All Hail the Police State

I wasn't in New York last Summer during the RNC, but there are more than enough stories of the ill manner in which the Bloomberg Administration and the Polic treated those who were. These included a makeshift gulag that held people without charge (and generally without cause) for several days.

And now there is this:

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.

Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.

Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."

Could there be a bigger indication that the American ideal most all of us espouse and love is widely ignored?

Unfortunately, it is all too common a habit that those who people disagree with or disliked are tarred with all sorts of evils because we figure they must have done something wrong anyway.

How else could bug-eyed Nancy Grace have a chance to hyperventillate every evening on television. I seriously doubt Ms. Grace has ever considered any charged individual to have been wrongly accused. Yet here are hundreds, perhaps thousands of examples of injustice. Will her program touch upon it? Of course not, there is a celebrity freak to convict.

But it is more pernicious than just a dyed-blond bobblehead. This sort of behavior is seen in court rooms across the country from more police officers than just Mr. Wohl. They focus their recollection of events to justify their actions, to justify imprisoning or punishing those they dislike or disagree with...and when you can do it with a badge it is especially pernicious.

New York in the Summer of 2004 was hardly the most oppressive event that ever happened in this country, or in New York for that matter...not even close. But it was still shameful and there should be a glaring media light shown upon this.

But there probably will not be.