IMHO: this view point written with poignancy expresses the world view which economic interests i.e. the 1%, the power, wealth, me first denizens of the apocalypses with the ideal "we will survive by driving beneath the wheel",
" The tired, poor, huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. ... these, the homeless, tempest tost'
As the Prophet and self proclaimed 'Son of God' once said;
"Lazarus come forth!"
'Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"[11]
(Reuters) - New York City reached a preliminary agreement on Wednesday to pay $21,500 each to roughly 300 people who alleged they were cornered and abused by police during a June 2020 racial justice protest following the killing of George Floyd.
The proposed settlement that still needs court approval would award $21,500 to each of the more than 300 people arrested, and it would place New York City alongside a handful of others, like Minneapolis and Denver, that have similarly settled class claims alleging police abuse during the summer of 2020.
Despite the optics, those settlements are hardly "accountability," in my view.
The agreements admit no wrongdoing, and generally do not address Americans' rights to free speech and assembly at all. Most lack any binding terms on law enforcement to protect protesters in the future or hold individual officers and their superiors directly accountable for violating their Constitutional rights. Moreover, it's not officers, sometimes not even police departments, that bear the financial burden. Insurance policies and taxpayers often foot those bills. A New York Police Department spokesperson told me on Wednesday that officers were dealing with an especially challenging situation and that the "NYPD remains committed to continually improving its practices in every way possible."
Taking a step back, a review of recent court decisions regarding law enforcement’s violent suppression of Black Lives Matter demonstrations during the summer of 2020 shows how the judiciary has failed to adequately protect Americans’ right to protest in the wake of one of the largest social movements in U.S. history.
A wave of litigation against law enforcement has followed the protest movement, as some police officers across the country met mostly peaceful protesters against police brutality with even more police brutality, deploying so-called “non-lethal” weapons that blinded and maimed and forcefully cleared out demonstrations in public streets.
Scenes of police violence played out in front of the world, and the apparent abuses drew international condemnation even before courts considered the formal legal questions.
Thus far, the cases over some of the most noteworthy incidents have been largely resolved, often through settlements favorable to the government or in rulings clarifying that U.S. law enforcement have broad leeway to quell non-violent protest based on fears of disorder alone.
For example, the federal government has settled the most significant claims in four lawsuits against the Trump administration for violently clearing out demonstrators in a park near the White House in June 2020. In April 2022, two federal police agencies committed to making modest changes — mostly reiterations of existing policies and law, such as agreeing to prohibit race and sex discrimination — in exchange for dismissal of the historic claims.
In other litigation, federal courts in February issued decisions in two high-profile cases by protesters in Portland, Oregon, a city that saw some of the most pronounced instances of unrest and police violence. The law enforcement response there generated widespread criticism because of the presence of unidentifiable federal troops in unmarked vehicles who were arresting people, seemingly at random.
A U.S. district judge in Portland on Feb. 14 threw out an excessive force claim against an unnamed federal marshal who shot protester Donovan LaBella in the face, causing LaBella to suffer a brain injury.
In the other case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Feb. 2 reversed a lower court's decision and rejected an ACLU-backed case filed by protester Mark Pettibone, racial justice groups and journalists, alleging that federal agents arrested them without cause during the 2020 Portland protests.
The U.S. Justice Department, which is representing the government defendants in the cases, did not respond to a request for comment.
In both cases, the plaintiffs were effectively blocked from challenging police conduct by a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision issued shortly after the peak of the protest movement, which insulated federal officers even in cases of intentional abuse of authority. The high court’s conservative justices granted near-absolute immunity to federal officers for Constitutional violations in Egbert v. Boule, saying they couldn’t be sued unless Congress had passed a law speaking to the specific violation committed. The ruling gutted a 1971 precedent by a different set of justices that established that people have a broad right to sue federal officials for damages to vindicate their Constitutional rights.
Applying Egbert, the lower courts in Oregon held that Congress hadn't spoken to the specific allegations in the LaBella and Pettibone cases, citing various factors, including that high-level officials were involved in directives to clear out protesters in Portland. (LaBella can still file an appeal and has a remaining tort claim against the federal government.)
Those decisions illustrate how the judiciary’s view of the right to assemble leaves Americans who wish to protest law enforcement at the discretion of the very authorities they seek to challenge. They reveal an anti-democratic trend in which police responded to the largest informal and peaceful protest movement in U.S. history with violence, and lawmakers responded largely by further curtailing protest rights — all with judicial approval.
U.S. courts have consistently under-protected those seeking political change and racial reckoning through public demonstrations, Drexel University School of Law professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj wrote in a 2021 law review article about the role of the courts with regard to the 2020 protest movement.
In “opinion after opinion, federal judges balked at the task of drawing a line that law enforcement cannot cross when policing disruptive protests,” El-Haj wrote. (El-Haj said she was not available for an interview.)
That same approach occurred in January when the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed claims by youth organizers in the St. Louis area who alleged that police declared Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 to be unlawful and cleared them out to silence them. The court held without much discussion that police can declare an assembly unlawful even if there’s no crime, according to the Jan. 19 opinion.
Taken together, the rulings show how the judiciary has served to support a police and legislative backlash against one of the largest — and most diverse — social movements in our history.
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