Report from within the roundhouse By Rolando de Aguiar
Conditions within the Roundhouse, police headquarters at 8th and Race Streets are degrading. As of 5 p.m., detainees had not eaten in 10 hours, while police had suspended bathroom privileges.
R2K media received a call this afternoon from "Joyful," who was picked up yesterday at the Ministry of Puppetganda, and has spent the past 24 hours in a dirty cell, hungry and thirsty.
Though her group remains in a holding cell, with access to a phone and the R2K legal team, the conditions in that cell are "extremely unsanitary," with nowhere to sleep with a dirty floor, and with restroom privileges suspended or reduced, the sanitary conditions continue to worsen.
Around noon yesterday, police raided the Ministry of Puppetganda at 41st and Haverford. The activists were packed aboard a 36 person "school bus, painted with police colors" and driven from West Philadelphia, to the Roundhouse, then to Northeast Philadelphia's condemned Holmesburg Prison, and finally back to the Roundhouse. During this entire trip, the prisoners were not offered water. In the heat, the only opening in the bus, with 32 people aboard, was a "one-inch crack in the top [roof] window."
In the evening, while at the Roundhouse, waiting in the bus to be brought in to the facility, a particularly horrifying incident occurred, when an overweight man slipped into unconsciousness, and slumped between two seats. Due to his weight, he could not be moved into a safe position. After some 20 minutes of screaming from the detainees aboard the bus, during which Joyful was holding the man's head up, police entered. Rather than assisting the man medically, they roughly dragged him through the bus, and finally into the building.
Shortly thereafter, the bus, filled with 32 people, was offered a 16-ounce bottle of water.
The activists were ultimately brought into the police headquarters, around 1 a.m. They were fed at 7 a.m. Ten hours later, they had not been fed again.
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"Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality." -- Mikhail Bakunin