James Gaites has an excellent first-person account of his recent experience of very civil disobedience during the Republican Convention. Death and Life in New York: Three Days in the City for an RNC Protester.
There is surely grist for the mill here for everyone. The police arrested many people whithout cause, including bystanders. They also penned up protestors and then arrested them for failing to disperse, having made it impossible.
Once arrested, it's obvious that at the very least NYC did not make much effort to process protestors either as quickly as the law required or as quickly as they could have, indeed managed (intentionally?) to put them on ice for the entire convention. And the outdoor pen in which people were held may have had biohazards that people were forced to sleep on. Sanitation was rough.
On the other hand, there were no systematic beatings, some food was provided eventually, and even people who were clearly guilty of parading without a permit were released without fines. No one disappeared, and now they are free to write about it and to litigate.
How do we score this? To call it a 'win' for civil liberties is to set the bar far too low. Yet, is the term 'political prisoner' really apt? If so, it's the mildest confinement regime for a 'political' I ever read about.
