At around 5:00 p.m. last Thursday, November 20, approximately 50 riot
police dressed in black were marching north along NE First Avenue. Like
an army of androids, clear plastic shields and shiny helmets advanced
toward me, a menacing wall spread across the pavement. I was the only
civilian in sight. "Turn around!" shouted an officer who'd stepped out
of the line and pointed at me with his baton.
"I need to go downtown," I told him, holding up the Miami New Times press credentials clipped to my jacket.
"You can't go downtown!" he yelled. "It's an emergency!"
As in a State of Emergency? I asked myself. Has martial law been
declared? Not last I checked, and I'd left my office just five minutes
earlier. I had no idea what was happening downtown at that moment, but
if it truly was an emergency, I had a job to do as a reporter. That's
what I get paid for.
A group of young protesters from Gunnison, Colorado, had agreed
to meet me at the center of town. I'd been heading south on First Avenue
from Twelfth Street when I encountered the black tide that was now
advancing to the steady rhythm of clubs striking shields, a tactic meant
to intimidate and send crowds scurrying -- but the only crowd here was
me.
I spun and reversed direction, walking north ahead of the
fast-moving police line. The downtown appointment would have to wait.
Instead I decided to go to the Convergence Center, the warehouse
at North Miami Avenue and 23rd Street where FTAA protesters had been
headquartered for the past several days. At the next intersection I
turned the corner and waited for the police to march past me. Another
cop ordered me off the street.
On my way to the Convergence Center I saw another field force of
police in riot gear at Miami Avenue and Fourteenth Street. Hoping to
avoid confrontation, I sat down on the corner and slowly took off my
backpack, careful to keep it in full view of the police as I pulled out a
notebook and pen. Just then I noticed four young men approaching the
opposite corner and recognized 24-year-old Austin Stewart, leader of the
Gunnison Peace Initiative, the people I was supposed to meet downtown
and whom I'd been hosting at my North Miami home as part of an
assignment to produce an intimate portrait of a group of FTAA
protesters.
I jumped up, waved, and joined them. We stood on the corner as a
convoy of more than twenty squad cars squealed by, headed farther west,
sirens blaring. The street was deserted. The sun was setting. Together
we began hiking up North Miami Avenue en route to the Convergence Center
and, if necessary, all the way up to my house.
It was nearly dark when another group of young people, walking
south, met us on the sidewalk. "Don't go to the Convergence Center," a
girl advised us. "They're evacuating. They're taking people out on
buses." Well, we had to go in that direction anyway, so we crossed to
the east side of the avenue. At least we'd be on the opposite side of
the street from the center. We weren't the only ones trekking north;
other clusters of people were in front of us and behind us.
Suddenly a Miami-Dade Police Department squad car came hurtling
south down Miami Avenue, doors wide open. The car swerved across the
oncoming lane, climbed the curb, and screeched to a halt on the swale in
front of us.
"Get down!" four officers shouted as they leaped from the car. "Get on the ground!"
We dropped to the ground.
Throughout the day I'd witnessed police provoke protesters. I'd
seen young people cuffed and lined up along the street, but I thought
they must have done something bad to be detained. Surely the police
would see that we were doing nothing wrong and let us go. Surely they
would recognize my role as a working member of the press.
"I'm a reporter with New Times," I said to the brown-shirted
behemoth in a helmet who hovered over me. I pulled out my press pass,
which included a color photograph of me.
"Put your hands behind your back," the cop ordered without
looking at what I held in my hand. I wiggled out of my backpack, put my
press pass inside, slid the pack along the ground above my head, then
clasped my hands behind me.
"Do yourselves a favor and turn your head to the right," the
officer commanded us. I obeyed. One of the Gunnison men, 23-year-old
deli worker Nate Stewart (Austin's brother), told me later that he
continued looking left. He saw the officers surround a shirtless man
with black hair and a huge tattoo at the small of his back. The police
raised their clubs. Nate turned his head to the right.
We were handcuffed with plastic cable ties pulled so tight that
within fifteen minutes my wrists began to swell and my hands tingled.
Lying on my belly in the dark, I heard a woman call my name in
Spanish: "Celeste, is that you?" I raised my head to see a friend's face
poking out of a passing car. The police ordered her to move on, but she
returned on foot. I explained what happened and asked her to call my
mom and my editor.
