by Tom Judd

(cneverman, flickr)

My name is Tom Judd. I’m from East Greenwich, Rhode Island, and the week of September 21st I came to Pittsburgh to protest the G20 meeting. As someone who identifies as an anarchist, I thought it was very important to be in Pittsburgh to oppose the wealthy capitalist powers that were meeting to make decisions about the global economy. There were many different demands being made – for myself, I was part of the bloc demanding an end to capitalism and hierarchical structures such as the G20 which enable the rich to work together behind closed doors to maintain the global political and economic status quo. Protest is a very important symbolic act to me, and this summit seemed to have a lot of really good organizing happening to make it an exciting and powerful experience. There was also a lot of excitement among young people leading up to the demonstrations – I had been at a well-attended workshop put on by Pittsburgh organizers at the national convention of Students for a Democratic Society this summer, and I left with a sense of collective power and a feeling that we would be going into the G20 protests not just as affinity groups or an organization, but as a movement.

The shadow of police repression was present even before I went to Pittsburgh. In the days leading up to our trip, my friends and I were receiving a lot of bad news about the force being used by the state to deny permits to almost all of the marches planned for Friday and to raid local housing spaces and food providers. It felt like the police were doing their best to make it as hard as possible for people to protest in the city, and we were nervous about reports of people being hassled by police for sleeping in their cars in the city because we didn’t have housing when we went down. Some of my friends who were already in the city told us to be careful because there was a massive police and military presence on Thursday night, so we ended up sleeping in a parking lot outside of the city limits on Thursday night.

Thursday these shadows of repression became very real. My friends were acting as medics for the summit – meaning they were there to support protesters and others who were injured, needed water, etc. during the protests. When we arrived at the medic space in Pittsburgh we noted that the area was under surveillance by police vehicles (including U-Haul rental trucks, which we would see many of) with officers videotaping us. The taping of people who are simply gathered together in collective spaces with the intent to protest later seems to be a common practice, as I have observed the same behavior at previous summits in DC. During the afternoon we joined a massive un-permitted march through a lower income neighborhood. This march was almost unable to leave because of a large presence of riot police which almost surrounded Arsenal Park, and was quickly declared an illegal assembly as soon as we headed towards the G20 meeting. Despite the fact that the march had been peaceful and they were in a residential area, the police did not hesitate to use chemical weapons in an attempt to disperse us. I was teargassed along with some friends I had met up with, and when we broke away from the larger group to recover we encountered a woman who had been driving through the area, unaffiliated with the march, and had been exposed to teargas as well. Also present with the police was the LRAD (Long-Range Acoustic Device) sound weapon, which I was never directly exposed to but heard being used with frequency. The police seemed to be using a lot of force in order to intimidate and harass protesters, not only trying to “control” the protests but to stop them. Throughout the afternoon police would use everything from teargas and pepper spray to rubber bullets and beanbags to break up protests as they formed and re-formed.

That night, my medic friends and I responded to an alert that students gathered at the University of Pittsburgh had been teargassed. When we arrived at Schenley Plaza we found many students, some protesting and many watching, lines of riot police gathered in front and on the sides of them, but no sign of the earlier chemical attack. The police increased their numbers as time passed, including mounted officers and an LRAD, and were advancing a foot or so towards the crowd every so often. As the police increased their power, more students and folks there to protest joined the crowd. After around two hours of this there was a change, however, and the police (who had now surrounded three sides of the plaza) cleared the field by pushing people out and using smoke charges and teargas. Once we had been pushed out onto Forbes St., I witnessed an older man who wasn’t moving fast enough for the line of cops pushing him thrown to the ground and arrested. The police swarmed him, and when I called out for a legal observer a riot officer pushed me and tore off the bandanna I had around my face (on a related note, Pittsburgh has no masking laws to begin with). He yelled that I needed to keep moving. When I asked him not to put his hands on me he again yelled at me to keep moving. At that point it became clear that the police were going to do whatever they wanted to. What followed was a genuine police riot – cops teargassing and pepper spraying crowds of onlookers on and around the UPitt campus, chasing and harassing anyone who looked like a protester, and transforming the Oakland neighborhood into a war zone.

I learned later that there had been a militant Bash Back! march near the plaza at the same time this student gathering had occurred, where a number of windows on chain stores and banks (as well as a police substation) had been shattered. It seems likely to me that the police, seeing that even their overwhelming show of force had failed to control the protests, responded with aggression against protesters and onlookers alike. The fiction of a totally secure, policed environment that the city and state government had worked to create was shattered as well, and the cops attempted to re-impose their vision with force.

After this night of violence, we were unsure of what to expect on Friday. We came out to the large permitted march, encountering lines of riot officers on our way, and I marched and chanted with my friends in a large and noisy black bloc. Even at this permitted march the police presence was massive.  During the rally at the end, we were videotaped and surrounded on two sides by riot police, mounted police, and an LRAD. Even at an explicitly “peaceful’ rally the massive police presence was tangible.

