New York City Cops Seek Federal Court Approval to Mass Arrest Protesters Without Warning [View all]

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“This is the most significant and most defining legal case on protesters’ rights in the last 40 years, since the mass arrests of May Day 1970,” said Carl Messineo, Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJ) legal director, which represented the protesters. “Mayor De Blasio seeks the authority to arrest today’s protesters in the same manner Mayor Bloomberg falsely arrested Occupy Wall Street protesters by the hundreds.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has agreed to meet in full to reconsider an August ruling that sided with protesters and chastized the New York Police Department for the way it herded and arrested 700 Occupy protesters on the Brooklyn Bridge in fall 2011. It concluded that the cops violated the protesters' constitutional rights and the police did not have “cause” to arrest them.

Attorneys representing the protesters say the NYPD seeks renewed power to make mass arrests after entrapping protesters, as was the case in October 2011, when police walked calmly beside Occupy marchers from lower Manhattan onto the bridge. As a majority on the lower Appeals Court panel noted, most protesters did not hear any arrest warning from police and felt they were led by cops onto the Brooklyn Bridge to continue their march.

http://www.justiceonline.org/new_york_city_cops_seek_federal_court_approval_to_mass_arrest_protesters_without_warning