The following is a message from Amy Partridge, who was arrested in Chicago under the Patriot Act while exercising her constitutional rights. Press accounts of these arrests last Thursday are inaccurate: please help us get this message out. -- Matthias Regan
Dear all,
I want to warn you all about what happened to hundreds of peaceful protesters, myself included, at the rally and march on Thursday night in downtown Chicago. Both the rally and march were entirely peaceful. I saw not one instance of civil disobedience or aggro behavior. Police escorted us on the March and onto Lake Shore Drive. We were never asked to disperse or threatened with arrest. When police prevented us from marching on Michigan Ave marchers moved on. We were, however, surrounded by hundreds of police a few block later and prevented from leaving. No one around me intended to or wanted to be arrested. Everyone asked to be allowed to leave and disperse. I have since heard this was not how the media reported it but more than once the crowd chanted “let us go” and “we will disperse.” The police told individuals who asked that they could leave from some other side of the crowd but in EVERY instance I witnessed this was not the case and no one was allowed to leave, including a 17 year old boy and his 14 year old sister. At first police rushed the crowd and pulled out 10 people at a time. I and everyone around me was arrested despite the fact that we were standing on the sidewalk (not in the street) and that we asked again and again to be allowed to leave since we had done nothing illegal. A cop grabbed me, put me in cuffs, and told me I was being charged with mob action and that I should be glad I was not in Iraq. I have since heard that people were allowed to leave much later but we were told that everyone would be arrested sooner or later.
Close to 300 (at least) women were held in custody for hours. I was in custody for over 20 hours. Despite the fact that we were told that we be released as soon as we were processed, I was held in a jail cell from midnight until 4:00 pm the next day. During this time I was not allowed a phone call, not read my rights, and my charge was not explained to me. We were all told numerous times that we would be released on I-Bonds, meaning once we were processed (mug shots taken and finger prints sent to the federal registry) we could sign ourselves out. A friend of mine came to get me at 8:00 am and was told I would be released by noon. By 2:00 she was told I had been “lost” and might not be “found” or released until Monday. When she offered $100 cash at 4:00 (despite the fact that we had been told explicitly numerous times that we did not require bail money) I was “found” and released. Only because a cell phone had been smuggled into my cell block was I able to contact this friend or to hear the news that they were suddenly and inexplicably requiring $100 bail to release us. The police allowed no one to call friends and family to arrange this payment. We were all told that if we got arrested again within 24 hours of signing our bond we would be charged with a FELONY. Waiting parents and friends were told that if we SO MUCH AS SHOWED UP AGAIN AT ANOTHER RALLY we would be charged with a felony. This, of course, cannot be right. But this is the mood of Ashcroft’s America.
The average age of the arrestees as far as I could tell was between 17-25. No one I met had ever been arrested before or had had any intention of being arrested for civil disobedience Thursday night. At least 3 women that I met were tourist that had gotten trapped in the crowd. This fact was explained both by the women themselves and many of the protesters but they were treated no differently and as far as I know held for the same amount of time as the rest of us. While some the cops were fine, a number threatened us and many ridiculed us. They treated us with disdain and disgust and booked us as though we were terrorists under the new Patriot Act and not peaceful protesters. It was a miserable and shocking experience. This may have been the most egregious response and it may be that no other peaceful protesters will be trapped and arrested as we were. But I recommend if you intend to go to any future protests that you make sure you have a number of a lawyer or the ACLU memorized. I would also suggest that you let someone know you are going and that if you do not call them upon your return that they should check to see if you have been arrested. Those of us that had it worst and were held the longest did not have anyone waiting for us and demanding our release.
All the best,
Amy Partridge
PhD Candidate Performance Studies
Northwestern University
Holy shit. What is happening to our country? HOw can you get past this? Can you sue them? No, what good what that do, you would be looked at as a freak. In fact every protester is already portrayed as a freak by the media.
What can we do?
While this is shocking in its own right, it seems right in line with what I expect of big city police departments. I was at the Chicago protest, and saw about 20 cops in full riot gear chasing one person because he did not move onto Michigan Ave. fast enough. The whole thing got pretty bad after that.
Posted by: J L on March 27, 2003 05:59 PMThe most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.
Posted by: Marian on January 18, 2004 07:48 PMThe rest of our conversion follows a similar vein. Instead of going through line by line, let's just compare end results: when the transition is complete, the code that used to read:
Posted by: Beatrice on January 18, 2004 07:49 PMNote first that favoriteNumbers type changed. Instead of our familiar int, we're now using int*. The asterisk here is an operator, which is often called the "star operator". You will remember that we also use an asterisk as a sign for multiplication. The positioning of the asterisk changes its meaning. This operator effectively means "this is a pointer". Here it says that favoriteNumber will be not an int but a pointer to an int. And instead of simply going on to say what we're putting in that int, we have to take an extra step and create the space, which is what does. This function takes an argument that specifies how much space you need and then returns a pointer to that space. We've passed it the result of another function, , which we pass int, a type. In reality, is a macro, but for now we don't have to care: all we need to know is that it tells us the size of whatever we gave it, in this case an int. So when is done, it gives us an address in the heap where we can put an integer. It is important to remember that the data is stored in the heap, while the address of that data is stored in a pointer on the stack.
Posted by: Andrew on January 18, 2004 07:49 PM