While the permitted march signaled the formal end of protests against the G20 for the week, my most direct experience with the pseudo-military state imposed upon Pittsburgh was to come that night at a student rally against police brutality in Schenley Plaza. The situation was ironic, but also to be expected: lines of riot police – some with dogs – along with helicopters, squad cars, and LRAD trucks. It was clear they were making an intimidating display of their power in order to scare students and others from even starting a rally to protest the actions of these same officers. After about an hour, Schenley Plaza was ringed with cops and the large, peaceful crowd (many of whom seemed to be there for the spectacle) was informed that they were an illegal assembly and needed to disperse or face the wrath of the police who had abused them the night before. Some started to leave, but many remained and began to protest the huge armed presence on the UPitt campus and in the city in general. This protesting was not tolerated for long, and the police began pushing forward along Forbes St. using the LRAD as well as their batons and pepper spray to attack anyone in their way. They seemed more aggressive than the night before, as if the gloves were coming off. No doubt they were angry seeing another mass protest in the city, especially one that was explicitly against their actions. Since that night, the cops as well as some ACLU representatives have attempted to draw the line between students and protesters, claiming that the excessive force was a reaction to anarchists/”professional protesters” hidden in and inciting the crowd. This sort of divisiveness is to be expected from the cops but extremely troubling when voiced by liberals, as it simply reinforces the criminalization of dissent in this country.

I have heard and seen many disturbing accounts of police brutality which occurred that night, and for myself and some of my friends we were arrested with around 30 other people as we were dispersing from the site of the protest. While leaving, this group of people was surrounded by police, given no instructions about how to leave, and arrested. Many were either students who had either attended the rally or had simply been in the area of the Cathedral of Learning outside of which we were arrested when the cops swept the area. Together we were taken to a detention facility in the city where we were processed, fingerprinted, and made to sit in plastic chairs in handcuffs. Most of us were not released until 11 a.m. or later, having sat in jail all night. A friend whose hands were losing feeling asked the officer on the bus if they would loosen his cuffs – they refused. The National Guardsmen were giving him a very hard time because he is a veteran who was acting as a medic for protesters and had a shirt which said “Afghanistan: the “good” war”. My friend was the last off the bus, long after we were unloaded. When they were unloading me, I asked them to take care of my friend’s cuffs. The officer gave me a hard time and then said to the people outside that I was “a loudmouth who cared about other people more than [my]self”. Someone else asked to use the bathroom and was refused a number of times – finally they took him off the bus, and when they brought him back on he said they just took him off the bus and put him back on again. When he continued to complain, the officer on the bus told him to urinate in his pants. Someone started singing, and they took him off the bus and he didn’t come back on.

Around 2 a.m. we were unloaded and processed at the detention facility, which had police officers, members of the National Guard, and CERT (I assume Correctional Emergency Response Team members who had been contracted for this job) officers present. I was frisked very roughly, and they took our fingerprints while processing us. While jail was very low-key if uncomfortable for me, I met a number of folks who had been molested by the cops in some way. A female-bodied arrestee that I sat next to spoke of feeling like an animal when the officers were going to cut the septum piercing out of her nose because they couldn’t figure out how to remove it. One man who was there before me had been pepper sprayed during his arrest and had been taunted by the arresting officers afterwards when he asked to be treated. Despite his obvious difficulty seeing and breathing and his repeated requests for help, he wasn’t given any treatment until around 7 a.m. (it was hard to reckon time without my cell phone, the windows in the holding room were covered in newspaper and there was no clock). Besides witnessing these injustices, my most uncomfortable experience was being silenced by the CERT guards when we were trying to speak with each other. Once out of jail, I received all of my belongings but I was know others did not.

Shortly after returning home from Pittsburgh, I learned from the G20 Legal Clinic that I was being charged with failure to disperse and disorderly conduct from my arrest on Friday night (the police had told us nothing). These were charges that were issued to almost everyone picked up on Friday night, and the ridiculous nature of being ‘mass charged’ after being mass arrested should be apparent immediately. What these charges amount to are a penalty for protesting. On my summons I am told that the G20 was a national security event and that I was part of an illegal assembly because the police declared it to be so. These statements, as well as my observations, speak to the fact that the state and its armed protectors were intent upon limiting or stopping all actions aimed at the G20 or pretty much any dissent within the city aside from the few permitted marches they allowed. The police used their power to declare dissent illegal and sweep up large numbers of people on Friday night in the area of the protest because, even if it meant future legal action in the form of civil suits, on the night of the 25th they wanted to keep demonstrations off the streets.

I will be going back to the city next week to dispute these charges and hopefully enter some sort of civil suit for wrongful arrest, but the true defense of our right to protest is not in the US legal system but in building power among us to struggle successfully against capitalism, hierarchy and the state. While we were being chased from Schenley Plaza there were (right) libertarians who were shouting “we have the right to peacefully assemble” in front of riot officers. While this resistance in the face of power was good to see, quoting the “Bill of Rights” in front of overwhelming force employed by the state is ironic at best. “We the people” do not make the rights in this system, and were never intended to. The (generally white, generally male) rulers in suits in secret meetings make and interpret the rules, and the people with guns, teargas and sound weapons enforce them. The police actions at the G20 only highlight something that many poor folks in cities like Pittsburgh know – we are living in a police state. There is no justice here, just us, and we need to support people who have been brutalized and arrested by the police at the same time we’re building power to counter the iron fist of the rich.