The big lawsuit filed by City Council members and Occupy Wall Street protesters wasn't the only civil lawsuit filed against the NYPD in federal court today! Another lawsuit, specifically concerning the NYPD's barricading of protesters at a demonstration last November, was filed today, seeking unspecified damages and an injunction stopping the NYPD from engaging in such tactics.
The lawsuit (read it in full below) has to do with a demonstration on November 30th 2011 outside the Sheraton Hotel in midtown, where President Obama was giving a speech at a $1,000-a-head fundraiser. The demonstration was peaceful, but after the protesters arrived near the hotel, they were suddenly penned in by police, told they were in a "frozen zone," and not permitted to leave until after the president departed. "We came to express our views at a place where the President might see us, and were detained for hours as if we had committed a crime," says Buswick resident John Rivera, one of the class action plaintiffs, who was a member of the Civil Service Employees Association.
Reporter Andrew Katz said that night, "One officer actually said I could go into the kettle where the protesters were, but [another] officer grabbed my arm... and said we had to leave the area. Three officers, including a female officer who gripped her arm around my hip, escorted us a block down to 52nd Street behind a set of barricades." Mother Jones's Josh Harkinson was also there and filed this report about the "free speech zone."
According to the law firms of Rankin & Taylor and Beldock Levine & Hoffman, the NYCLU was successful in getting the NYPD to agree to restrictions on the use of barricades in 2008. But their lawsuit alleges that the NYPD has violated those guidelines as well as the U.S. Constitution. "Under Commissioner Kelly the NYPD has considered itself above any restrictions when it comes to political protests, even restrictions it agrees to in front of a federal judge," says attorney Mark Taylor.
Today's lawsuit was coincidentally filed simultaneously with another federal lawsuit accusing the NYPD of repressing First Amendment rights. That lawsuit, which includes four city councilmembers as plaintiffs, calls for the creation of federal monitor to oversee the NYPD policing of demonstrations. Protesters claim the NYPD has deliberately rounded them up for arrest on arbitrary charges to stifle dissent.
"This felt like an attempt to scare us from participating in future protests,” says Phoebe Berg, a Brooklyn protester who was outside the Sheraton and is named in the lawsuit. "I hate the fact that I can't help but take into account the real possibility of being detained again, not allowed access to a water/food or a restroom for possibly hours, during the May Day General Strike and other future actions."
