On Thursday evening, a freed protester would walk out of the Criminal Courts building every few minutes to cheers from a crowd of several hundred supporters. Many of those released were caked with grime; their reports from inside did little to calm worried parents. Protesters, they said, were being held for up to 24 hours in pens at Pier 57, a parking garage on the Hudson River. The floors were covered with dirt and motor oil. Several arrestees said they sustained chemical burns from sitting or lying on the floor.

Julia Gross, a turquoise-haired 20-year-old from Philadelphia, had been held for 29 hours, 13 of them in a small pen at Pier 57 with 40 other women. Because there was only one bench, most of them sat on the floor when they grew tired of standing. "I was lying on the ground and I started getting welts," Gross said. "The next day they started erupting and pussing out." There are two sores on her arm. One is largely scabbed over. When she pulls back the bandage on the other, it's leaking blood and some hideous yellow fluid. She was wearing a miniskirt when she was arrested and there are more sores on her legs. "Imagine that one but huge and bubbling," she said.

Asked about conditions at Pier 57, Jason Post, an NYPD spokesperson, insisted that protesters were spreading misinformation. "It's not the kind of place you want to go for a week of vacation but the conditions were fine," he said. On Wednesday, he acknowledged, the police installed carpeting, suggesting that there was a problem with the floors earlier in the week. But, Post said, "Conditions were adequate prior to that." So where did the protesters' oozing sores come from? "You'd have to ask them," he said.

On Thursday, worried friends and relatives demanding the release of their loved ones weren't calmed by police assurances. Eva Buchmuller, a Hungarian-born East Villager, held a yellow handwritten sign saying, "Free My Daughter Rebeka." Rebeka, she said, had been detained for more than 48 hours. Elspeth Schell was waiting for her 22-year-old daughter Phoebe, who'd also been arrested with the War Resisters.

On Tuesday, the War Resisters had planned to march from Ground Zero to Madison Square Garden, where they were going to lie down in the middle of the street in a symbolic "die in." They planned to get arrested, just not before they broke the law. Instead, they were rounded up near Ground Zero as they marched two abreast down the sidewalk.

It was preemptive. "I was at the march on Sunday and thought the police were pretty restrained," Schell said. "But this is looking more and more like a South American Republic."

That may be an exaggeration. But the kind of mass arrests and long detentions protesters were subjected to this week aren't supposed to happen in New York. In 1991, a state court of appeals ruled that prisoners in New York must be processed within 24 hours or released. On Thursday, State Supreme Court Judge John Cataldo ordered the release of 550 protesters who had been held too long without seeing a judge. When the Police Department failed to let them go, he issued fines to the city -- $1,000 per protester still held by 5 p.m.

The NYPD said that it was simply overwhelmed with the number of convention-related arrests -- around 1,200 on Tuesday alone, and about 1,700 in all. That excuse struck protesters' attorneys as preposterous, given how long the department had been preparing for the demonstrations. "We believe the city of New York improperly and illegally detained protesters," said civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel Thursday night. "We believe the city's plan is to keep protesters detained until George Bush leaves the city tonight. Some people have been held more than 60 hours."

Ordinarily, Siegel said, people arrested during demonstrations take less then 10 hours to go through the system, and sometimes as little as two hours. But he claimed the city has developed a pattern of holding people for prolonged periods during multi-day protests in order to keep them off the streets. As to the city's contention that the large number of arrests on Tuesday created a backlog, Siegel pointed out that people arrested for civil disobedience during the previous five days were also subject to extended detention, even though there weren't enough of them to jam up the system.

Siegel is currently representing 33 people in a lawsuit against the city stemming from the demonstrations against the World Economic Forum in February 2002. Then, as now, protesters were detained for 40 or 50 hours. "We allege in that lawsuit that the purpose was to detain people so they couldn't come back to demonstrate," he said.

When he started getting calls about the RNC arrests, the parallels struck him as obvious. He got involved, he said, when the mother of a 17-year-old Trinity High School student named Richard Prins called him at midnight on Tuesday, saying she couldn't find her son and feared he'd been arrested. The next day Prins' mother called central booking to find out when her son would be released. According to Siegel, "she was told that all the detainees are going to stay until President Bush leaves."

Thanks in part to Siegel's intervention, almost everyone ended up being released by Thursday night. And in the end, the arrests didn't stop thousands from marching from Union Square to Madison Square Garden on Thursday to show, once again, their opposition to the president and his agenda. "I'm still here," said Angela Coppola, a 25-year-old anti-RNC organizer who was arrested Tuesday during an impromptu street party in Union Square and held for 28 hours. "None of us inside had any intention of going home after being released."

Still, standing outside the courthouse, Coppola admitted to a certain sadness about how everything had turned out. "The true tragedy of the RNC," she said, "is that people were arrested for just contemplating saying how much they hate Bush -- while the Republicans are in my city celebrating how successfully they've robbed us."

Recent Stories