| L.A.P.D. Attacks Occupy L.A. |
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
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