Last week a friend of mine (and a friend of many of you, as well) was riding his bike in Pittsburgh and got a bit roughed up by some policemen. All Chris did was ask the cop not to touch him and another cop came in and pushed him up against a car with his club and then arrested him.
I'm utterly ticked. Talk about your illegal arrest.
I'm very, very, very indignant. Okay, and angry, too.
We need to stand up against things like this and do what we can to stop them from even happening in the first place. Seriously? Ugh.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
I'm indignant for my friend
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5 comments:
pittsburgh, not philly. just a quick correction.
Why were there so many cops around in the first place?
Lydia's question is mine, too. Was there something else going on and Chris was just there at the wrong time?
Sorry it took forever to respond.
And, Em, I already replied to the email, so this is getting posted twice for you.
There was a G-20 Conference in Pittsburgh a couple of weeks ago. Chris is going to school at Pitt, if I remember correctly. These conferences (well, G-anything, really) always attract a lot of protesters. The city got 1,000 extra police for the event because they were afraid that something psycho was going to happen. And there really were some crazy protesters there. (For a more in-depth treatment, please see here.)
But because there were so many extra police and there wasn't really a whole lot for them to do, their controlling of the public and the students went overboard, as can be seen in the videos of Chris, who was just riding his bike when the riot police starting saying who could drive where and how, including bicycles. Notice that there were no protesters anywhere, not even on the parallel street behind them.
So what happened seems to be that a cop went highly overboard and illegally arrested (and attacked Chris). Chris was just riding his bike down the street and told the cop who had touched and pushed him to stop and that's when the other cop who was positioned 4 away in the line went berserko.
So, yeah, like my friend Arwen said, they pretty well arrested him for no other reason than he was "scruffy looking" (cop profiling) and he was asserting his legal rights to not be pushed around by a cop.
Ticks you off, no?
-v
Wow.
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