
What happens after you’re arrested at a protest in New York - marcopolis
https://medium.com/@noralev/what-happens-after-you-re-arrested-at-a-protest-in-new-york-975bb34fb47c
======
mschuster91
> This was super distressing for a lot of people, as those belongings usually
> included wallet, phone, and keys. So after you are done at Central Booking,
> you are basically left with no possessions or money, and no way to get into
> your home or contact anyone.

Please, someone tell me this is fucking illegal.

~~~
task_queue
This is standard fare for any police department ever.

It took me about 4 months to get my phone back from the NYPD, which was fun.

I love it when white people are shocked by their first arrest, because it
(unfortunately) means something might get done. The system sucks. Now please
scare other white people about it.

~~~
mgraczyk
"I love it when white people ..."

It's unclear to me why race has anything to do with this. Are you implying
that you expect non-white people to handle "their first arrest" more casually,
as if it is something they are familiar with and know will happen?

If we really want things to improve, we need to stop complaining about how
"white people don't see how bad it is for the rest of us." Focus on what we
have in common, not what you arbitrarily perceive as what makes us different.
The system is shitty for everybody. Your argument would have been just as
informative and a lot more pleasant to read if it didn't begin by partitioning
your readers by race.

~~~
task_queue
I'm white. Systematic injustice has a funny way of being swept under the rug
for years, decades and centuries when it doesn't inconvenience us or when
powerful people of our race benefit from it.

Swaths of people go through this regularly or are targeted and treated, much,
much worse than this guy for the sole virtue of being the wrong race. Somehow,
many white people, especially those in the upper class, never have to see this
injustice ever.

There's a reason MLK's strategy during the civil rights movement worked. It
inconvenienced or scared white people into seeing the injustice of the system
they are a part of and control.

Police brutality and injustice is a side of America we are privileged to be
mostly excluded from. When it becomes our problem, the system at least
attempts to correct itself.

As an aside, for many people I know, the whole police brutality meme really
started brewing when it became common knowledge that cops can come into your
house and shoot your dogs. It doesn't and didn't matter that has been going on
for decades to those of the wrong race or religion, often with deadly
consequences.

------
spodek
> _for every one of the 120+ of us in holding, there was also a cop who was
> waiting there too, being paid overtime and trying to get our paperwork
> processed so that they could go home_

Cops being paid overtime is a tremendous conflict of interest motivating them
to arrest and to process slowly.

~~~
wheaties
I doubt very seriously that any cop does not find the manual paper entry and
time wasted a good thing. More than likely they wanted to go home just as bad
as the "perps."

~~~
arsenide
But it is a potential conflict of interest, hence it is something worth
addressing, no? Especially it's in the best interests of both the cops and the
people.

~~~
pyre
Then again, you could be seen as _punishing_ the cops for making a (possibly
good) arrest by forcing them to spend long hours processing paperwork and not
getting paid. Though, I do agree that the current situation is stacked in a
bad way.

------
revelation
NYPD needs to be disbanded. If you have officers repeating the same conduct
one just got charged with depraved heart murder for, it's out of control.

This stuff is simple enough. Get out of your escort, stand among the other
normal people and do some dogfooding of the police experience. I guess nobody
higher up wants to spend the day doing that, because at the end of it there
wouldn't be anyone still employed at NYPD.

~~~
kw71
When they expressed insubordination by turning their backs on the Mayor, that
signalled to me that they have no respect for authority. This is exactly the
kind of people that do not belong on a police force. I can't imagine why they
weren't all fired. They certainly don't deserve any of the respect that they
get, nor their pensions.

~~~
icelancer
What? They are allowed to express their right to free speech and expression as
well, just as the protestors should be able to.

~~~
agwa
Legally, they do not have the right of free speech when in uniform. See
Garcetti v. Ceballos:
[http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6711908971660042...](http://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=6711908971660042297&hl=en&as_sdt=6&as_vis=1&oi=scholarr)

And as a matter of principle, they should not. When in uniform, a police
officer is not a private person, who has rights, but rather a representative
of the government, which does not have rights, but authority delegated to it
by the people.

Further reading, from an actual lawyer:
[http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/10/18/ferguson-revenge-
of-...](http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/10/18/ferguson-revenge-of-officer-
keith-novara/)

~~~
vacri
Neither of your links support your case.

In the first link, the case is about a memo written as part of the employee's
role; a uniform is irrelevant (district attorneys don't wear uniforms, and the
word 'uniform' is mentioned zero times in the document).

In the second link, the article _explicitly_ states: _" Wearing a badge
doesn’t forfeit the free speech of the person"_. It's abundantly clear that
these police turning their backs on the mayor at a funeral over a political
stoush between the parties are not acting as voices of the government. No
reasonable person would even remotely think that the police turning their back
on the mayor is 'what the government message is'. Those police are _clearly_
not 'speaking' in an official government capacity (and literally are not
speaking at all).

