PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

An Account of Thursday's march - and my thirty six hours in prison
by Chris Ammons Monday, Mar. 24, 2003 at 12:09 PM
ergon25@yahoo.com 1-412-216-0625

for Pittsburgh Indymedia My experience with Thursday's march An account of my thirty six hours in the allegheny county jail 2400 words

So I meet Ana at the University library, like we said we would. And am dashing down the stairs after her. We are very excited. Lots has happened. She has found us a ride into the city with another protester.

Finding parking is difficult in Pittsburgh. And together we scuttle around for twenty minutes trying to find a meter. And give up and go to a garage. And we are there just in time and we happily run into the lines of the march.

Its larger than we thought. Less student. More adult. More walks of life. This is very good.

The rainy-pale-cold-feeling has passed. The sun is coming out and there is good, warm, soon-to-be-night windy breeze.

“Spring has come and now god has turned against the war.”

There are balloons and noiseblasters. Lots of drummers. When a car “honks for peace” a ripple of cheers passes through the crowd.

This is the spirit of parade.

And Bush is a uniter, not a divider

“Whose streets – our streets”
“No blood for oil!”
This is what democracy looks like”
“1-2-3-4 we don’t want your racist war.”

I am becoming more vocal.

Most of the onlookers do not look very annoyed, just confused and sometimes staring in amusement. As if we where some circus troops.

Protesters are blocking a car. The driver is very angry and he tries to ram his way through. Protesters become very angry. Kicking his car and spray-painting the back windshield.

Vans and busses are blocked sometimes too. POGers finger in anarchy circles, peace circles, and heart circles, in series, on the sides of grimy PAT bus windows. Traffic is stopped.

This is the spirit of disobedience. Direct action. Civil disruption. Both spits are with most-everyone until the end. The tactics clash with each other and there is no real solution to it.

The march goes on across the bridge.

There is no traffic on it and it is taken with a feeling of grand celebration.

The police were barely present yet. But once we are out of downtown and onto East Carson street they are amassing a presence.

Demanding everyone off the side walk. Paddy-wagons and riot geared police come up. They are becoming more daring. And force us off the road onto the sidewalk.

I am in passive, nervous civil disobedience – with most everyone else. Going into the streets only in clusters. Careful not to be to far in front or behind.

I race ahead of Ana to a cluster, running around a parked car. I am slammed in the back by a policeman. He screams, with his large build and graying mustache “STAY ON THE SIDEWALK”

Its my first contact with police violence. Almost an honor. Something expected-to-happen-eventually. My back hurts. It hurts for half of an hour. It produces a rage inside to be hit like this. The type I got as a child when I felt so wronged inside that I wanted to burst out in angry tears. But these feelings are easily put aside.

And I am on the street with POGers. We are ahead and cut off from everyone else.

Their batons are out and they are shaking cans of mace.

Everyone is scared.

Someone, with great fear in his voice, starts singing the national anthem.

The march regroups on a back street. Confrontation seems imminent. This march will be different than all the ones yet.

The police have decided to use violence. They have escalated.

Eventually reassembled we are moving back across the bridge into the city. This time distinctly on the sidewalk.

Except for a lone black girl who defiantly walks on until she is rough-handed and arrested. Screaming out “PEACE!” while they cuff her.

Then a few minutes later her girlfriend comes out into the mass of the police. Her face is slammed into the pavement. She is arrested too.

And they chant:

“Shame-SHAME!”
“This is what a police state looks like.”

The police are getting very angry.

There are large scary police dogs.

The march continues on downtown. Now much smaller, more militant and youthful in character. Side walked – only the most daring clustering in onto the street.

Police cars fill the bridge behind us. There is a huge density of flashing sirens. It’s a very shocking and awing.

The police are closing in.

We cross a street and are on a sidewalk.

The writing girl is there. With a sign: “Should children be blown up?”

Police start grabbing signs from us.

They are trying to pull the ones they don’t like from the crowd.

Someone is pulled out and he is beaten on the ground with a baton.

Then they start coming into the sidewalk charging into us after what they want.

More beatings.

They wanted to use tear gas on us – I read this Saturday.

Finally they order everyone up against the wall.

I am handcuffed. I offer no resistance.

* * *

So I’m in the paddy wagon with three other guys. There is friendly conversation and speculation, and painful torn-into wrists by plastic handcuffs, suffered by everyone but me.

We are led out into the station and frisked. They take my backpack and tell me I can’t have it back until Monday.

We are celled. Twenty or thirty in a cell. There were one hundred and twenty one arrests.

A more respectable looking young democrat who knows the governor, who is bragging to us that he will be out in five minutes, is pulled out and threatened, loudly, behind a curtain.

Then the officers come in and threaten us all with a good thrashing. A very difficult night, if we weren’t well behaved.

Someone can’t help himself from giggling. He’s pulled up, slammed against the wall. “I’ll tear your fucking throat out if you mess with me, sit down and be quiet.” And no one says a word.

The only “non-protester” in our cell is a Hispanic looking kid. His face is pounding, swollen-red from a police beating.

When he rubs his eyes and gets mace back in him he begins to violently, painfully thrash around the cell. And we call the guards, but they don’t give one shit about it.

It is all a very rapid introduction to reality. Police will lie and hurt and get their way. The law is nothing because they are the law. We are animals and they can whip us if they want to.

They would hold us as long as they could if they could get away with it. This must be what fascism is. I can see what it must be like to have no rights.

Camp X-ray, the patriot act, the decay of civil liberties – they all, now, have a much more real meaning.

