please make me stop and re-read this post if I’m ever about to invite a bunch of strangers to defy the cops
Here — in order — are three things Naomi Wolf wrote in her account of getting arrested by the NYPD on Tuesday night:
1) “I saw that the protesters had been cordoned off by a now-massive phalanx of NYPD cops and pinned against the far side of the street – far away from the event they sought to address.
“I went up and asked them why. They replied that they had been informed that the Huffington Post event had a permit that forbade them to use the sidewalk. I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks; even film crews must allow pedestrian traffic.”
2) “Finally a tall man, who seemed to be with the event, confessed that while it did have a permit, the permit did allow for protest so long as we did not block pedestrian passage.
“I thanked him, returned to the protesters, and said: ‘The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don’t block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so. Please join me if you wish.’”
3) “The police are now telling my supporters that the permit in question gave the event managers ‘control of the sidewalks’. I have asked to see the permit but still haven’t been provided with it – if such a category now exists, I have never heard of it;”
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To repeat, the title of this post is “please make me stop and re-read this post if I’m ever about to invite a bunch of strangers to defy the cops.” If the day does come that I’m about to invite a bunch of strangers to defy the cops and you do get me to stop and you do get me to read this and I say “What’s your point? Leave me alone,” then please point to the next paragraph and ask me to re-read it again.
Wolf is not an attorney specializing in New York City sidewalk law, so it’s entirely appropriate and understandable that she would write, as she did, that “if such a category now exists, I have not heard of it.” But a person who will ultimately have occasion to write “if such a category now exists, I have not heard of it” is also a person who should dial her phone and consult an expert before inviting strangers to defy the cops on the basis of “I knew from my investigative reporting on NYC permits that this was impossible: a private entity cannot lease the public sidewalks.” “Impossible” and “I have not heard of it” really should not come out of the same mouth. Furthermore, a conversation with “a tall man, who seemed to be with the event” is hardly gospel and does not justify announcing to a group of strangers that “The permit allows us to walk on the other side of the street if we don’t block access. I am now going to walk on the public sidewalk and not block it. It is legal to do so.”
Just to be totally clear, arresting Wolf strikes me as a case of yet another NYPD white shirt needlessly escalating a nonviolent standoff. I’m grateful to whoever filmed her arrest and hope it boosts the odds that justice, restraint, and sanity will prevail.
In the name of helping sanity prevail, I hope Wolf will find a way to mellow the rhetoric. Her phrase “completely Stalinist,” for example, evokes slave labor, starvation, abuse, and death in Siberian prison camps rather than “my phone was taken and for half an hour I was in a faeces- or blood-smeared cell.” And I mostly think of the lack of similarities to Guantanamo and secret CIA prisons and Jose Padilla when Wolf writes “the protesters were lied to about our whereabouts, which seemed to me to be a trickle-down of the Bush-era detention practice of unaccountable detentions.”