I have no great love for the police, but the correct path forward is a fair
view, not a knee-jerk 'fire them all on principle'. This thread is full of
knee-jerk hysteria, but the irony is that so many people are calling for an
end to multiple people's careers because, while not on duty, the were
literally standing still while facing the incorrect direction. Ironic because
it's supposedly a reaction against undue application of power, and yet the
punishment for facing the wrong way is termination, regardless of whether or
not that officer has abused power elsewhere.

~~~
agwa
> In the first link, the case is about a memo written on duty as part of the
> employee's role; a uniform is irrelevant (and the word 'uniform' is
> mentioned zero times in the document).

The facts are not identical, but the facts are sufficiently similar that you
could cite that case as precedence for arguing that the facts in question here
should be treated similarly. The lawyer I linked to certainly thinks so. Are
you a lawyer?

> In the second link, the article explicitly states: "Wearing a badge doesn’t
> forfeit the free speech of the person".

You took that out of context. "Person" here means the _private_ person, not
the cop representing himself as a cop. The paragraph goes on to say, "the
speech of a person who presents himself in his official governmental capacity
is no longer the individual’s free speech, but the official person’s speech.
And the latter is not free."

~~~
vacri
Speaking of taking things out of context, did you read the rest of my
paragraph, which talks about private speech versus official capacity, and
matches the context surrounding my quote from the article?

 _in his official governmental capacity_ were the words - the
funeral/protesting police were not on the clock on active duty, and as I said,
no-one sane would confuse their message with a governmental message, official
or unofficial.

 _Are you a lawyer?_

?

It's clear neither of us are. So what? You're still misreading the second
article re: private vs offical personage. That article is not saying what
you're claiming it says. And as a result, the first link you provided is also
not supporting your claims. The lawyer you linked to says _absolutely nothing_
about uniforms - the term (and concept) 'uniform' appears nowhere in the
article, but it does talk about the loss of freedom of speech when speaking in
an official capacity.

And no, 'in uniform' is not the same as 'official capacity'. In none of these
cases are they equivalent: the district attorney doesn't wear a uniform;
Novara's phone call was about abusing his official capacity, and he could have
been in the nude when he called, for all it mattered; the police turning their
backs at the funeral are _clearly_ not acting as a government voice and
couldn't be confused to be doing so.

------
MarkG509
Perhaps it time someone built a web site where the opinions, comments, and
especially actions/votes, of every politician running for office, from City
Council on up, were tracked.

Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and
especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just
an election cycle or two.

~~~
Johnie
How about try to increase voter turnout first? No amount of public education
and politician tracking will be useful if only 1/3 of eligible voters actually
vote.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-
politics/wp/2014/11...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-
politics/wp/2014/11/10/voter-turnout-in-2014-was-the-lowest-since-wwii/)

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Low turnout is an acceptable response to an inefficient system where
majoritarianism, gerrymandered districts, ballot access laws, etc. culminate
in a meticulous engineering of the odds being stacked against the voters.

Though, for some reason, voting and "democracy" elicit such warm conditioned
feelings that people are willing to desperately scrape for examples of
whatever small local victories they've secured in order to justify that it's
worth going through the whole jungle. Electoral reform, though? Dead end.

------
JDiculous
It's ridiculous that they're allowed to waste so much of our time, taking
hours to fill out paperwork with pen and paper as if it's the 20th century.
That needs to change. And police officers taking selfies with the people they
arrested and boasting about it on social media should be arrested. So fucking
unprofessional.

------
comrh
> The police officers in the front of the wagon were taking selfie videos of
> the crazy race-car style driving and posting to Snapchat stories that they
> shared with each other and boasted about openly in front of us, laughing.

Mind blowing. The behavior part of the nation is completely up in arms about,
they still see fit doing.

------
tzs
It's out of print and kind of hard to find, but if you can get a copy of
"Rough Justice: Days and Nights of a Young D.A." by David Heilbroner [1], it
is well worth it. (Don't confuse it for the at least 10 other books whose
titles start with "Rough Justice"...).

Heilbroner was a fresh law school graduate who took a job as a New York D.A.,
and then wrote this book about his time there. He started out handling
misdemeanors, and there are a LOT of those. There's basically an assembly
line, running all day and all night, to bring in those who have been arrested,
get their paperwork to a D.A. for charging, get the arresting officer in to
make a statement, and getting a hearing before a judge where the defendant
usually pleads guilty and gets a fine.

The Public Defender has a similar assembly line going.

When his shift would start, he describes walking into the office, stepping
over or around all the officers sleeping in the hall waiting to have their
statements taken, then picking up all the cases that the previous shift was
working on when their shift ended. Often he'd end up in court with a stack of
cases he'd never seen, and have to frantically work to read the notes from the
previous shift and skim the officer's statement as the case was being called.

When his shift ends, the cases he's working on are handed off to someone on
the next shift, and almost always will be resolved by the time his next shift
comes around. So there is no engagement with the case, he's just a cog in the
machine, processing his pieces of paper as the pass through, and occasionally
taking statements from officers, and reading from these pieces of paper in
front of a judge.

Eventually he gets to handle felony cases, which for both the D.A.s and the
Public Defenders are more like what they had in mind when they were in law
school imagining what their jobs would be like--taking a case all the way from
charging through to a trial, and actually making serious legal arguments.

It's quite an eye opener.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-
Young-D/dp/039458...](http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Justice-Nights-
Young-D/dp/0394581911/ref=la_B001KDVXT8_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430629926&sr=1-1)

------
pcurve
"My arresting officer walked me out the door and down the street past the
barricade, where there were volunteers from New York Lawyers Guild waiting to
provide information on legal resources, as well as donuts and coffee."

That must've been a sight of relief. What a horrible experience everyone had
to go through. This is nothing short of intimidation tactic.

