Report: Punishing Protest: Government Tactics that Suppress Free Speech (2007) Report, National Lawyers Guild, August 1st, 2007 The National Lawyers Guild has released its second comprehensive report on government violations of First Amendment rights. “Punishing Protest: Government Tactics that Suppress Free Speech” documents how negative portrayals of protest and protesters in the mass media pave the way for a broad hierarchy of governmental threats to the First Amendment. The report includes testimonials from protesters who have experienced firsthand unlawful police conduct; it also documents case histories and chronicles steps the National Lawyers Guild is taking to address escalating threats to civil liberties. Chapter titles include: Protest: A Maligned Tradition; Applying the “Terrorist” Label to Activists; A Catalogue of Unlawful Government Tactics; Police Lies, Tampering, and Videotape; Court Settlements and Decrees to Protest Free Speech and Political Activity; Case Study: Bicyclists Under Fire. [Read more]
Essay: On the Phenomenology of Giant Puppets Broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture David Graeber, Academic Source, June 10th, 2007
A very important background document in that it explores and sources the groundless police accusations, from as early as 2000, that activists at events like the 2008 RNC in St. Paul planned to or actually "threw urine at police". [Read more]
Report: Rights and Wrongs at the RNC (2005) NYCLU (New York Chapter), American Civil Liberties Union, August 31st, 2005 In this report, the NYCLU documents the important events leading up to the Convention, the swirl of activity surrounding the Convention, and its aftermath. Focusing primarily on the NYPD, the NYCLU concludes that the Department performed many of its duties well during the Convention while respecting the right to free speech, and the NYCLU commends the Department for those actions. At the same time, this report documents many troubling NYPD actions and makes a series of specific recommendations for changes in NYPD practices to assure that similar problems do not arise at future large-scale demonstrations. [Read more]
Report: The Assault on Free Speech, Public Assembly, and Dissent (2004) A National Lawyers Guild Report on Government Violations of First Amendment Rights in the United States Report, National Lawyers Guild, September 1st, 2004 The facts assembled in the following pages attest to the pathology of a government so frightened of its own citizens that it classifies them as probable enemies. Mustering evidence from witnesses everywhere in the country (from trial judges in Oakland and Philadelphia as well as from First Amendment lawyers in New York, Portland, Boston, Washington and Miami) the report cites a long list of recent incidents in which various law enforcement agencies (federal, state, municipal) have deployed one or another of the increasingly sophisticated methods of intimidation (checkpoints, rush tactics, pop-up lines, containment pens, mass and false arrests, etc.) meant to negate the freedoms of speech and silence the voices of dissent. [Read more]
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