The police picked up the women first. A female officer told me to
spread my legs and put my head against a prisoner transport truck that
had arrived on the scene. While she frisked me, I repeated that I was a
journalist and that my credentials and my notebook were in my black
leather backpack nearby. She wasn't interested in the fact that I was a
reporter, but did reassure me that my belongings would be waiting for me
when I was released.
The officer removed my driver's license and a stack of New Times
business cards from my jacket pocket, looked them over, then replaced
them. Another officer untied my hiking boots and checked my socks for
weapons. Onboard the paddy wagon were others arrested at the same time,
the women separated from the men by a metal barrier. The Stewart
brothers were there, and young Nate later told me about being frisked by
two officers before being loaded onto the van. "One was mean and the
other guy was really nice," he recounted. The mean cop ground his heel
into Nate's foot and growled in his ear: "Welcome to fucking Miami. How
do you like it here?"
Three paddy wagons filled with as many as eight people each
finally began speeding toward the Biscayne Boulevard parking lots just
south of the Freedom Tower. Here a group of officers waited to fill out
arrest reports. "I want you to know I'm not comfortable with this," a
ponytailed female officer said to a male officer named Manny, who wore a
star-spangled bandanna. She wasn't worried about us; she didn't like
the way the reports were shaping up. Manny agreed to a rewrite. At one
point another officer complained: "We don't even know what they're
charged with. This is so fucking stupid."
Finally the police settled on the following narrative for me and
the four guys from Gunnison: "Defendant was observed in the area of NW
Nineteenth Street and N. Miami Ave. with a group of individuals which
matched description of people who were throwing rocks due to FTAA
protests. Defendant was approached and asked to stop and refused.
Defendant subsequently taken into custody without incident." None of us,
of course, threw any rocks. And all of us instantly stopped when we
were told to do so. Still I was slapped with two misdemeanor charges:
one count of "failure to obey a lawful command" and one count of
"resisting [arrest] w/o violence."
In time we were taken to the Earlington Heights Metrorail station
along State Road 112 near NW 22nd Avenue. The parking garage there had
been converted into a holding area for FTAA prisoners. Two young
activists who'd been arrested with me -- "Porch," a massage therapist
who worried about nerve damage because her cuffs were so tight; and a
woman I called Houdini, a double-jointed anarchist who taunted police by
rotating her arms from behind her back to her front -- were processed
quickly because they refused to provide any personal information. They
called it "jail solidarity," an act they hoped would clog the court
system and give them leverage in having their charges dropped.
We ended up in a chainlink cage with an Italian girl who was
singing the Bob Marley anthem "Get Up, Stand Up (for Your Rights)."
Artist Claudia LaBianca knew nothing about the FTAA protests, but with
her wild hair, paint-spackled shorts, and unshaven armpits, she could
have passed for an anarchist. She and her blond-dreadlocked boyfriend
had ventured out from her Overtown studio to visit a friend in an
apartment building near Miami Avenue. Without warning police stormed the
building, grabbed the pair out of the elevator, and placed them under
arrest.
LaBianca noticed Laura Winter sobbing in the cage next door.
Winter is a secretary with the United Steelworkers of America who was
caught in the dragnet while trying to get back to her hotel. "It's all
right," the artist consoled her, then belted out the classic Mexican
folk tune "Cielito Lindo": "Ay ay ay ay ay/Sing and don't cry."
When a guard with a handful of plastic cuffs walked down an aisle
between the cages, 71-year-old prisoner Bentley Killmon pleaded with
him to loosen his handcuffs. Soon everyone in the holding area was
chanting: "Change his cuffs! Change his cuffs!" The handcuff man
relented. He had Killmon pulled out of the cage and tied on a new pair
of cuffs before cutting off the old in case the retired airline pilot
from Fort Myers became violent.
One by one we were taken from the cages and processed a second
time at a row of card tables manned by Miami-Dade corrections officers,
where we were relieved of any possessions left in our pockets. Anyone
wearing boots had those removed too, so I slogged around for the rest of
the night in my socks. At least the handcuffs were cut off from behind
my back and a new pair put on with my hands in front -- although still
too tight. Two officers escorted each of us to another paddy wagon.
I was shoved in next to a woman in her early forties who looked
more like a nun than an anarchist. She identified herself as Bork and
said she works in a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. Later, in the
holding cell, she told me she'd been arrested 27 times in the past three
years for actions that ranged from taking over abandoned houses for the
homeless in D.C. to chaining herself to the gates of the United
Nations, trapping Secretary of State Colin Powell inside for 45 minutes
while insisting he could not come out until he made peace in the Middle
East.