I will join the ACLU.

We are left alone and calmed down, and then are all talking again.

There is an older man, who was arrested with his son. He is so calm I am wondering if he is an observer. When he told an undercover agent, dressed up as one of us with a peace sign, that they were from Iran, they were taken away and arrested.

There is a bail-bond form. Everyone fills it out. I keep my pencil. I get paper from the young democrat, and start writing out the day.

I can write on toilet paper too. And there is plenty of time for me to write but I don’t. I’m soon to drained and numbed for anything creative.

We are moved, rearranged again and again, from cell to cell.

And eventually this stops for the night. I am settled down for the night with a dozen others in H17.

There is optimism on everyone. We will be out in just a few hours more.

But we aren’t getting out. It is past midnight and no one passes our cell for hours. Everything is just speculation. Soon enough it is clear that this will be at least an overnight.

The worst part about the cell is that it is all hard concrete. I get maybe an hours rest. I wake up after light dreams, with an asleep leg, sore back, and a hurting hand.

Its thirty-six hours of sleep deprivation. No one else gets any real sleep either.

And no real food. A meager ration of cornflakes and milk in the morning. Then baloney sandwiches for lunch and dinner. The sandwiches are so plastic smelling, so devoid of sufficient-taste, that I give my second one away.

Everyone is very starved. But I’m not very hungry. Or sleepy either. You don’t get sleepy when its impossible to sleep.

I am one of the quieter ones in the cell. I pace around and drink lots of water. Fragments of Bruckner and Mahler are repeating. I am thinking of Ana and hoping she will be ok – that she will bond. That her suffering will be sustainable.

Time wars down shy barriers and in time we are all talking to each other.

We are becoming friends but we all hate it here and we want to go. Much more than we want to make friends.

Most of it is about the situation. The police brutality, the shittiness of jail and a want to be out of it. The injustice of this whole thing.

The night is a radicalizing experience for him. It is for everyone there who was not already there.

Cops will never look the same.

Jail is intensively inhumane.

There is no clear end to the night since there is no real sleep. No real change.

It is one very long day.

In the morning we are shifted more. Into two different cells, then eventually back to where we were.

Sometimes prisoners will go through. A black man a cell down is screaming “Fuck Bush” for fun.

The prisoners are led out. They are in red suites. Nine are black. One is white.

We are amused and sustained by making fun of the guards. There is general Robocop – also known as twitchy, officer poopy-finger, and just a really really fat cop.

The sun is out Friday morning and we think we will all be out very soon. By mid-morning a few names have already been called. A public defender talks to us and he tells us that they are going to try to get us mass arraigned.

But it is afternoon and this clearly isn’t happening. Two or three people are called away every hour. It becomes clear that we will be here all night.

Frustration and anger come on. There is some crying. Angry fists bashed into the door. To just get one call through so so-and-so will know where I am and that I am all right.

The guards won’t tell us anything. If they respond they will lecture us and say that we shouldn’t have been on the streets. This is our punishment. This is a prison and not a playground. One of them calls us “sons of the rich.”

For three hours after dinner, no one is called away and no guard is to be seen. A blinder is set up so we can’t see down the bended hall.

I am numbed further and further as the day goes on, physically and mentally deteriorating. I am pacing about with barely a legible thought as if my IQ had dropped twenty-five points.

My face is a mess. I pick away at the yellow scabs. My infection crawls across my chin.

I am still stable through this. Keeping a long-term mind. Packing again and again around the cell. Sitting down when my feet are tired. Getting half an hour here and there of non-sleep sleep.

I am one of the most controlled ones. I am not yet stressed out.

A headache starts. A sign of minor dehydration someone says. Because I’m drinking lots of water, but pissing the rest of my body-fluids away.

The day is going further and further on and I am going further off. I will miss the symphony. How I wanted to see Brendell (And Bruckner’s 7th was playing!) And now I will most probably never see one of the greatest pianists who ever lived.

When we began there were about twenty people in our cell. And slowly there is less and less. We set up a pot. The last one in gets five dollars.

After pleading civilly with a higher officer we get more information, and a paper. They say they are trying to get us out.

We read the Post-Gazette and its depiction of the night is full of lies and half-truths. We read about anti-French venom. American war-success. An editorial that ends in “thank god for George W. Bush.”

There is an amazing boot of morale then when we learn that there have been protests outside the jail all day long. Marching around, they are chanting “let our friends go!”

Slowly we filter out and eventually I do. I am out at about eight. There are eight left thee after I am gone. And it takes five hours for them to filter in to our next cell before we can move further on our way out.

I’m finger printed. My photo is taken. By then I’m feeling barely aware. Headached away. A walking zombie.

So then we are in another holding cell, one with “real prisoners.” A self described gangster from the hill district. Mostly black but some white. DUI charges. A drunk man snores like a vacuum cleaner, somehow able to fall soundly asleep on the concrete bench.

And these are some of the hardest hours. It goes on past midnight. Past 2:00. Past 4:00. I pace around and around and just try to keep pacing. That is all. My feet hurt from all the walking.

So in the early morning they take me away again, handcuffed and footcuffed this time. There is a final holding cell and the stay here is short. We are in front of the magistrate for two minutes and he reads three of us our charges and gives us papers and that’s it. We are free.

“Our friends” are still outside. About half a dozen left. There are hugs for everyone. A cell-phone to call the parents on. A ride to home. Blankets. Brownies. Cigarettes. Such a feeling of friendship. Ana is alright. There are all cheers when the last prisoner is out (I am fifth to last.) And the sun is out and it is morning.

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