Bad attitude is not a crime and you have a constitutional right to taunt the police at a demo. If they bust your head for doing it, I and other Guild lawyers will defend you zealously. But the question here is not rights but smarts. You have a right to do lots of things it's dumb to do. Pointlessly provoking armed men and women who have a certain degree of immunity to bust your head and throw you in the can is basically annoying to everyone. It distracts from the point you might have been trying to make at the demos (end the war, etc.) and causes NLG lawyers, who work enough pro bono hours as it is, unnecessary unpaid work that might have gone to defense of people the cops brutalized without provocation. Besides, do you want to have your head busted and be thrown in the can just to make the point that cops can act like pigs? Don't they make that point clear enough a lot of the time without provocation? Why wave, ahem, red flags in front of angry bulls when there's no purpose to it or need for it?
--- Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/19/07, Liza Featherstone <lfeather at panix.com>
> wrote:
> > I certainly didn't mean to imply that these
> particular plaintiffs had
> > deliberately provoked cops or claimed they lived
> in a "police state."
> > This was a more general comment -- I have been to
> and covered many,
> > many protests and seen many protesters taunting
> cops on purpose, and
> > heard many, many demonstrators yelling "this is
> what a police state
> > looks like." This is extremely common and it's
> important to be honest
> > about that to a left audience, so that readers
> know these folks are
> > not just whiners or macho show-offs but actually
> have a real case.
> > The sentence wasn't a description of the RNC
> protesters -- I agree
> > they were extremely disciplined.
>
> But why play the "good activists, bad activists"
> game? Especially
> since it's not as if it's legal for the police to
> mass-arrest people
> and detain them for a long time under horrible
> conditions if some
> young people taunted the police, yelled, "This is
> what a police state
> looks like," and so on? "Bad attitude" is not a
> crime, unless perhaps
> in a police state. :->
> --
> Yoshie
> <http://montages.blogspot.com/>
> <http://mrzine.org>
> <http://monthlyreview.org/>
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