M20 afternoon pix

This was a homeless man whos only crime was getting in the way. The Officers were chasing a black blocer and collided with this man,who inadvertantly had walked between the and their prey. I watched as two "peace" officers batoned this man after he was on the ground, then arrested him. As I tried getting the involved officers name and badge numbers, I was pushed and told to "mind my own fucking business." thank you Officer Riordan, for making the world a safer place.

I had to miss the protest because of family matters, but it feels like deja vu all over again looking at these photos. Remember always that police brutality at marches is NOT an accident. It is a deliberate strategy to chill dissent in America or anywhere else. Ever notice that the cops protect the KKK and not honest critics of government who have exhausted all other means of expression and have not received a hearing or redress.

This happens even as Richard Clark states on 60 Minutes that the United States waged preemptive war on Iraq because it had "better targets."

So the question is: why are we being beaten? Cops should start looking upstairs for the source of the problems in society rather than down at us.

I know these girls they are 16 and were arrested w/ my daughter

She was dragged on the ground,cuffed too tightly and subjected to lewd remarks (by the arresting officers). A friend of my daughter. She was released to my custody when we were unable to contact her mother, thanks to the help of an officer at Mission Station; they are not all bad.

What can I say? This picture is hysterically funny. She looks so pleased with herself.

If anyone has photo/video evidence of these or other instances of police brutality on 20 March 2004 please contact mark [at] indymedia.org and/or the National Lawyers Guild (415-285-1011). In particular we need to identify the particular officers involved. Any documentation gathered could be of use in defending against criminal charges and/or any civil suits. Thanks.

Hey folks, thanks for the positive feedback on the photos.

I put in a lot of time filtering, cropping, editing and processing these pix... take several hundred, pick the best 10-20, photoshop, etc.

Mitzi, if you want, I can email full-size files to you of the pictures of your daughter and her friend. At that resolution, you can have them printed at 8x12 (or even 12x18) and still get great quality.

I actually have 10 or 15 good shots of them, because the lighting was good, they were standing near me for quite a while, and they were particularly photogenic. You should see the ones where one of them is standing in plastic cuffs, blowing bubbles with her gum!

Peace,
Matt Fitt

I titled one of my above photos, "violent cop," and identified Officer Bardoni as having been responsible for the violence and arrest of the Indybay journalist and others.

Officer Bardoni has since responded, stating adamantly that he was not the officer involved.

I went back and reviewed the video recovered from the broken video camera. The last frames show the offending officer rushing towards the cameraperson.

It is quite clearly NOT Officer Bardoni.

I offer my apologies to him for having wrongly accused him of an act he did not commit.

Matt Fitt

While I appreciate that Matt, once called on it, DID actually check his facts and offer corrections, it is appalling that Bardoni's picture is still posted to the site as violentcop.jpg with the original caption under it. Why not repost the entire thing? I get much of my news from Indybay. So it is embarassing and disturbing that the IndyBay site is no more reliable than the Chronicle for printing misinformation, slander, and lies. Officer Bardoni is well-known in our community (I am not any part of law enforcement, etc.... actually I am an organizer) for his integrity, fairness, and positive impact on our community in his role as an officer. He is exactly the officer that truly leftist resisters would respect and appreciate. This kind of slander and third-hand gossip masquerading as eye-witness accounting is exactly what provokes folks to mistrust alternative news sources. We should be better than that.

Although I know for sure that Officer Bardoni # 636 was not the officer who charged the indybay reporter. I am almost certain that he was the officer who struck the first blow across the street which started the incident.

Matt is incorrect as to Bardoni's role in the situation was. But, like I said, I am pretty positive that he was the one who started swinging at the FNB guy. Perhaps someone can prove me wrong. It was a pretty intense situation. Perhaps folks can look more into this incident and what caused it. There was no reason whatsoever that these folks were arrested and beaten. What did officer Bardoni do to stop this incident? He was there. Shame on us? No, shame on the SFPD.

A cop is a cop is a cop, regardless of what you may want to try to argue. Cops come from a long line of overseers, pinkertons, class traitors, and racist scum. Their role is to protect private property and they very rarely step out of line from their fellow officers. If Bardoni is such a great cop why didn't he help diffuse a stupid situation created by either him, or one of his fellow officers. I was there, I saw the whole incident start, and I sat there and watched Officer Bardoni's smirk as folks confronted him about being the cop that started the whole incident. Maybe Matt got it wrong in someway cause he was not able to see the whole incident, but I don't trust a cop who stands in line with such a long line of traitors and scum. It would be nice if Matt or Officer Bardoni would clarify this ongoing storyline by posting Officer Bardoni's claims to innocence on Indybay. Regardless Bardoni still seems to stand strongly behind the thin blue line of silence when either his fellow officers of himself start a chain reaction of violence over someone supposedly not walking fast enough through a cross walk. Maybe my comments aren't as clear as I want them to be, but I hope you get the drift...

