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Giuliani's 20 Person Parks Rule Selectively Enforced by Robert Lederman
When street artists and vendors held a protest this past Wednesday 2/23/2000 at City Hall Park we got a first-hand experience of exactly what the Giuliani administration intends to do with its 20 person permit limitation on freedom of assembly.
My co-organizer for this protest, Hyun Lee of CAAAV (Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence 212 473-6485 xt 100) a group which advocates for Chinatown vendors, spent a week applying for a permit to hold what we knew would be a small rally in City Hall Park. She met and talked with numerous police officials, respectfully filled out all of their forms and answered all of their questions. Parks Department and NYPD Intelligence officials also called her office with additional questions. One that they seemed especially keen on getting answered was, "Will Robert Lederman be there?"
The officials strung her along with a promise of a permit to assemble and a separate sound permit right up until 10 AM on Wednesday morning when the rally was scheduled to begin. As the vendors and artists began to arrive at the fountain in City Hall Park in the belief that this would be a "legal" protest without police threats we were approached by a group of police officials and informed we'd been denied a permit. No reason was given.
We then moved the protesters, most of whom spoke no English, to the very wide and virtually empty public sidewalk outside the south corner of the Park where thousands of demonstrations have been held, generally without a permit, since NYC was first incorporated. The police followed and informed us that based on the 20 person rule we were still violating Parks Department law and would either have to move the protest across the street to a much narrower and far more congested sidewalk or face arrest. They explained that Parks claims 500 feet in any direction from a park and that we were therefore still under their jurisdiction even though we were standing on a public sidewalk outside a park. Giuliani has not as yet created a 20 person limit rule on NYC streets.
At that point I stepped in, did a head count (there were only 19 demonstrators there at that point many of whom were female vendors and their children) and told the police we would not move the protest but would, to avoid arrest, send additional protesters across the street as they arrived. The police surrounded the protest and made a few further threats but by then there was a considerable media presence and I began addressing them on the 20 person rule and how it was being applied to silence the Mayor's critics. Due to the television cameras the police backed off and eventually fifty or sixty vendors participated in defiance of Giuliani's law.
At last year's public hearing on this rule (9/22/99) Parks Commissioner Henry Stern and the Parks lead counsel Thomas Rozinski attempted to downplay the rule and how it would be enforced. Commissioner Stern told reporters who called him after receiving my press releases on the proposed rule that I was lying about how the rule would be used, about what it said and even about it being changed. At his press conference on 9/23 Giuliani also lied to reporters claiming the 20 person rule didn't exist and that such a rule would never be enforced.
Then on 12/8/99 34 members of an African American activist group, the Zulu Nation, were arrested in a park near their public high school on Staten Island at 3:45 in the afternoon and charged with, "unlawful assembly". Their crime?. They were holding a completely peaceful and quiet meeting for prospective members of their group in a park because they had no other facility in which to meet. While the City has called Zulu Nation a "street gang" they describe themselves as a community service and arts organization. One can reasonably assume they are not campaign contributors to or major supporters of Mayor Giuliani.
On 1/19/2000 the City dropped all charges against the 34 defendants. In a 1/20/2000 Staten Island Advance article the District Attorney's office explained that to get a conviction they'd of had to prove that someone had, "called a meeting and then gave a speech".
In a 12/3/99 Daily News article the City further explained the law, making its purpose much clearer. "For an "impromptu gathering" of 20 or so people, "Don't worry about it," [Parks Department Counsel] Rozinski said." The Cyberpark mailing list posted the final version of the rule on 12/3/99 which reads as follows:
>>NOTICE OF ADOPTION OF FINAL RULE
AMENDMENTS TO CHAPTER 1 OF TITLE 36 (56?) OF THE
OFFICIAL COMPILATION OF THE RULES OF THE CITY
OF NEW YORK.
The final version of Special Event. "Special Event" means a
group activity including, but not limited to a performance,
meeting, assembly, contest, exhibit, ceremony, parade, athletic
competition, reading or picnic involving more than 20 people or
a group activity involving less than 20 people for which a
specific space is requested to be reserved. Special Event shall
not include casual park use by visitors or tourists.<<
In other words the City won't enforce the rule against casual visitors or tourists but only against community activists who would dare to, "call a meeting and give a speech". Could one imagine a more blatant attempt to violate freedom of speech or freedom of assembly? Could one invent a more explicit example of selective enforcement? Again please note, the Parks Department and the NYPD Intelligence division both contacted Hyun Lee to determine if I, Robert Lederman, would be present while deciding on whether to issue a permit. One can be certain that if I was a noted Giuliani apologist rather than a Giuliani critic we would have gotten our permit or more likely, not have needed one at all.
Those who are supporting Giuliani for Senate generally claim to love this country, the American way of life and the rule of law. I have no doubt that they are sincere, but unfortunately they are mistaken about the real views of their candidate. Behind his phony charts and false statistics, his ludicrous claims to want to put the Ten Commandments in schools and his pronouncements about improving "quality of life" Rudy Giuliani is an outright enemy of civil rights and is a chronic violator of freedom of speech. He uses his team of 680 lawyers in the NYC Corporation Counsel and hundreds of additional Giuliani appointed lawyers infesting every NYC City agency to fashion unconstitutional laws and then selectively enforce them against minorities, the poor and the Mayor's political opponents. When these lawyers are not occupied in deconstructing the Bill of Rights or obstructing justice they are kept busy arranging favors and special deals for Giuliani's wealthiest supporters.
Giuliani is a criminal and his administration is a criminal enterprise. The Mayor likes to say, just look at my record of accomplishments. I agree that we should. However, if one looks at the Mayor's "accomplishments" the issuance of an arrest warrant rather than a campaign check would be the most appropriate response.
Excerpted from: Daily News 12/3/99 'Casual' Groups Get Free Park Use "Retreating from a strict rule that would have required many picnickers and partyers to pay to use city parks, the Giuliani administration will allow casual park users and tourists to continue having their fun free. A controversial regulation that took effect this week requires any group of more than 20 people to get a $25 Parks Department permit for everything from poetry readings to parades to picnics held at city parks. It replaces a longstanding but erratically enforced parks guideline. Facing outrage that City Hall was slapping a price tag on the use of public parks, officials slipped new language into the final version exempting "casual park use by visitors and tourists" from the permit fee. The rule never defines casual use, but park officials said the change is intended to clear up ambiguity about who has to get a $25 permit, and who doesn't...For an "impromptu gathering" of 20 or so people, "Don't worry about it," Rozinski said."
Robert Lederman is an artist, a regular columnist for both the Grenwich Village Gazette [See: http://www.gvny.com/ ] and Street News, and is the author of hundreds of published essays concerning Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. His essays and letters have appeared in the NY Times, NY Post, Daily News, Newsday, Brooklyn Bridge, Park Slope Courier, The Daily Challenge, Amsterdam News, Sandbox, Penthouse, Our Town, NY Press and are available on hundreds of websites around the world. Lederman has been falsely arrested 41 times to date for his anti-Giuliani activities and has never been convicted of any of the charges. He is best known for creating hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator.
Robert Lederman, President of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics) ARTISTpres at aol.com (718) 743-3722 http://www.openair.org/alerts/artist/nyc.html