
"For example, anarchists, operating individually and in groups, caused much of the damage during the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle," the report says.
Graf believes the Founding Fathers' efforts to keep the judiciary and law enforcement separate is getting lost.
"I look at it as we have King George III right now," he says.
The attitude among some in law enforcement now seems to be "just let us do whatever we want to do and stop with these technicalities like the Bill of Rights," Graf says.
'Total cowardice'
Even before Sept. 11, some observers warned police powers were encroaching on civil liberties.
The targets were not terrorists, but peaceful protesters. In a lawsuit in U.S. District Court against the city of Cincinnati and some police officers, attorney Robert Newman says law enforcement has deliberately violated the U.S. Constitution.
Newman represents five people arrested during protests against the TransAtlantic Business Dialogue in November 2000. He contends Cincinnati adopted a policy of arresting innocent people to discourage the protests.
"Instances of this policy are arresting and jailing protesters with no intention of prosecuting them and then after their release from jail, abandoning the cases, charging people with clearly inappropriate criminal violations in order to justify an arrest and then not prosecuting, and charging people for sitting on the sidewalk after being instructed by the police to sit on the sidewalk," Newman wrote.
The lawsuit, against some of the Cincinnati police and the city itself, has been referred to a federal magistrate for trial. Newman says meetings have taken place with city lawyers, and the case might end in a settlement.
Newman condemned the U.S. Justice Department for refusing to prosecute police officers who fired beanbag missiles at nonviolent marchers and children at Elm and Liberty streets April 14. The attack seriously wounded a Louisville teacher and two little girls (see Firing on Children).
"I thought it was just an act of total cowardice by the U.S. attorneys," Newman says. "They just folded up their tents and left town. They want a guaranteed a case. They want to win all their cases. That's chicken shit. It's the climate where police are using force willy nilly and using these beanbags against innocent people."
Newman represents several people injured by police during protests in April. U.S. District Judge S. Arthur Spiegel had issued a stay in the case pending the federal prosecutors' investigation. Depositions are now being scheduled.
Taking on Darth Vader
Proving who fired on the teacher, the kids and the rest of the 38 plaintiffs might be difficult. Officers must report all uses of force, according to Assistant City Solicitor Richard Ganulin. But the reports tell little, Newman says.
"The reports that they've filed don't say who they shot," he says. "We'll never know if they shot at any of the plaintiffs in this case or other people. We can't identify them because these guys were wearing masks and Darth Vader protective type gear."
Police officers did nothing wrong, according to Ganulin.
"The police division denies those factual allegations," he says. "They deny that they used unreasonable force. The police only use force against people who are acting unlawfully. The police division used the force that was reasonable under the circumstances to restore order to a city under riotous conditions."
Ganulin says the plaintiffs' claims do not correspond to the information on the reports. The police don't concede that the plaintiffs were even struck by beanbags, he says.
The beanbags are supposed to stop unlawful activity without penetrating the person shot at, Ganulin says. But one plaintiff, Mary Ann Meredith, says she was struck in the head by a police beanbag and had to have 20 sutures at University Hospital, where doctors removed eight small metallic pellets from her scalp.
"Our claim is that's a nasty way to send a message to people who are not committing any crime and who have a right to protest and who have a right to protest police," Newman says.
The city should enact a policy of firing beanbags only when an officer faces a threat of serious bodily injury or death, similar to the circumstances in which they can use a regular firearm, according to Newman.
Cincinnati Police acquired the beanbag shotguns at the urging of the mental health community, after officers shot and killed Lorenzo Collins, a mental patient who threatened officers with a brick.
But Newman doesn't want people shot with the beanbags who aren't committing criminal acts. He asserts the beanbags can be deadly, and an October report in The Annals of Emergency Medicine backs him.
The report, written by four medical doctors who studied beanbag shootings by officers in Los Angeles, cited one fatality from a beanbag shot and a host of other injuries, including ruptured spleens, cardiac contusion and liver hematoma.
One of the authors of the report, Dr. Dirk de Brito, has agreed to testify in the Cincinnati lawsuit, Newman says.
The First Amendment needs to be protected even when the message is unpopular, according to Newman. If a march were held to support Marines in Afghanistan, he says, flowers would be thrown at the feet of marchers.
"If on the same route there was a protest against our war in Afghanistan, instead of flowers thrown at the feet of the protesters they'd be stoned, arrested, Maced," he says.
Protecting freedom, Newman says, means protecting protesters from police.
"They want to create a kind of a free fire zone for the cops in times of trouble and in certain neighborhoods," he says.
Graf, a former New Yorker with relatives who work and live near the World Trade Center, says he is as concerned about Americans' constitutional rights as he is about the terrorist attacks.
"I don't think we should use this as an excuse to suspend the constitution," he says. "There's ways of being aggressive through law enforcement without suspending the Constitution.
"This is what we've been fighting to protect, and if we turn ourselves into a despotism, then we're no better than the despots in Saudi Arabia." ©
