POLICE STATE USA

Yahoo/Village Voice: When Cops Play Soldier, Protesters Become the Enemy

After a couple of hours in the cold at the recent anti-war rally, Annie Stauber, 59, felt she'd had enough. Confined to one of the crowd-control pens on First Avenue, she couldn't see a way to maneuver her wheelchair back to the street. She rolled, instead, right into a blue wall of obstinacy, the latest manifestation of the way the war on terror is corroding the right of New York to be its obstreperous self.

The myriad tales of police hostility that have gushed forth since February 15, when hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest a U.S. war against Iraq, extend far beyond a few cops' bad-egg excesses. The police, the courts, the city itself seem to have turned on New York's own residents, as government agencies scramble for security in a perpetual code-orange climate. Rather than providing orderliness and safety, city responses to the demonstration at every level—from courts denying demonstrators a permit to march, to cops blocking people's way to the rally—created chaos and confusion. They cast Americans exercising their democratic rights as, at best, a nuisance to be contained and controlled, and, at worst, as potential terrorists.