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Bring the ruckus

New Orleans, LA

It is a quarter to nine central standard time on Christmas Eve. I leave tomorrow for a much-needed break. I will resume working and writing in New Orleans on January 2nd, next year.

I was at Central Lockup again down at Orleans Parish Prison until midnight.

Yesterday was a hell of a day. I took my man Sean to the airport and made it to Common Ground’s morning meeting by 8:30 to explain the Chief Al case to the new group of volunteers and announce the action. A good turnout of these folks was important. A lot of the core people involved in eviction defense work are out of town. This includes most of the local activists. Like Sean, very few of them are from here and have mostly left to visit their families.

A big concern has been the lack of media interest in Chief Al’s case. The local and national media have been very responsive to most everything we have done around evictions so far. I sent the press release out twice and a young volunteer from Maryland took the time to call each outlet and ask if they would cover. She told me they had been noncommittal, and for the third time, no media showed. This is getting a little mysterious. I hope it was just the holidays stopping them from covering this time, but who knows?

We had about 75 folks and the Chief was in full form again. As smoothly as last week went, last night’s action was the complete opposite. It was a real test. I would say we passed and met the obstacles as well as possible, but there were obstacles at every turn.

The first serious issue arose when we entered Lucky’s. It was a lot fuller than expected and the regulars were all stunned when we entered. A couple of them tried to stop us before we even got started. We were not about to get shouted down by a drunk. We were sober, righteous, and experienced shouters on a mission. We got started and held the bar’s attention until another drunk went completely ape-shit. He tried to get violent, but was too drunk and surrounded to actually do it. Finally, the bar management had him dragged out by a bouncer and a regular. Unnamed employees approached us afterwards and apologized for the wanna-be violent drunk and said that “our boss is an asshole. He treats all of us like an asshole too.”

When we got down to Igor’s main place a few blocks down, they were ready for us. Loyalist employees and regulars physically blocked the Chief at the door. We raised our ruckus in the doorway long enough to clarify our position to the other patrons. It started looking unsafe for our 67 year old Chief.

We went outside and were picketing and flyering the busy St. Charles traffic for a matter of minutes when the NOPD came down heavy.

We got lucky at the last week’s action. National Guard units responded before the NOPD. These troops jumped out of their Hummers with loaded rifles and we immediatly explained what we were doing. The sergeant looked at the flyer, then looked at the Chief, then looked at the crowd. “Well, this is a First Amendment issue. It’s not violent and we have no problem with it. A platoon of Guard MP’s posted themselves up and the NOPD kept rolling by. There has been friction between the Guard troops and local law enforcement. The Guard has intervened already against what it considered abuse or unnecessary police violence. Their presence kept NOPD at bay last week.

Last night was another story. Sixth District NOPD came in fast and hard. The patrolmen arrived with a group of detectives. I had barely introduced myself when the lieutenant detective took over their negotiations. The woman was anything but sympathetic.

Whenever police respond to these kinds of actions, my approach is to calmly explain the grievance behind the action and our First Amendment rights. These commanders and detectives came with intelligence and a mission of their own. “I know why you’re here. I know about you and about your group. I also know you know there is a proper way to resolve this and you decided not to use it.”

I wanted to know where the investigation of Igor Margan was at, if they were so familiar with the situation. We went back and forth on the topics of protest permits and such until she started challenging me about where the Chief was and what steps he’d taken before. Up stepped Chief Al and set this Sixth District Uptown detective lieutenant straight.

The First District knows all about this. All they said is contact the Attorney General and he hasn’t done a damn thing. She maintained the same line of questions, in the most intimidating possible and she was pretty good at being intimidating. Finally the Chief said ”Look, no disrespect ma’am, but I’m not to be made a fool of. You keep asking me the same stupid questions and there is no way to possibly respond. You are wasting your time and you are wasting my time.”

The detective lieutenant visibly shrank. She looked at her detectives and her patrolmen, then she looked at the Chief. “We’re done here. We’re going to leave, just don’t impede traffic.”

Back at our starting point, it got difficult again. A young man from the UC Santa Barbara group was being arrested. I ran over with a local video camera activist we work with and asked the same patrolman from the action what the charge was. “Public urination and lewd conduct.” I tried to reason with him the officer, but he had decided not to issue a citation. The student volunteer’s out of state status meant he had to be locked up until he saw a judge, which would have meant Monday morning. He was about to leave and I took a different line of reasoning. As soon as I started arguing that this was retaliation for protesting, he paused. He knew he was caught then. “Was he one of the ones down there with you? “ As if the cop was in the parking lot to look for people urinating by some chance and wasn’t watching our group. I made clear there was no question this arrest was connected to the protest, not in our minds or our lawyers’ down at the Loyola University Poverty Law Clinic. “I am going to call my supervisor.”

The uniformed lieutenant came quick. He talked to me, his officers, and the kid in the car. He said the arrest was warranted because “the kid ran from the officer” and he was out of state. He conceded to make it a bondable offense.

We were 30 deep at Central Lockup almost as fast as the kid got there. The sheriffs who run the bail window talked to me and the Chief and took flyers: “$515 dollars and he’ll be out as fast as he’s booked. We’re already booking him now baby.”

An hour later the culprit was back at the Common Ground volunteer center surrounded by three young women from his UCSB delegation. They were not subtle in their opinions of his decision making. It was healthy peer pressure, but I couldn’t resist jokingly offering him a ride back to OPP.

Jeremy

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2005 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Jeremy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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Bring the ruckus

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