After the police smothering of anti-trade-liberalization protests in Miami, and of the anti-GOP protests in New York, it's harder than it used to be to assert that we have a meaningful right to assemble and protest in this country.
Stories like this don't help:
Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest: 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.
How convenient.
Why, editing a tape to make an innocent party look guilty of unlawful conduct in order to help suppress others’ freedom of speech is no more than an example of cops and prosecutors being “uncivil,” I think Bricklayer would call it–“ain’t that a kick in the head,” Dean Martin would say–and certainly not any evidence of incipient fascism on the part of any person involved in the prosecution of said innocent party. “Myopic” to see it mentioned here as it so unjustly ignores the pressing issue of how ‘liberal’ professors, by asking a student a question in class or choosing a topic for discussion, provides us the more poignant example of fascistic oppression in these dark times.
Right, Bricklayer?
This is the reason why at every protest there are people whose sole purpose is to videotape, to make sure that cops don’t get away with absurd/ridiculous/random arrests like they do whenever they feel a protest has gotten out of hand. It is also the reason for routine “cop watches”, which keep track of cops while on the beat.