Friday, April 25, 2014

THE TRIAL OF ONE WOMAN FOR BEING GRABBED BY THE BREAST AND BEATEN BY A COP - SAY WHAT?

APPARENTLY WHAT WE ARE VIEWING HERE IS
CECILY MCMILLAN ASSAULTING A POLICE OFFICER

BULLETIN:  

Cecily McMillan Found Guilty – Write to Her!

Cecily McMillanOn Monday, May 5th, Cecily McMillan was found guilty of assaulting a cop. That McMillan was merely reacting to an actual assault by the cop seemed irrelevant to the judge. She was immediately remanded and will be jailed until her sentencing date on May 19th.
Being unexpectedly jailed is terrifying and the first few days are understandably the most difficult. Help make this time more bearable by writing to Cecily to let her know folks on the outside have her back.

Her current address is:
Cecily McMillan
Book & Case Number 3101400431
Rose M. Singer Center
19-19 Hazen Street
East Elmhurst, New York 11370
For up to date information and other ways to help, make sure to visit justiceforcecily.com

Cecily McMillan is on trail essentially for being assaulted by a cop.  That isn't the charge, but that is the reality.  

On March 17, 2012 McMillan was at Zucocotti Park on the six month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street. Although Cecily had participated in OWS, she wasn't even there to protest that day.  She was just meeting some friends on the way to a St. Pats day celebration.  Young people, what are ya gonna do?

Anyway, as they are always wont to do, the cops swept in.  She was grabbed on her breast from behind.  She instinctively responded.  Apparently her elbow made contact with a cop's head.  Uh oh, can't have that! She was charged for assault for that reaction and faces up to seven years in jail.  

Of course, the real assault by the police didn't end with one grope, one violent grope which left major bruising, no that wasn't the end.  After being taken into custody she was beaten so severely that she went into a seizure and was denied medical treatment.  There were lots of witnesses who pleaded with the cops for help.  They didn't.  As Kathryn Funkhouser writes on the Toast:


Protestors stand behind a barricade, near a city bus where the police are taking the people they have arrested. McMillan is being escorted there in handcuffs when she collapses to the pavement and begins to seize uncontrollably. The police officers stand over her in a tight circle wordlessly watching as she, in her bright green shirt, lies on the ground, unable to breathe as her body jerks violently. The visual is chilling. Do they think she’s faking? The protestors curse and shout for the officers to help her, protect her head, give her space, but none of them acknowledge the cries. Several officers finally pick her up, take her out of the street, and put her down on the sidewalk, removing the handcuffs. It’s more difficult to see her, but she seems to be going in and out of consciousness and she’s clearly in distress. The protestors begin to roar for a medic. The officers respond by fanning out along the barricades, looking around warily at the protestors, their faces unreadable. McMillan tries to sit up, can’t seem to breathe, then collapses, again and again.  All of the officers seem to be moving maddeningly slowly, milling around with hands on hips. It takes a very, very long time for the ambulance to come.

When she wakes up in the hospital, she’s covered in bruises and doesn’t know where she is. She thinks her rib is broken, it hurts so much. In the next forty-odd hours, she is shuttled between the hospital and jail, and although she asks over and over, she is not allowed a phone call to a lawyer, friends, or family.

This is not about McMillan’s elbow. This is about changing the conversation.



Need I bother to say that the cop, Grantley Bovel has been charged in other incidents of excessive force and illegal behavior.  I need bother because the judge isn't allowing that into evidence.  Michelle Goldberg writes at the Nation:


... Bovel has twice been investigated by Internal Affairs, including for one incident in which he and his partner were alleged to have run down a 17-year-old on a dirt bike. He received a “command discipline” for failing to radio that they were in pursuit. In another case, he was filmed kicking a suspect on the floor of a Bronx bodega.

Oh yeah, Bovel is also currently being sued by a protester arrested the same day for bashing his head into seats of a police bus.  The Guardian further reports on this little fact that the jury won't get to hear:


The protester (suing Bovel), Austin Guest, alleges that Bovell dragged him down the aisle of a bus while “intentionally banging his head on each seat”. His attorneys said in an updated complaint filed to federal court in Manhattan last week that as a result he “suffered physical, psychological and emotional injuries, mental anguish, suffering, humiliation, embarrassment, and other damages”.

They allege that after being put face-down on the ground and tightly handcuffed, Guest, a 33-year-old graduate of Harvard University, was “dragged up the stairs and thrown head-first into the bus”, which was to take him and other protesters to a courthouse for processing.

