It isn't often that I agree with the editorial writers at the Washington
Post. But on April 19, referring to the World Bank/IMF protests, the Post
editorialized that the city should be "grateful" to Police Chief Charles
Ramsey. I agree. We have something to thank the police for. Not, as the
Post would have it, "for the professional manner in which they handled the
week-long protest." Rather, for they way, with batons, barricades and
brutality, they gave some fledgling activists experiences shocking enough
to bind them for the long haul to the movement for radical change.
Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a 17-year-old high school senior from Boulder,
Colorado, spent eight hours in water-soaked clothes and shackles, on a
cold, concrete jail floor, denied food, water and use of a telephone. "I
learned a lot more in that week than I would have learned in a million
weeks of school," he told the Colorado Daily.
"We were told that a bunch of 'niggers and faggots' were going to rape us
and beat us, and that we would get HIV and AIDS," he said. "If a bunch of
mostly white people who had the whole world watching them were treated the
way we were, the way the regular prisoners are treated must be unbelievable."
Similar stories are being heard everywhere, as 1,300 detainees return home,
some of them having spent six days in conditions they call "outrageous."
Many had signed up to protest, as Ginsberg-Jaeckle did, because they
"firmly believed that it was our right to be represented in those [global
finance] meetings."
Others signed up for nothing, but may return for the next protest. Mike
Fassler is one of them. A 26-year-old Kentucky native, Fassler has never
been an activist. "I watch CNN from time to time, but I don't write
letters to my congressman," he says. He maintains the office mainframes at
Leonard, Hart, Frost, Lilly and Levinn, a K Street law firm. The job often
involves working off-hours. This was the first time it entailed arrest.
On Saturday afternoon, April 15, Fassler left work and headed home. "I was
walking toward the Metro and I had to walk through a crowd," he says. A
group of 600 or so were walking the sidewalk protesting the death-sentence
of Mumia Abu-Jamal and the prison-industrial complex. At the end of the
block, Fassler came face to face with a police barricade. He turned around,
and found another police line: "I was caught between them. There was no way
to get out."
It's here that Fassler's pronouns switch from "them" (the protesters) to "us."
For two strange hours, this apolitical computer techie and his new, de
facto colleagues asked police to let them go. "All we wanted was peacefully
to disperse. I kept telling them that all I wanted was to go home."
Instead, the police arrested them, one by one. The only people the cops let
leave-in fact, forced to leave-were reporters who, like Fassler, had been
caught up in the corral. "The right to assemble-at least on the
sidewalk-and to have press present to witness is just theoretical, as I
found out," Fassler says.
Bused to a local Police Training Academy, his group of 30 or so were kept
for nine hours, their wrists handcuffed behind their backs. They were
locked for a further nine hours into what the U.S. Marshal's office calls
"three-piece suits"--running chains that link a person's right wrist to his
or her left ankle. "It was painful to move. I still can't wear my watch,"
says Fassler, four days later.
"The three-piece suit is standard procedure," says Todd Dillard, U.S.
Marshal for the D.C. Superior Court, where Fassler and others arrested were
brought. Because they were shuttled among D.C. police, U.S. Marshals and
the Correction Department's wardens, there's much passing of the buck going
on. Dillard denies that his officers, who've come in for the sharpest
criticism, committed any abuse. "I've received not one incident report from
any of my employees." The D.C. police and the Warden's office did not
respond.
Fassler says that on his bus Marshals gagged one protester, kicked the feet
out from another and smashed his face into the floor. In a holding cell at
the Police Academy, he claims that Marshals threatened them: "They told us
they could do anything they wanted. They said, 'There's no camera in here.
Who are they going to believe?' "
AIDS, gay rights and civil rights organizations including the ACLU, the
National Lawyers Guild and the NAACP are demanding investigations into
abuses committed by the security forces in Washington. Fassler says his
lawyer filed a wrongful arrest suit against the D.C. police on April 24.
Will he be there at the demonstration next time? "Perhaps," he says. "I'll
never be the same."
Laura Flanders is managing editor and host on Radioforchange.com, the new
radio network from the Working Assets Funding Agency.
In These Times © 2000
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