The Police Are Rioting: A Report from the G-20 Streets, Pittsburgh 2009

by David Rovics, professional musician & G-20 protester.

There is a popular assumption that, although other countries such as Iran or China don't have freedom of speech and of assembly, we do. And that it's what makes us so great. Anybody who has spent much time trying to exercise First Amendment rights in the US now or at any other time since 1776 knows that the First Amendment looks good on paper, but has little to do with reality.

I can tell you from experience that I have witnessed police riots before, during, and since the Bush years. Most recently, last Friday in Pittsburgh PA. In a nutshell, here's how it went down.

Wednesday night, September 23, 2009

I drove to Pittsburgh from a gig in Allentown, listening to BBC, NPR, CNN, etc. on my satellite radio. The coming G20 talks were in the news. The most powerful people in the world, the leaders of the world's richest nations, were meeting in Pittsburgh to decide the fate of the planet, to decide how to deal with the economic crisis, the climate crisis, and other crises caused by industrial capitalism gone mad, crises which affect each of us intimately, crises about which many of us naturally want to do something. Crises about which we would at least like to voice our concerns.

Notably absent from the news is anything about the lawsuits that the ACLU had to file to force the authorities to allow any demonstrations or marches to happen at all. Permits applied for months ago by state senators, peace groups, women's groups and others were only granted in the past couple weeks. Many other permits were never granted. It doesn't say anything about applying for a permit in the First Amendment, and in many other more democratic countries than ours no permit is required for citizens to assemble. In many European countries, if citizens choose to have an assembly in the streets the role of the police is to escort the march in order to divert traffic and keep things safe, and no permit is required. But not in the US--not in Philadelphia or Los Angeles in 2000, not in Miami in 2003, not in Denver or St. Paul in 2008, and not in Pittsburgh last week.

While various progressive organizations were trying hard to work with the intransigent authorities, other groups took the sensible (but in the US dangerous) position that this is supposed to be a democracy and we should not need to apply for a permit so that the authorities could tell us where and when we could and could not protest.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

The first nonpermitted march that I heard about was Thursday afternoon. I should mention that I and many other people I talked to were having strange problems with our cell phones. The problems started in whatever states we came from and continued in Pittsburgh right up until yesterday. People I talked to, friends, and fellow engaged members of society such as Cindy Sheehan, Joshua White, Sarah Wellington and others reported the same phenomenae. Every time one of us received a call we couldn't hear the caller, though we could hear our own voices echoing back to us. When we'd call back it usually would work then. Coincidence? Sure, maybe.

Reports I heard over the phone on Thursday from people I talked to were in between bouts of catching breath and running from the police. Reports on the local media (the only mainstream media doing any serious coverage of the protests, mainly connected to the traffic reports) said the police were restrained (what else are they supposed to be?) until the march reached a certain point, at which time it was declared to be an unlawful assembly and the crowd was dispersed. How? There was no mention.

Usually, and outrageously enough, if there's a meeting of the global elite happening you are not allowed in unless you're part of the gang or you're a lobbyist or a (officially-sanctioned) journalist. Usually a perimeter is formed by the police, Secret Service, FBI, and other enforcement agencies there, that you can't cross. This was also the case in Pittsburgh. But like Miami in 2003, St. Paul in 2008, and other occasions in recent years, the authorities were not just being on the defensive and maintaining a perimeter around the meetings. They were on the offensive.

If this happened in Iran or China it would be called martial law. But here in America we never have martial law, apparently, even when the military and the police are jointly patrolling the streets with armored vehicles and weapons of all descriptions and attacking people for the crime of being on the streets. Any gathering other than the permitted march (which was a great, festive march involving many thousands of participants from all walks of life, albeit with a ridiculously large, armored and menacing police escort) was declared an unlawful assembly and then attacked. I saw it myself on Thursday night and then again, much worse, on Friday night.

And what kind of unlawful assembly are we talking about? Hundreds of students and others, a few of whom may have broken a window or two at some point during the evening in the course of being pursued by violence-prone riot police, who were ultimately gathering on the grass on the university campus. They had no weapons, they were unarmed, mostly youth, mostly college students from various parts of the country, along with perhaps an equal group of local college students, most of whom were just curious and didn't even have anything to do with the protests, many of whom in fact were just wondering what there is to protest about! They soon found one thing to protest about: police brutality and active suppression of our Constitutional rights.

I have no doubt that the Pittsburgh police have radicalized many local students who had previously been apolitical.

Friday night, September 25, 2009

On Friday night I went to a free concert on the campus. It ended around 8 pm. Over the next two hours there were more and more riot cops arriving. Why? Because a few hundred young folks were planning on gathering on the green at 10 pm. Many of them came by bicycle, after having engaged in a criminal, nonpermitted mass bike ride around the city. I returned in my rental car around 11 pm along with Cindy, Joshua and Sarah.