"I thought they let me behind the police line because I look like
a harmless soup-kitchen lady," she told me. But when she was arrested
late Thursday afternoon, for "endangering police," she discovered that
the cops already knew her identity. "I think they let me sit there
because they wanted to keep an eye on me," she said.
As Bork talked, a teenager with bright pink hair was pushed in
beside me. She'd been beaten pretty badly; there was a raw gash on the
bridge of her nose and contusions on her forehead and cheeks. She reeked
of whiskey. "I was just marching and all of a sudden the cops started
hitting me, man," she told me later. But when she got into the paddy
wagon she was too disturbed for conversation, screaming and swearing and
kicking the truck's steel wall. Bork calmed her down in a soothing
voice.
The last to slide in was a frail college student I called Kitten.
She said she was 21 but with her tiny five-foot frame and pouty oval
face, she looked more like 12. She was arrested at gunpoint by a SWAT
team after she and three strangers tried to hide in an abandoned
downtown building when a fracas broke out following the officially
sanctioned protest march. "I just don't like how it feels in here," she
whined, head doubled over her knees.
"We all feel that way," Bork comforted her. "That's okay."
For the next three hours at the Turner Guilford Knight
Correctional Center in west Miami-Dade we were herded from holding cell
to holding cell, tiny concrete-block rooms equipped with a toilet and a
metal bench. Pink Hair was put in a room by herself, screaming and
jumping on the bench. Porch, Houdini, and Bork consulted on jail
strategy. When we were at last allowed to make a phone call, I learned
from my mother that my backpack would not be returned to me upon my
release. As it turned out, the cops had simply discarded it, along with
the possessions of many others detained. By sheer coincidence, attorney
and former Miami ACLU president John De Leon came upon the scattered
piles of personal effects while inspecting the neighborhood south of the
Convergence Center. He scooped up the items and held them for
safekeeping.
We spent the night in cold cells at TGK, listening to Pink Hair
rage. The next morning we met with public defenders, handcuffed together
in groups of eighteen. We were told we had three choices: plead guilty,
plead not guilty (then wait in jail until someone posted our bail), or
plead guilty with adjudication withheld -- which meant we would admit
guilt, but because the charges were minor, they wouldn't appear on our
records as criminal convictions. That was the quickest way to get out of
jail, but it also meant you wouldn't be able to sue later for wrongful
arrest.
The Jane Does -- Bork, Porch, and Houdini -- pleaded not guilty
and bond was set at $5000 each. Kitten, Pink Hair, and Claudia the
artist all accepted the guilty plea. "I am sorry," Claudia yelled to the
rest of us, "but I have to be free!" Secure in the knowledge that the
steelworkers union would support her, Laura Winter pleaded not guilty. I
too was prepared to plead not guilty, but the prosecutor dropped the
charges against me and against three out of the four Colorado men
arrested with me; the fourth copped a plea. By Friday afternoon all five
of us were out of jail.
That evening, when the five of us who'd been arrested were
reunited at my house with the rest of the Gunnison Peace Initiative, the
other members told their story of how the peaceful protest in downtown
Miami had turned ugly. At precisely 4:00, they said, the entire line of
police fronting the security perimeter at Biscayne Boulevard and Flagler
Street slammed their batons into the stomachs of protesters without
warning. The protesters fled but the police kept coming. One group of
cops ran toward the Bayfront Park amphitheater, where they reportedly
tear-gassed people who were quietly looking on.
Other squads of riot police herded protesters north and west.
Black-clad anarchists took a stand near the federal courthouse, throwing
rocks and dragging iron barriers into the street to set up a barricade
between protesters and police. Around the corner from the courthouse, at
Miami Avenue near Fifth Street, the Gunnison group said they saw riot
police invade the storefront "Wellness Center," where medics were
treating injured protesters. The cops allegedly fired pepper spray into
the building and also sprayed the face of the woman at the front door.
Police drove the retreating protesters deep into Overtown, where
they were detained and forced to dump their belongings onto the ground,
but not arrested. Instead, the Gunnison group said, police told them
they were in the "worst neighborhood in Miami" and then abandoned them
to meet their fate -- except for the four young men who left the group
before the downtown melee and ran into me. They were detained, arrested,
charged with crimes, and sent to jail as I was -- for doing nothing but
walking down the street.
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