~~~
GhotiFish
I don't know how I feel about that. I mean on the one hand, it feels like
ambulance chasing, but on the other, they're providing the exact thing
everyone leaving those cells needed. Food, drink, legal advice.

Do you think turf wars start with competing law-firms over that spot?

~~~
hanumantmk
It's nothing like ambulance chasing.

Their work is pro-bono and the engagement technically starts a bit earlier
than leaving jail. The lawyers guild is also the group that fields observers
to record what demonstrators/police have actually done in protests.

Also the coffee/donuts are usually a separate set of people, lay volunteers up
in the middle of the night trying to keep track of people to make sure they're
processed quickly enough, or to give them said coffee/donut or a couple of
bucks to catch the subway home. The keyword you're looking for is "jail
support" [http://organizingforpower.org/jail-support-
solidarity/](http://organizingforpower.org/jail-support-solidarity/)

------
ZanyProgrammer
I have a really basic question: What crime was she being charged with?
Protesting?

~~~
goodhueytactic
Have you considered that reading the article might give you an answer to this
question?

~~~
GhotiFish
It's easy to miss things. Sticking a piece of information in the middle of the
10th paragraph is a great way to hide it.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
I respect that things need to be done, but I couldn't breath through the
stench of an agenda/propaganda while reading half the article.

~~~
GhotiFish
Could you tell me what the agenda was? I didn't catch it...

Other than making the NYPD look bad of course. That I got.

~~~
lloyd-christmas
"...and the metal bench was designed to be cold and uncomfortable."

Yep. I'm sure they went out of their way just to make her uncomfortable. From
reading the article, I picked up on a person that steps outside just hoping to
be offended.

~~~
GhotiFish
Ah, you're saying that her objective from the start is to make the NYPD look
bad, so she's ham handedly complaining about things that are innocuous.

That's fair, I got the sense from your first post that the article had some
kind of mystery undercurrent of anti-abortion sentiment or something.

------
Quizz
Yep and people are surprised when violence suddenly erupts against the police.

~~~
iopq
No, those people have guns. It's usually against the people in your community
that had nothing to do with it.

~~~
eru
Even in the places where the police don't have guns, like London.

------
voltagex_
I'm not from the States - when this kind of thing happens, does it affect your
future employment opportunities? Will it turn up on background checks?

~~~
pcurve
it depends on the states. Some states offer more protection for applicants
than others. It also depends on position too.

Basically, any arrest record will stay on your record for number of years
including ones where the charges were eventually dropped. But in many states,
employers are either disallowed or discouraged from looking at it.

If there was conviction, it will stay with you. There is no way getting around
that and that will jeopardize your future employment prospect.

------
joshstrange
I honestly didn't think you could be arrested for protesting like this without
at least a warning and even then if only if it turned violent...

~~~
Johnie
From what I've read, there had been plenty of warnings all day.

>The group was on East 17th Street about halfway down the block when police
took a stand and ordered protesters to get on the sidewalk. Before the march,
while the group was in Union Square, police handed out flyers and used
loudspeakers to warn protesters that they would be arrested if they didn't
stay on the sidewalk.

[http://7online.com/news/more-than-140-protesters-arrested-
in...](http://7online.com/news/more-than-140-protesters-arrested-in-new-york-
marches-/687689/)

Here is the flyer that they were handing out:
[https://twitter.com/Azi/status/593536703324905473/photo/1](https://twitter.com/Azi/status/593536703324905473/photo/1)

I mean, look at it that other way. People should not be able to openly
obstruct traffic. If I were to go run out in the middle of Broadway and block
traffic, I would probably be arrested. Just because someone is "protesting"
doesn't give them free reign to violate the laws.

