As he bankrolls toward the 2020 Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee, Mike Bloomberg has yet to apologize to the innocent bystanders who were swept up in the mass arrest at the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York and held in intolerable conditions for as long as 50 hours.
Bloomberg was in his first term as mayor after an election in which his initial chances seemed as slim as they initially were in his current presidential run. The innocents in 2004 included a playwright who was on her way from a bookstore to buy a Frosty at Wendy’s, an astrophysicist-turned-rising-star in the financial world, a 15-year-old diabetic high school student on her way to the movies, and a Canadian university professor who authored a highly regarded book on the Lincoln Memorial.
The hapless bystanders were scooped up along with large numbers of protesters, some of whom had announced plans to shut down a city that was still jumpy from the 9/11 attacks three years earlier. All were handcuffed with plastic ties for extended periods and confined in chain link cages on a pier known to be contaminated with asbestos and toxic chemicals from its prior use as a bus depot. Prisoners were denied phone calls and, in a number of instances, medical care. The floor was coated with a mix of diesel soot and oil waste that triggered skin rashes on those who lay down.
ADVERTISEMENT
What the police termed a “Post Arrest Staging Site” on Pier 57 acquired a nickname inspired by the American detention facility in Cuba and an idyllic upriver hamlet, Hastings-on-Hudson: “Guantanamo-on-Hudson.”
With 9/11 still fresh in everybody’s mind, the police argued with some merit that they could not let protesters block Manhattan thoroughfares at a time when the city remained the No. 1 target of terrorists. The ever-present possibility of another attack meant streets had to be kept clear for emergency vehicles and ambulances, particularly around the convention. A federal judge subsequently noted that “the City faced threats of terrorism and... the RNC (Republican National Convention) faced a particularly large threat of violence and disorder.”
But in making the mass arrest of 1,803 people with the help of orange mesh netting, the cops were at time no more discriminating than fishing crews using drift nets. Anybody in a netted off area was arrested. One cop was quoted in court papers telling a protester that it was his fault innocent people were being grabbed.
“You fucked up, punk! It’s because of you punks they are being arrested.”
Another cop is quoted telling an innocent party, “Sorry, but you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Bloomberg himself told reporters afterwards, “You can’t arrest 1,800 people without having somebody in the middle who shouldn’t have been arrested. That’s what the courts are there to find out afterwards.”
Before they reached the courts, a considerable number of innocents first had to undergo a two-day nightmare that began with the trauma of being suddenly rounded up, handcuffed and crammed into cages at Guantanamo-on-Hudson. The charges against more than 90 percent of all the prisoners were either immediately dropped or dismissed after six months.
New York officials were well aware that a considerable number of innocents had been arrested. That was the time for Bloomberg to have apologized.
Instead, the city insisted in court papers that it had not “violated any rights, privileges or immunities under the Constitution or laws of the United States or the State of New York,” adding that its representatives had at all times “acted reasonably in the proper and lawful exercise of their discretion.”
The city continued to deny it had erred even after it made an $18 million settlement in a federal lawsuit whose lead plaintiff was Deirdre MacNamara, the playwright who was on her way from Barnes and Noble in Union Square to a nearby Wendy’s for a Frosty on Aug. 31, 2004. She had started up Fifth Avenue, where others were out enjoying the summer afternoon.
“People were walking, just walking,” she recalled.
She was approaching the corner of 17th Street when her stroll literally took an unexpected turn.
“A police officer said, ‘You can’t continue walking up this way any more,’” she told The Daily Beast this week.
The edict applied to anybody walking that way.
“We were told to turn left onto 17th Street,” MacNamara recalled. “I don’t think anything of it. I really didn’t care... It was all the same to me.”
She and the others did as instructed.
“I just started walking and walked into an orange net,” she remembered.
The net was held by NYPD officers.
“I hadn't really seen them used,” MacNamara said. “On TV maybe. Not in real life. I said, ‘OK, this is new.’”
She figured on just turning around and walking back the way she came.
“The cops said, ‘Just stay here,’’” she said.
The police ordered everybody onto the sidewalk and she complied along with maybe 150 other people who had been hemmed in. Some apparently may have been either on the way or coming from a protest. Nobody appeared to have been doing anything illegal.
“Then more cops came, then more cops came,” she remembered. “I said, ‘OK, this is getting real.’”
The cops began taking out plastic zip-tie handcuffs.
“I said, ‘OK, I guess I’m not leaving.’”
She and the others were soon sitting on the pavement in handcuffs.
“Things are getting a little weird,” she later said. “We were at this point still talking to the police officers. They were saying, ‘It’s nothing. Nothing is going on.’”
The police loaded them onto buses that took them to what she would later call “the infamous pier,” arriving around 8:30 p.m. She shared the reaction of numerous prisoners to the toxins.
“I immediately broke out in some sort of weird dermatitis,” she said. “We remained in handcuffs about eight to nine hours. I’ve got nerve damage in two fingers to this day.”
She was able to get some relief because she is double jointed.
“So, I was able to dislocate one of my thumbs and forefinger and I wriggled them out,” she recalled.
She and her fellow prisoners moved about in disbelief.
“Not really understanding what has happened,” she later said. “I kept thinking, ‘They’re going to let us out soon, they’re going to let us out soon. The sun came up and I was going, ‘I’m going to be there overnight,’ then, ‘I am here overnight.’”
She and the other prisoners were shuffled around from cage to cage. There was one porta potty for every 100 people.
“There were far too few toilets for the numerous people held in the various cages, no toilet paper and no place to wash or cleanse herself of the filth and toxic chemicals and other substances that were in the cages even before the prisoners were placed here,” her subsequent lawsuit notes.
