Coming to NYC for the RNC next summer?

Hey - please keep us updated on what local people are discussing for possible events and tactics. In my estimation, New York police are really mean and are extremely good at crowd control, and geography (the high density of NYC) works to their advantage. They don't have nearly the area to cover of Los Angeles, or the low number of police of Seattle. The police regularly control huge crowds in Times Square during new year's etc. and they were really suppressing people during the huge antiwar rally last February where they forced people into fenced cages and wouldn't let them move around and drove them away from the rally entirely. Plus look at their history of just violating the law and beating people up.

Last summer, I was at the beginning part of this, with pictures in the link. http://www.endnonsense.org/viewtopic.php?t=216
There were about 15 people with signs, and they were shouting speeches about Bush and so forth. They seemed insane because they had to shout and usually insane people shout, but then when one, who was rather eloquent, used a bullhorn, the 70 police surrounding them came over and threatened that he was about to arrest him for using amplified sound. We left because it was looking dismal, but after this group start to just walk down the sidewalk with signs, the police, who had been smirking and ruining their ability to have free speech during their rally just suddenly struck out and arrested most of them for no reason at all, and threw an older man through a plate glass window for fun.

yeah, i was there for the WEF protests and we were very, very caged in the day of the big, legal protests. (i got sick and couldn't make it to the more renegade stuff, but understand that tons of people got arrested.) it really sucked - we were really squished together and getting out to go pee was a big ordeal, squeezing through people, and then i luckily got back in but a lot of people couldn't get back in the fences after leaving. and there were TONS of cops. the night before the demos i was walking around midtown and there were about 5 cops on every corner.

this is not to scare anybody, but just be prepared for more pork than you'd ever want to see in your life (even if it does come from a "magical" animal.)