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In early July, the Philadelphia Police Department admitted that it had been spying on and photographing protesters. At the time, a policewoman said "just because we are getting information about people who are going to be part of the demonstrations here doesn't mean we believe they in particular are going to be in any way disruptive or violent." On Wednesday, August 2, John Sellers, the head of the Berkeley, CA, based Ruckus Society, was arrested as he walked along JFK Boulevard. A Philadelphia AIDS activist named Paul Davis was arrested on Tuesday as he walked down the street, talking on a cell phone. Several other alleged protest "leaders" were arrested by police, even though the police gave no definitive evidence that they had specifically partaken in violence. In the days after the protest, few people were angry that arrests had occurred. The protesters had expected arrests. And the large number of injured police, including one with a broken arm, showed that the violence had hardly been one-sided. But the random picking-off of organizers had people outraged. "We disorganized them," said one officer. On the Friday after the convention, I stopped by the park across the street from The Roundhouse, a two-building circular jail downtown where many of the arrested protesters had been held. By the time I got there, many of them had been transferred to various locations around the state, making any kind of large-scale protests impossible. The remaining protesters, 30, maybe 40, desperate souls, sprawled on the grass, looking exhausted, dirty, and hungry. They gave every appearance of a defeated army, which, in a way, they were. I approached a young woman who was obviously nervous and scared. Her name was Jaime Davis, and she is a third-year law student at George Washington University. She is part of the "legal collective" that is working with the protesters. Davis told stories of people handcuffed foot-to-wrist, of people being dragged from their cells by their hair, by police roughing prisoners up "a little bit." Her stories seemed to match others that were dribbling out of prison. Of the 300 or so protesters still in jail, 151 had gone on a hunger strike. Many of them had removed their clothes, so police couldn't identify them. Very few were giving their names. They claimed that they were hungry, and thirsty, and innocent. And throughout the city, people scoffed. "People who aren't involved in the movement think we're paranoid," Davis said. "But many friends of mine have been approached on the street by police who were carrying their picture. They know our names. Many of our phones have been tapped. Even my best friends are like, 'oh, come on,' but basically everyone I know who's involved in the movement has had this happen to them. At demonstrations, there are police filming not only activists, but also people who are walking by. This has a chilling effect on the First Amendment. People are afraid to hear what we have to say because they think they're gonna get picked up." People were laying about the park in a daze. A small group of plainclothes cops stood by and watched them. One cop said they could stay in the park, but they weren't allowed to display signs or otherwise "convey a message." It was quite a nightmare, and quite obviously the end of the line. - - - - At a press conference a few days after the protests, Joseph Rogers, a 48-year-old Quaker, the director of National Mental Health Consumers' Self-Help Clearinghouse, and hardly a menace to society, gave the following testimony: "I was locked up for two nights myself, and at one point I was hog-tied by plastic restraints from my right arm to my left ankle and told to hop back to my cell. When I told the guard that I had a bad knee on which I had had surgery, they then made me crawl back to my cell. They did this to me because I raised my voice in protest about another prisoner who was being tortured." The day I left Philadelphia, I went to the offices of Unity 2000, which was in a barely controlled panic as stories of police abuse of prisoners poured in. I spoke with Jason Capell, from Litchfield, Connecticut, a 20-year-old senior at Johnson State College in Vermont. He was very pale, and seemed desperately sad. He had recently been in police custody for 49 hours. We sat in a third-floor hallway of a North Philly warehouse that has been converted to offices and to artists' lofts. He told me his story, which is the story of all of those who dared protest the 2000 Republican National Convention. "I was arrested at the intersection of 15th and JFK Boulevard," he said. "I was in that area watching everything happen, and I noticed that a group of women had locked down. They really needed the support. They were kinda freaking out. There were a lot of cops around. The women were shouting for solidarity, so I jumped in and locked down with them. We were told that we could get up and go with the cops and comply with them. They said if that didn't happen, they were gonna force us. And then they moved in. I was the first person to go. They forced me to let go. Three officers picked me up, handcuffed me, and put me in a bus. "I never was and still haven't been told that I was being placed under arrest. I was one of the first people taken, so I sat on the bus while they got everybody else. We were yelling out the cracks of the windows, trying to get badge numbers to observers, because they were being really, really rough with people who weren't complying. They would slam them around, throw them into seats. They would step on the people in the aisleway. Big huge burly SWAT team kinda guys just throwing people around. "They took us to The Roundhouse, and we ended up sitting on the bus for a couple of hours. Finally, they opened the windows, and we got some air. Once we were taken off the bus, we were put in a garage thing and were given a hose to take water from. That was four and a half hours after I got arrested. They took my picture, put all my belongings, including my shoelaces, into an evidence bag. They took me to a holding cell, and I was in there for a long time, more than 24 hours, before they came and took my fingerprints. A single-person cell was 6X8 feet, and they had six people on average to a cell. Up to 10, we heard of. We had people laying down next to the toilet. "For some reason, three of the people I was with were targeted early. The police picked out a group of about 12 people from various cells, and from what we could tell, they used them as an example. They dragged them to go and get their fingerprints done. We did a lockdown in our cell, to try and stop that from happening. Just holding our arms together. They came to get the person. I was up against the wall, so nothing happened to me, but they were kicking and elbowing people, and we lost our guy. They removed him and dragged him down the hall. He came back an hour later and told us that while they were dragging him they kicked him in the head and other places. "We didn't even get offered food until Wednesday morning at about 8 AM. It was only two slices of bread and a single slice of cheese, and a small milk carton size of iced tea. Shortly after we figured out that was all we were getting for food, we started hearing from the other cellblocks that there was a hunger strike. I immediately joined, and by last count, there were 151 people inside the jail participating. "The jails are really, really bad. The cops would come in waves. They would wait until you had quieted down at like 3 AM and were trying to get some rest, and that's when they would come in and start forcing people to get fingerprints or go to arraignments. People that they perceived as our leaders, even though we don't have leaders, they pulled out and isolated. Everything they did was to try and break the solidarity of all of us. They usually hit the middle cells to try and make them empty to break the communication lines. Even though we couldn't see most of the stuff that was happening, we could hear it. We could hear the women. We could hear the people chanting for food. Every time we heard somebody screaming because they were being beaten up, we would start a chant." Jason Capell kept going, without any prompt from me. If, on the street, some of the protesters were talking in agitprop and lefty code, and they were, I wasn't getting any of that from him. He just really needed to talk. "The police's plans have completely backfired on them, in terms of trying to break our solidarity, our convictions and our personal beliefs. We were all arrested for protesting the prison-industrial complex. Now that we've gone through it and been a part of it, our convictions have been completely solidified. We're struggling to find a way to turn that into something that can be positive and still strengthen the movement. We need to break past the idea of the protesters being the violent ones. It's the system that's violent. Not us. "Looking back on it," he said, "it's really tough to try and accept the anger that I'm feeling. It's so not my personality. But it's just overtaking me right now. In the jail, it didn't affect me so much, just because we were focusing on each other and keeping solidarity. We didn't have time to look at how we were feeling. It was hard, because we were trying to talk to the officers. We understood that a lot of the reason they were acting the way they were was because of their frustration. Our blame is on the superior officers giving the orders, not on the working cops. We talked to them like human beings, and we came to understand their situation. They were all doing mandatory 12-hour shifts. Most of them ended up working much longer with overtime. All the people we talked to hadn't seen their families for days. They weren't getting breaks or anything. They were all hungry and thirsty. They were just like us."
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