And the number four—as in four people together in the capitol rotunda constitute an unlawful assembly, and are subject to ticketing or arrest? Well, that’s just a convenient number to assure adequate police staffing, since for every four people he’ll need twelve cops.
And this isn’t about free speech or the First Amendment—it’s simply about following the rules and the procedures. He—David Erwin—doesn’t make the law; his job is to enforce it. And there are people complaining—they can’t work, they can’t hear the phones, they can’t do business.
But they wouldn’t listen to reason, would they? They had to keep gathering illegally, singing during lunch hour, refusing to vacate—so what choice did the police chief have? He put handcuffs on ‘em, and dragged them away.
And yes, he’s sorry that he called the protestors terrorists, though he didn’t, really. He actually said that some of them were terrorizing people, like the protestor who sang a song making reference to a policeman whose father had recently passed away. That’s pretty hard to take.
My dad was a journalist, which is why I include the clip below of David Erwin speaking to a Milwaukee TV anchor. And sitting quietly in his chair, far from the action, it all seemed reasonable. But then I remembered how it played out. Here is what happened to Damon Terrell, who wasn’t even participating but was simply observing:
The story for Terrell worked out well: in early September of this year, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said he wasn’t going to press charges against Terrell. But what about the thugs in uniform? Are they getting off free?
Yes and no. In the interview, Erwin states that if people don’t like the rules, go and change ‘em, or try to. And people did. A young assistant professor of medical physics, Michael Kissick, who had been protesting in the capitol, no longer felt it was safe to do so. But it bugged him to be silenced, and so he went to the ACLU. And in April of this year, the ACLU slapped a lawsuit in federal court against the Department of Administration, in charge of the state capitol, stating that requiring citizens to obtain a permit was limiting free speech under the First Amendment.
Here’s part of what Kissick said:
I stopped protesting inside the Capitol at that time because of police behavior. Officers whom I once trusted to explain how I could exercise my First Amendment rights without being cited or arrested suddenly turned on everyone who was protesting. Suddenly, the police wouldn’t answer my questions – they looked right through me, in fact, after a year and a half of very good relations. They were randomly citing peaceful protesters, claiming that they were violating rules and regulations that were constantly changing. They provided a phone number to call if we had questions, but nobody I know who called the number ever received a response. I lost trust in the police completely. Protesting inside the Capitol became unsafe for me.
Time for the backstory. One of the interesting facets of the Wisconsin protests of 2011 was the extraordinary relationship that the capitol police had with the protestors. Why? It came down to—as it curiously often does—one man, the leader and the chief of the Capitol Police. Also curiously, I wrote “leader” without thinking in the sentence above, briefly pondered whether to delete, and decided no. Because the chief of police at that time was a guy named Charles Tubbs; here’s the Wisconsin State Journal’s backstory on him.
The danger of getting in trouble with the law is something Tubbs, 57, saw firsthand growing up in a tough neighborhood in Beloit. Several of the children he grew up with are either incarcerated or dead from drugs or violence. His two older brothers ended up in jail, he said. Both were eventually freed but died as a result of violence more than a decade ago.
So Tubbs turned to religion and sports, went on to become a cop in the Beloit Police Department for 30 years. He made his way up to Deputy Chief of the department and resigned after 30 years; in 2008 Governor Jim Doyle named him chief of the Capitol Police.
And Tubbs had been influenced by a remarkable cop, David Couper, who had been the Chief of Police in Madison during the tumultuous protests in Madison during the Vietnam War. And what had Couper done?
Couper was all about dialogue, protecting free speech, getting close to people and creating relationships. All of a sudden, cops were going into crowds, talking to people, explaining the rules, asking for cooperation, and pledging to protect.
Tubbs, in turn, talked to union officials on February 12, 2011, the day after Wisconsin governor Scott Walker said he was gutting the state unions. And he kept up that level of communication all throughout the protests in the state capitol, in which tens of thousands of people were protesting. His goal? Zero arrests, and remarkably, he achieved it.
Not, according to Sue Riseling, the Chief of Police for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, without considerable difficulty. Riseling, in her book A View from the Interior, praises Tubbs for “incredible grace under pressure;” she also felt that he was too close to the unions. And there were other frictions as well among the top cops (Madison Police were also involved) involved in what was an explosive situation. How can it not have been? Riseling says it all when she writes: "What can the police do with such a divided community?" Riseling said, asking the question she's still considering.
Time for the passive voice: mistakes were made, tempers were lost, briefcases were slammed on desks….
My view? It was a triumph of policing. Other view? Tubbs didn’t understand his job, which was to keep order in the building.
And Tubbs, understandably, didn’t want to go through round two, which he knew was coming with the recall election. So he quit. Can you blame him?
Walker, of course, was less than heartbroken, though his spokeswoman murmured words of praise and gratitude for his efforts during a distinctly difficult time. And Walker lost no time in putting his guy, David Erwin. Here’s how he did it, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
Gov. Scott Walker's administration rewarded the new hardline Capitol Police chief and his top deputy with double-digit pay raises earlier this year after moving the pair on paper to phantom jobs for two weeks and then back to their real posts.
Chief Dave Erwin — who has overseen a crackdown on Walker protesters at the statehouse — received an overall salary hike of 11.7%, to $111,067 a year, the same rate as his predecessor. That amounts to an $11,680 annual raise.
It is, according to Peter Fox, who was the employee relations secretary under Republican governor Tommy Thompson, legal; he also says he doesn’t like it.
Neither do I.
Well, as you saw in the video above, the Capitol Police did become “hardline.” But what happened to the federal lawsuit against them, filed by the ACLU on behalf of Michael Kissick? Read on:
The Department of Administration and the ACLU of Wisconsin Foundation have signed a settlement on a federal lawsuit involving permitting requirements for state Capitol protests. Under the settlement, announced Tuesday, groups like the Solidarity Sing Along will need to give notice, rather than obtain a permit, to gather at the Capitol. Nevertheless, the parties are still clashing over the interpretation, if not the terms, of the agreement.
The Department of Administration, the defendant in the suit, says the settlement recognizes that the state's permitting process is "constitutional."
"The permit process has been repeatedly upheld as constitutional by the courts, and today's settlement demonstrates ACLU's agreement with the process as well," said Mike Huebsch, secretary of the DOA, in a news release.
But Larry Dupuis, legal director of the ACLU of Wisconsin, calls that claim "bizarre."
"It's pretty astonishing, because it's nowhere in the agreement," says Dupuis. "They tried to get it in the agreement and we said absolutely not."
At last we come to the point. Here’s what the Madison paper Isthmus had to say two days ago:
Capitol protesters are no longer just contesting the tickets they've received for participating in the Solidarity Sing Along. They're filing their own complaints against the Capitol Police officers who wrote the tickets.
On Tuesday, Bob Syring and Jerry McDonough filed some 15,000 complaints with the Capitol Police, alleging officers engaged in harassment and other misconduct in issuing about 250 citations to protesters between July 24, 2013, and Sept. 6.
"I hope this gives them pause to think what they did was wrong," says McDonough.
Syring says they are filing many complaints from third parties -- that is, complainants who did not necessarily witness the arrest but are "aware of what has gone on."
Yeah? Third party complaints from people who did not witness the arrest but are “aware of what has gone on?”
Let’s make it 15,001!
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