Prometheus 6

The lesson is simple: In the United States of America, you don't arrest people simply because they assemble to protest government policy.

$2M settlement is a cop wakeup call
Tuesday, August 19th 2008, 9:24 PM

Around 8 a.m. on the morning of April 7, 2003, Sarah Kunstler, daughter of legendary civil rights lawyer Bill Kunstler, joined a small protest in Manhattan against the fledgling Iraq war.

"I was in law school at Columbia at the time," Sarah Kunstler recalled Tuesday. "I had my knapsack and books with me, and I thought the demonstration was early enough so I'd be able to get to class on time."

She thought wrong.

Kunstler hadn't counted on the ironfisted crowd-control tactics the NYPD had begun to adopt, tactics the department would later employ in even more shocking mass arrests at the Republican convention in 2004.

That day in 2003, Kunstler started walking in a picket line outside the offices of The Carlyle Group, a major war contractor.

"After about half an hour we were surrounded by cops in riot gear," she said. "I'd never seen that kind of response. There were more of them than there were of us."

Police immediately cordoned off the street and allowed no one to enter or leave. Then, without any announcement, they started arresting all the protesters on trumped-up charges.

This according to dozens of witnesses and the NYPD's videotape of events that day, all of which came to light as part of a 2004 federal civil rights suit that the Bloomberg administration finally agreed to settle Tuesday for $2million.

The case is called Kunstler et al. v. New York City.