Around 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 1, they were handcuffed and loaded into vans. The driver of her van made a sharp turn and MacNamara was pitching forward when the handcuffed woman beside her managed to prevent her from taking a header.
“She saved me by biting my shirt,” MacNamara recalled. “She literally had my back with her teeth.”
Some more than 1,500 prisoners were crammed into the holding pens at criminal court, with more held elsewhere.
“I knew I was looking at a bunch more hours,” MacNamara said.
The initial shock had worn off and the question of what happened gave way to the question of what was happening.
“People were starting to lose it,” MacNamara recalled. “Nobody knew what we were doing there, when anything was going to happen, when we were going to make phone calls, talk to somebody.”
“You had to be out protesting,” one of their captors said.
“Some people were out protesting, but, myself included, we were walking the streets in our city and we were rounded up,” MacNamara said.
At one point, a corrections officer took MacNamara aside.
“He said, ‘Look, just so know know, you guys are not going anywhere until after George Bush gives his address and leaves,’” MacNamara recalled.
Around 10:45 p.m., after more than 50 hours, McNamara was finally released.
“Sure enough, it was after the convention was over,” she recalled.
She was starving and went to a Johnny Rockets diner.
“I got grilled cheese and drank like eight Cokes and I was sick as a dog the next day,” she said.
She became the lead plaintiff in case 04 CV 9216 in MacNamara et al v. City of New York, brought in Manhattan federal court by many of those who were detained, including protesters.
Among the other bystanders was Deepa Majmudar, a senior portfolio manager at J.P. Morgan with a PhD in astrophysics from Columbia University. She was enjoying a day off from work by stopping into a book store and then reading in Union Square. She was walking to catch a bus home when she encountered a line of police officers on motor scooters.
“Blocking her way and refusing to allow her to proceed,” the suit notes. “Shortly thereafter, Majmudar was ordered to sit on the sidewalk, where she was arrested and handcuffed.”
One of the protesters informed the police that Majmudar was an innocent bystander. The suit quotes a cop as telling her, “Sorry, but you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The suit further notes, “Following her arrest, Majmudar remained handcuffed for many hours, causing extreme pain and discomfort in her left shoulder, which persist to this day, and swelling in her hand.”
Shahrzad Ghahremani was a 15-year-old high school student who was walking with a friend to see a movie on 34th Street when they encountered a group of protesters two blocks from the theater.
“She asked a police officer where she could go to avoid the protest,” the suit reports.
The officer instructed her to continue uptown. She started across the intersection only for other cops to detain and arrest her. Her age did not save her from being handcuffed and consigned to Pier 57 for several hours before being taken to a juvenile detention facility.
“Ghahremani was denied medical care or attention, despite the fact that as a diabetic she needed insulin,” the suit says.
Christopher Thomas was a 44-year-old art history professor at the University of Victoria in Canada and author of the highly regarded The Lincoln Memorial and American Life. He was visiting New York with his teenage son and they were heading from the Empire State Building to catch the subway to Yankee Stadium. They had tickets for that night’s game.
They paused so the son could take some photos of the famous New York Public Library. They were approaching the front steps when they saw the police arresting some demonstrators.
“Thomas was approached by a police officer, who shouted, ‘Get outta here, you’re blocking the street,’” the suit says. “Thomas was not blocking the street and noted to the officer that the officer was ‘blocking the steps’ to the Library, to which the officer instantly replied. ‘That’s it! You’re under arrest. You’re goin’ in, you’re a collar.”
The suit adds, “Thomas explained to the officer that he was a tourist from Canada with his young son who was unfamiliar with New York City and requested that he be permitted to speak with his son to ensure his safety, which request was denied.”
Thomas was handcuffed and transported to Pier 57, where he joined Majmudar, Ghahremani, MacNamara and possibly hundreds of people who were not guilty even of the minor charges that were used as a pretext to hold them until the convention was over.
MacNamara, who is an actor and a yoga instructor and a mental health care coordinator as well as a writer, was left with the memory of “a scary few days” and the knowledge that such a thing could happen when she was just out for a summertime stroll.
“I lost a lot of faith in my country,” she told The Daily Beast this week. “This is a terrible loss. I was not raised that way. My parents are children of immigrants. Everyone is here doing their job. No one’s perfect but they are here for a purpose. They’re doing their best.”
She is not surprised that Bloombeg has never apologized.
“He’s not sorry,” she said. “He’s not one bit sorry.”
As the 2020 Democratic Convention awaits, this wrongly arrested innocent bystander from the 2004 Republican Convention says of Bloomberg, “If he were my only choice against Trump, yeah, I’ll vote for him, because Trump is worse.”
The significant difference, in her view, is not that Bloomberg himself is better, but that Bloomberg does not have fervent followers such as comprise Trump’s base.
“[Bloomberg] is more like a boss... He has money, but he’ll never inspire loyalty.”
Bloomberg might inspire more votes in the 2020 campaign if he does apologize for the mass 2004 arrests, as he has for mass stop-and-frisks during his time as mayor. He might also try being generally more forthright about having said and done his fair share of stupid and just plain wrong things, particularly regarding women. He can still rightly claim to have saved thousands of lives with his ban on smoking in public places, including bars, a move that was termed political suicide when he did it simply because he felt it was the right thing to do. And he has been fighting to save thousands more with his efforts to reduce gun violence.
Meanwhile, MacNamara never did get that Frosty, even though it is now offered in vanilla as well as chocolate.
“Since that time, I’ve become a vegan,” she said.