If the police had made announcements for everyone to disperse (as I'm sure they had at some point) we were too late for that. What we arrived in the midst of was a police riot. We parked on the street in front of the campus and walked on the sidewalk on the campus. Within seconds we saw a young man on a bicycle, a student at that very university, being violently tackled by two riot cops, thrown down to the ground with the police on top of him. All of the police--all of the time--were dressed in black armor head to toe, many of them driving armored vehicles.

The young man with the two cops on top of him cried for help, perhaps not realizing that there wasn't much anyone could do other than take his name, which he was too freaked out to pronounce in a way that anybody could understand. Within seconds we found ourselves running from a group of cops, along with a bunch of young folks who had their hands in the air, hoping vainly that this might deter the police from attacking them. It didn't. Off the campus, a block away, police were running in groups in different directions, penning people in, throwing them to the ground, hitting them with clubs, handcuffing them and arresting them.

The four of us got separated. Sarah and I were running and were about to be boxed in by police coming in different directions. After I was clubbed in the back by a cop with his truncheon, we ducked into the front of the lobby of the Holiday Inn and started talking with guests, other protesters, and various students who had also gone there because they were afraid to be on the streets. Fifty feet away, in either direction, the police were assaulting and arresting people, individually and in small groups, picking them off the sidewalks.

Cindy and Joshua had ended up running in a different direction, through clouds of tear gas. They ducked around a corner just in time to watch dozens of young people, running away, being shot methodically with rubber-coated steel bullets in the back. One friend of mine said he saw someone who had ten welts on his back from being shot ten times. On both Thursday and Friday nights the authorities used their fancy new LRAD weapons, a sound-based weapon that causes people to flee because it hurts their eardrums so badly.

At every turn you could hear the sound of shocked students who had never seen or heard about this sort of thing happening, who were struggling to come to terms with what they were experiencing: "They're just attacking anybody on or near the campus, they're not differentiating between us and the protesters!" Some of them seemed to think that it might be OK to club protesters as long as you don't club the students. Others had concluded that attacking people for hanging out on the grass was over the top.

Eventually, by 1 AM or so, Cindy and Joshua were able to move without being fired on. They joined Sarah and me in the comfortable patio of the Holiday Inn. Some of the Inn employees were trying to keep protesters out. But if you could afford to buy a drink, you were no longer a protester, but rather a guest of the bar. Before Cindy and Joshua arrived, a convoy of limousines pulled up to the hotel, and then security locked the doors. You could still go in or out, if security opened the doors for you.

Going in and out of the bar, we passed by none other than Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, and his entourage, who were staying that night in the Holiday Inn and watching a big Australian rugby match on TV. In our confusion at having just escaped the riot police only to find ourselves ten feet away from the Australian Prime Minister, Cindy, Joshua, Sarah and I were at a complete loss as to what we should say to the guy. We talked about what we could say, but by the time we were getting close to a plan, he had gone to bed.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

The next day, I joined a couple dozen friends and acquaintances outside the county jail where people had spent the night, waiting to get out on bond. Most folks got out on bond, others were (and perhaps still are) being held on a higher bond, waiting for friends and relatives and comrades to come up with the money. Talking to people just out of jail I heard more horror stories. One man, Gabriel, told of being kept outside between 2 and 6 AM in the rain, and then being held in a cell where he was handcuffed to a chair along with another man, not able to stand or lay down, for 13 hours.

In Connecticut this morning I got a call from Cindy Sheehan, who had just gone to the Emergency Room because she was having trouble breathing. People around her the night before had been vomiting profusely as a result of the tear gas.

Why Protest Matters

Protest, however, matters. The end of slavery, the banning of child labor, the fact that most working class people live to be past 30 these days, is all a direct result of protest, of democracy happening in the streets: marches, strikes, rebellions, and all manner of other extra-parliamentary activities. The authorities are well aware that democracy is in the streets; no matter what they say. That's why dissent is criminalized. Because as soon as we are allowed to have a taste of our own power, everything can change. It has worked, and it will again. But the powers-that-be will continue to do what they do best: to try hard to make sure we don't know how powerful we are.

We don't have freedom of speech or assembly and we never have, but it is through all kinds of unlawful assemblies--from Shays' Rebellion to the Civil Rights movement--that change happens. So here's to the next Pittsburgh, wherever it may be. I hope to see you there, on the streets, where our fate truly lies.

David Rovics is an activist and musician. Billie Greenwood condensed and reposted this with his permission. The complete text , found at http://www.songwritersnotebook.blogspot.com/, was published 9/27/2009 at 7:16 PM.

David sings songs of social significance. His webpage is http://www.davidrovics.com/index.php

His music is available for free download at

http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=111310

It is also available on iTunes.