“He was carried like a battering ram so that his head struck each seat as they took him to the back of the bus,” said Rebecca Heinegg, an attorney for Guest. “They were clearly aware that this was happening.”

I don't really need to go on with this, do I?  You, and me, and the people down the street all know what happened, all know what is happening here.  We have all seen it before.  Goes on every day.  Doesn't usually happen to middle class white woman (although it can, especially in the middle of some protest).  Usually it happens to some unknown black person, in the night, where no one can see.

This time though the victim was white.  This time  we could see.  There are plenty of videos floating around where we can still see.  This time there are lots of supporters, lots of press, lots of attention.  Hell, here I am.

As the post below says:

Of course, it is important to cover Cecily McMillan's case, and to speak up for the rights of people everywhere to peaceably assemble in protest. It is equally important not to forget that there are people all over New York whose trials are not getting this kind of attention, or who do not go to trial at all because they have no help, no support, no one to stand by them while they refuse a plea bargain in an attempt to keep felony charges off their records. 

I agree.  I totally agree. 

So here we are on Prison Friday and you can read the rest from In These Times Below. 


Post-Occupy, #myNYPD Makes New York’s Blood Boil

As Occupier Cecily McMillan stands trial, the city’s 99% rediscovers its anger toward the NYPD.
BY SARAH JAFFE

 On Tuesday, April 22, the New York City Police Department had a very bad idea. Someone at the NYPD decided that the department could be doing better with its social media engagement and asked people to tweet photos of themselves with NYPD officers using the 
hashtag #myNYPD.

