Here in New York, a 63-year-old climate activist and musician was arrested Thursday and now faces up to seven years in prison for performing a piece by Bach during a protest outside the headquarters of Citibank. John Mark Rozendaal, a professional cellist, was arrested alongside 14 other peaceful protesters, who encircled Rozendaal to shield him from the police while he performed in the public plaza. Rozendaal spoke briefly before he started playing Bach’s “Suites for Cello.”
John Mark Rozendaal: “We’re here for freedom of speech. I’m playing music here today because we are taught that the purpose of music is to sober and quiet the mind and make it susceptible to divine influences.”
His words were interrupted as his fellow activists urged him to start playing as police approached. The protest was part of the “Summer of Heat on Wall Street” campaign, which has been targeting Citibank with peaceful demonstrations all summer. Some 500 people have been arrested since the actions started.
The point of these police assaults is to intimidate people into giving up. And, to some degree, they work. The DAs can keep these arrests on their records and use them for subsequent arrests. Citibank can push a litany of civil injunctions against them (restraining orders, for instance). Police can just make shit up (drunken disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, terrorist threats, whatever they feel like) and leave the victims to contest it. Eventually, its just a question of how much money you’ve got for your defense lawyers and how unfriendly a judge the DA can find to participate in the harassment.
Look up the history of Steven Donsinger, a plantiff’s attorney for an Eucadorian community that sued DOW Chemical over failure to clean up a nasty spill. The way the federal judiciary treated him brings the very core conceits of our civil justice system into question.