This is why public marches/protests require a permit. These guys did not have
a permit to do so. See: [http://www.nyclu.org/content/know-your-rights-
demonstrating-...](http://www.nyclu.org/content/know-your-rights-
demonstrating-new-york-city)

> You may be able to march in a public street (as opposed to on a sidewalk) in
> some circumstances. To march in a street, you must obtain a permit from the
> Police Department. If you expect to have fewer than 1,000 people in your
> march, you can apply for a permit at the precinct in which the march will
> originate. If you expect 1,000 people or more or you prefer to use mail,
> send your application to: NYPD Investigation Review Section, 300 Gold St.,
> Room 305, Brooklyn 11201. You can download a permit application from the
> front of the NYPD’s website

~~~
mckoss
The right to peaceable assembly in the First Amendment of the Constitution
SHOULD mean that the government cannot require a permit to do so (otherwise,
it wouldn't be a RIGHT).

If a large number of people want to get from point A to point B, even on foot,
an accommodation of normal traffic laws should be made to allow that.

Why the hell are police arresting peaceful protestors?

~~~
Johnie
If I'm reading what you're saying correctly, this is EXACTLY how it works.

The protesters were allowed to peacefully assemble in Union Square. The
protesters were allowed to peacefully march on the sidewalk to anywhere they
wanted to go in the city.

What the protesters were NOT allowed to do is obstruct traffic and walk in the
middle of the street without a permit. The people that were arrested were the
ones that were walking on the streets and blocking traffic.

You only need a permit if you intend to march on the streets. It's the same as
you or I needing a permit to host a parade through Midtown.

------
therobot24
>> I was never read my rights

I thought this was only necessary if the police are going to question you.

~~~
mod
I thought when arrested and charged with a crime.

IANAL obviously.

~~~
privong
It appears that it is only necessary when there is going to be
questioning/interrogation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miranda_warning)

Though, it seems as though the police can skip the miranda rights bit and
interrogate, if they don't want to use subsequent statements or information in
court. There's also the "public safety exception", which doesn't seem to apply
for the situation in this particular account.

------
puppetmaster3
For the data driven types, here is some data from the Economist:

[http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/594593671661641728](http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/594593671661641728)

------
anon4
The system is beyond saving, it's only a matter of time until the people start
rioting and killing cops as a personal vendetta... oh wait.

------
gayprogrammer
This sounds like a totally positive experience compared to how it could have
gone. Not to mention, a giant waste of money.

------
joshkpeterson
Maybe the accelerometers in people's devices could be used to record rough-
riding incidents. There should probably be "black box" devices in all police
cars to prevent incidents like the one that allegedly killed Freddie Gray.

------
golemotron
> I just got back from 12 hours in NYPD holding. If I can get arrested (with
> all of my white privilege and generally perceived non-threatening stature),
> so can anybody. ... Obviously I don’t know what happened in each person’s
> actual arrest, but I do know that the criminal charges overwhelmingly fell
> to people of color and those with more masculine gender presentations.

One of the most distressing things I find about the language of 'privilege' is
that it denies that women can have it as a group. In this last sentence, she
recognizes that women can be privileged over men in some situations.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Privilege theory generally asserts that everyone has some privilege in some
situations. It's just that there's a lot of imbalance between groups in terms
of how often and how much your personal privilege benefits you.

I think you're attacking a strawman here. I'm sure there are people who say
that women have no privilege ever and men have all of it all the time, you
shouldn't judge the entire concept based on the angriest 15-year-old
Tumblrers.

~~~
waqf
Why are you so sure that the 15-year-old Tumblrinas are not the true Scotsmen?

I mean, it's clear that you're defending a more reasonable version of the
claim and GP is attacking a more unreasonable one, but it's not clear to me
which of those is going to win out as the common understanding associated with
the expression "privilege theory".

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I think that the "common understanding" of pretty much any political idea, no
matter where it lies on the spectrum, is going to be mostly composed of
soundbites and tweets and memes, because those are the easiest to ingest and
repost. It's easy to get a strawman idea from that, but to get to to the heart
of an idea you need to read the TL;DR stuff too.

If you're afraid that the superficially furious people are going to win out
over the reasonable, thoughtful people on issue X, then the best thing you can
do is try to understand issue X and promote the reasonable approach to it.
Just saying "All Xs suck as proven by this misspelled Tumblr post" will only
further polarize the dialogue and help shout down (or radicalize) the
reasonable people.

~~~
Flimm
I love it when a conversation moves beyond the typical argument and counter-
argument. Thank you!

~~~
PhasmaFelis
You're welcome! I've been making a conscious effort to be less of a curmudgeon
online these days. I got tired of being angry all the time.