Perhaps predictably, the photos were not what they wanted. Activists quickly flooded the hashtag with photos of violent arrests, many of them from the days of Occupy Wall Street. The result was that the hashtag trended, with activists around the world joining in, prompting spinoff hashtags and even garnering the notice of the tabloids and the New York Times.
It seems the NYPD doesn't quite understand the depth of the city’s anger toward the department, even with a new (well, new-old) commissioner under a new mayor who ran a campaign against stop-and-frisk.  Mayor Bill de Blasio even went so far as to declare: “Now that we've moved away from that broken policy, and we've settled the lawsuits, and we are changing the dynamics on the ground between police and community, I think the average officer's having a much better experience.”
The average officer may be faring better, but a whole lot of New Yorkers out there still aren't.
On April 23, the day after #myNYPD hit Twitter, I spent the afternoon in a criminal courtroom in Lower Manhattan listening to some reasons why New Yorkers don't feel safer with police around. Cecily McMillan, a graduate student and Occupy Wall Street organizer, sat in the defendant's chair, scribbling notes to her attorneys on hot pink note-paper. McMillan was arrested on March 17, 2012—the six-month anniversary of Occupy—when Zuccotti Park was cleared of protesters who had briefly taken back the park late in the night. She is accused of having elbowed NYPD Officer Grantley Bovell in the face during the course of her arrest. McMillan faces felony charges of assault on an officer; if convicted, she could serve seven years. The trial began April 11, and is expected to last about three weeks.
McMillan contends that Officer Bovell grabbed her breast from behind and she reacted instinctively, elbowing backwards in reaction to what she considered an assault. 
I never met Cecily McMillan at Occupy Wall Street and I didn't meet her on Wednesday. I was unable to speak with McMillan’s lawyers, who are under a gag order from the judge and prohibited from talking to reporters. Instead, I simply sat in the audience, one of many there to observe.
And I didn’t see McMillan's arrest. But like many people who'd been around Occupy Wall Street, I stopped by the park that night after drinks with friends in the area. The park was ringed with police, but for the time I was there, the atmosphere was celebratory if tense. Old friends chatted; bagpipers were playing. At one point a small handful of police officers charged into the park and pulled down a tarp draped between two trees, but there were no arrests, and after a while, I went home. Looking back at my Alternet report on the event, I note I told friends: “I just want to get out … before they stomp on someone again.” The park was evicted of Occupiers while I was somewhere underground on a 2 train.
What happened after I left was captured on cell phone video and livestreams. A video of McMillan apparently having a seizure after her struggle with the officer was disallowed from the courtroom the morning of April 23, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Nick Pinto, who's been covering the trial daily. But as the New York Times described the scene back in March 2012: 
At one point, a woman who appeared to be suffering from seizures flopped on the ground in handcuffs as bystanders shouted for the police to remove the cuffs and provide medical attention. For several minutes the woman lay on the ground as onlookers made increasingly agonized demands until an ambulance arrived and the woman was placed inside. 
Also disallowed from the trial was Officer Bovell's record; he has faced prior allegations of brutality, and is currently being suedby another Occupier, Austin Guest, who says Bovell dragged him down the aisle of a bus while “intentionally banging his head on each seat.” The NYPD has paid out thousands to settle claims by Occupiers. That includes a $55,000 settlement announced Thursday, April 24 [video at the link] to be paid to Josh Boss, who was livestreaming an Occupy march when he was thrown to the ground and kneed by Chief Thomas Purtell, who was at the time the commanding officer of the Manhattan South Patrol Division. Also among the final tally is $82,500 to Shawn Schrader, who goes by Shawn Carrie, over three separate violent arrests. A joint report from NYU’s Global Justice Clinic and Fordham’s Walter Leitner International Human Rights Clinic [PDF] found that the police's treatment of Occupy included “frequent alleged incidents of unnecessary and excessive police use of force against protesters, bystanders, journalists, and legal observers; constant obstructions of media freedoms, including arrests of journalists; unjustified and sometimes violent closure of public space, dispersal of peaceful assemblies, and corralling and trapping protesters en masse.”
Yet Cecily McMillan, not Officer Bovell, is on trial, and the judge ruled that the officer's record is irrelevant.
When testimony began at the trial that afternoon, Officer Linda Waring was on the stand. Waring took custody of McMillan after she was sent to the hospital, to jail and eventually to Central Booking. McMillan's lawyer, Martin Stolar, asked Waring repeatedly whether she saw injuries to McMillan, what her complaints were at the hospital, how she reacted to the news that she was being charged with assaulting an officer. Waring responded that McMillan seemed surprised, that she didn't know why she'd be charged with such a thing. When Stolar asked her opinion of the Occupy protests, the judge disallowed every question except: “Were the protesters smelly?” and “Was it personal for you?””— to which Waring replied, “No, it's business.”
What they don't tell you about court, what the courtroom dramas don't show, is how deadly boring it is. At one point during the testimony of the District Attorney's Office forensic video expert, explaining a video that allegedly depicts McMillan's altercation with Officer Bovell, at least one juror appeared to actually fall asleep. And yet as you sit there, watching, listening to the same question being asked over and over, you remember that someone's life is on the line, that the third repetition of a blurry YouTube video from the night of March 17 could make the difference between conviction and acquittal. The video expert—in his three-piece suit and his smiles at the jury box, pointing at a green blur on a screen— becomes less boring when you remember that. You begin to sift through the hundreds of answers, looking for something that seems relevant. The fact that struck me was that the video was, according to the expert's testimony, downloaded from YouTube on the morning of March 18, 2012, just hours after McMillan's arrest. How quickly did the prosecution begin preparing its case? But those individual bits of information don't add up to anything on their own. You have to go every day for them to make a story, and even then you have to decide which bits fit into the story you believe is true. 
Cecily McMillan's story fits into a bigger story about the NYPD and the city that I've been following for a while. Like many white women in New York, my first experience getting pushed around by the NYPD was at Occupy Wall Street. As a reporter, I would attempt to ask questions of officers and be rebuffed, sometimes physically; in a crowd, I looked like other protester and was shoved around accordingly. I witnessed plenty of violent arrests, including those of friends and fellow reporters. I tweeted a few photos of those incidents on the #myNYPD hashtag.
These days, protest arrests are scarce and attention has faded from the NYPD's repressive tactics; some seem to consider the matter of police abuses closed with the reforms passed by City Council and imposed by a court of law. Yet protest arrests have largely faded because Occupy no longer holds parks and takes streets—and out in residential neighborhoods, there are no livestreamers and few reporters.  I rarely go a week without seeing police detaining someone, usually a young man of color.
Of course, it is important to cover Cecily McMillan's case, and to speak up for the rights of people everywhere to peaceably assemble in protest. It is equally important not to forget that there are people all over New York whose trials are not getting this kind of attention, or who do not go to trial at all because they have no help, no support, no one to stand by them while they refuse a plea bargain in an attempt to keep felony charges off their records. There were only two reporters who seemed to have stuck around for all of McMillan’s multi-week trial. How many reporters cover the courthouses for everyday arrests?
Cecily McMillan's case can't just be about her, whether she's a nice girl or a pacifist or not. It has to be—as the #myNYPD hashtag reminded us with its seemingly endless stream of violent photographs— about a police force that has gotten away with too much for too long and has not changed nearly enough. 


Sarah Jaffe is a staff writer at In These Times and the co-host of Dissent magazine's Belabored podcast. Her writings on labor, social movements, gender, media, and student debt have been published in The Atlantic, The Nation, The American Prospect, AlterNet, and many other publications, and she is a regular commentator for radio and television. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.



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