Reposted. No matter what you think about this, you should read it.
My Occupy LA Arrest by Patrick Meighan
My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “
Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.
I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other
people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a
blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “
Being Peace” when
1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed
in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat
Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the
Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while
we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”
As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used
knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly
removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any
personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across
the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the
Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a
pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy
LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health
professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested
it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact
canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s
dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds,
broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus
across the park. Note that these were the objects described in
subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was
“abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us,
destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to
dispose of while we were sent to prison.
When the LAPD finally began arresting those of us
interlocked around the symbolic tent, we were all ordered by the LAPD
to unlink from each other (in order to facilitate the arrests). Each
seated, nonviolent protester beside me who refused to cooperate by
unlinking his arms had the following done to him: an LAPD officer would
forcibly extend the protestor’s legs, grab his left foot, twist it all
the way around and then stomp his boot on the insole, pinning the
protestor’s left foot to the pavement, twisted backwards. Then the LAPD
officer would grab the protestor’s right foot and twist it all the way
the other direction until the non-violent protestor, in incredible
agony, would shriek in pain and unlink from his neighbor.
It was horrible to watch, and apparently designed to terrorize the
rest of us. At least I was sufficiently terrorized. I unlinked my arms
voluntarily and informed the LAPD officers that I would go peacefully
and cooperatively. I stood as instructed, and then I had my arms
wrenched behind my back, and an officer hyperextended my wrists into my
inner arms. It was super violent, it hurt really really bad, and he was
doing it on purpose. When I involuntarily recoiled from the pain, the
LAPD officer threw me face-first to the pavement. He had my hands
behind my back, so I landed right on my face. The officer dropped with
his knee on my back and ground my face into the pavement. It really,
really hurt and my face started bleeding and I was very scared. I
begged for mercy and I promised that I was honestly not resisting and
would not resist.
My hands were then zipcuffed very tightly behind my back, where they
turned blue. I am now suffering nerve damage in my right thumb and
palm.
I was put on a paddywagon with other nonviolent protestors and taken
to a parking garage in Parker Center. They forced us to kneel on the
hard pavement of that parking garage for seven straight hours with our
hands still tightly zipcuffed behind our backs. Some began to pass out.
One man rolled to the ground and vomited for a long, long time before
falling unconscious. The LAPD officers watched and did nothing.
At 9 a.m. we were finally taken from the pavement into the station
to be processed. The charge was sitting in the park after the police
said not to. It’s a misdemeanor. Almost always, for a misdemeanor, the
police just give you a ticket and let you go. It costs you a couple
hundred dollars. Apparently, that’s what happened with most every other
misdemeanor arrest in LA that day.
With us Occupy LA protestors, however, they set bail at $5,000 and
booked us into jail. Almost none of the protesters could afford to bail
themselves out. I’m lucky and I could afford it, except the LAPD spent
all day refusing to actually *accept* the bail they set. If you were
an accused murderer or a rapist in LAPD custody that day, you could
bail yourself right out and be back on the street, no problem. But if
you were a nonviolent Occupy LA protestor with bail money in hand, you
were held long into the following morning, with absolutely no access to
a lawyer.
I spent most of my day and night crammed into an eight-man jail
cell, along with sixteen other Occupy LA protesters. My sleeping spot
was on the floor next to the toilet.
Finally, at 2:30 the next morning, after twenty-five hours in
custody, I was released on bail. But there were at least 200 Occupy LA
protestors who couldn’t afford the bail. The LAPD chose to keep those
peaceful, non-violent protesters in prison for two full days… the
absolute legal maximum that the LAPD is allowed to detain someone on
misdemeanor charges.
As a reminder, Antonio Villaraigosa has referred to all of this as “the LAPD’s finest hour.”
So that’s what happened to the 292 women and men were arrested last
Wednesday. Now let’s talk about a man who was not arrested last
Wednesday. He is former Citigroup CEO Charles Prince. Under Charles
Prince, Citigroup was guilty of massive, coordinated securities fraud.
Citigroup spent years intentionally buying up every bad mortgage
loan it could find, creating bad securities out of those bad loans and
then selling shares in those bad securities to duped investors. And
then they sometimes secretly bet *against* their *own* bad securities
to make even more money. For one such bad Citigroup security, Citigroup
executives were internally calling it, quote, “a collection of
dogshit”. To investors, however, they called it, quote, “an attractive
investment rigorously selected by an independent investment adviser”.
This is fraud, and it’s a felony, and the Charles Princes of the
world spent several years doing it again and again: knowingly writing
bad mortgages, and then packaging them into fraudulent securities which
they then sold to suckers and then repeating the process. This is a
big part of why your property values went up so fast. But then the
bubble burst, and that’s why our economy is now shattered for a
generation, and it’s also why your home is now underwater. Or at least
mine is.
Anyway, if your retirement fund lost a decade’s-worth of gains overnight, this is why.
If your son’s middle school has added furlough days because the
school district can’t afford to keep its doors open for a full school
year, this is why.
If your daughter has come out of college with a degree only to discover that there are no jobs for her, this is why.
But back to Charles Prince. For his four years of in charge of
massive, repeated fraud at Citigroup, he received fifty-three million
dollars in salary and also received another ninety-four million dollars
in stock holdings. What Charles Prince has *not* received is a pair of
zipcuffs. The nerves in his thumb are fine. No cop has thrown Charles
Prince into the pavement, face-first. Each and every peaceful,
nonviolent Occupy LA protester arrested last week has has spent more
time sleeping on a jail floor than every single Charles Prince on Wall
Street, combined.
The more I think about that, the madder I get. What does it say
about our country that nonviolent protesters are given the bottom of a
police boot while those who steal hundreds of billions, do trillions
worth of damage to our economy and shatter our social fabric for a
generation are not only spared the zipcuffs but showered with rewards?
In any event, believe it or not, I’m really not angry that I got
arrested. I chose to get arrested. And I’m not even angry that the
mayor and the LAPD decided to give non-violent protestors like me a
little extra shiv in jail (although I’m not especially grateful for it
either).
I’m just really angry that every single Charles Prince wasn’t in jail with me.
Thank you for letting me share that anger with you today.
Patrick Meighan [
reposted from]