Hello Jankyhellface, This is Officer Bardoni and I am responding to your comment about me being the one who struck out at a protester. I know that you seem convinced that I am the police officer who did this, but you are wrong. As I explained to Matt I was not part of any arrest team, rather my squad was responsible for perimeter control of which those duties are to monitor the individuals on the sidewalks. I personally did not arrest or lay a hand on anybody that day and I have never struck a protester in the twenty plus years I have been a police officer.There were several hundred police officers on duty that day and you have me confused with another officer. You asked what was I doing? I was standing on line for several hours and did not even witness any arrests as my back was to the street and I was facing the sidewalk. I know that you would not want to be accused of wrongly beating someone, so please don't accuse me. Check all of the pictures and video tapes you want and I guarantee that you will not find me beating up anyone. God Bless.

I am a run-of-the-mill community person and anarchist in the area Bardoni works. I am no friend of paramilitary operations - institutionalized or not. I am also no friend of hypocrisy- which is why I have a bone to pick with you. Your distrust justified, your "I'm almost sure" is cagey, and your assumptive targetting downright rude. I know this guy. You obviously do not. He has a more solid understanding of power dynamics than many folks I know regardless of their political beliefs. He is courageous and truly an advocate for community folks. If there is to be a world with cops, which there IS at present, I, the youth - particularly the young men of color - I work alongside, and everyone I know in this community will back Bardoni's integrity and peacefulness. He's the kind of guy who probably won't post stuff on here - he would go direct to the author. He's not hiding when he does that, he is just a reasonable, calm, kind person who listens well, understands how much he physically represents "The Man", and seeks to avoid assumptions by checking stuff out before he shoots off his mouth (or takes out a baton). I challenge you to show he ever even touched his baton. I believe you were thinking of TAC (or whatever that squad is called).

LS, you may be right, some of us may have been mistaken in some way. However, from what I witnessed the whole melee that we are discussing was actually started by Bardoni's unit of crowd control cops. I don't know if they come out of the Tenderloin police station, as you seem to be implying in your comments about him working in a certain community, and as would be logical as we were right next to the Tenderloin policestation when this stuff was going on. Regardless, either Officer Bardoni or someone in his crowd control unit is guilty of being overzealous in starting a mini-cop riot by jabbing one protestor in a crowd of a bunch of folks for supposedly walking too slow through a crosswalk when we got to Market and were trying to walk on the sidewalk up Market away from the whole confrontation that the various SFPD squads had created with our group of folks on the day and place in question. Officer Bardoni, regardless of what he claims in emails to individuals, or what you claim in your relationship to him in the community, is still complicit in this whole incident whether it was actually him that did the jabbing and needless elevation of the situation, or one of his fellow SFPD officers. We as protestors are held responsible for what our fellow protestors do on the streets, and the cops should be too.

C.O.P. = capping our peace

Do you really think all those cops that were out there on Market Street were from one Station. They bus them in from all over the City. I am tired of being identified with the actions of the Blac Block followers as they screw up our peaceful demonstrations. To hold one cop responsible for what other cops do at a large rally is like the majority of peaceful protesters getting bashed for the BB idiots.

In a bigger picture, I like to think of police as a category of the working class. They aren't at the same level of power as leaders of the military, or even top businesspeople or professors. A demonstration like this, of course, would be one place where you wouldn't want to break down the barriers and try to become super friendly with them, because they're just working folks like everyone else. Rather, try to avoid deliberate interaction at all. The point isn't to seek out conflict with police, as a substitute for Donald Rumsfeld.
Before doing something risky in front of 250 police officers at these breakaways, I would carefully input the specific situation into your little moral equation, for if the payoff in terms of influencing the international situation in Iraq would be higher than the suffering you could receive if caught. So, I would say that the guy poking the one officer with a stick (who wasn't caught) might not have achieved enough in order to make that worth it. In retrospect, the cracking of the INS window and the people who civilly stood in intersections last year did make a big impression in the international press so people in other countries know that americans aren't solidly behind Bush. So in the future, I think there is a heck of a lot of space open to make an impression beyond the easily ignored peace march without having it merely be a dumb risky police confrontation.

I really do hear what you are saying. And it was as usual a total mess down there. FYI, the community I am talking about is 'round about Excelsior/SD/LV - Bardoni I think (but I am not sure) is not even out of the Tenderloin Unit. And I agree that the flip sides of the unity/complicency coin are super important to examine. AND I know that we as protesters should seek to have eachother's backs in a bunch of different ways - some more public than others. I mean, how many of us face any kind of screwed up dynamic or oppressive politics/decisions/production at our work? So we are all complicit with those organizations on that level, right? But folks also try to fight from within. And if we find that there are folks doing their part to increase fairness and equity within an institution that is going away no time soon, why be fine with them taking the fall for an abusive coworker or a larger abused system. My point is that it DOES matter whether one particular officer or unit did or did not put hands on and/or abuse folks. And while I agree that protestors ARE held as complicit for the acts/accused acts of other protestors, I'm not sure that makes it o.k. with me. That is what Prop 21 tried to legalize more of (among other things), that is embedded in the Patriot Act, and it seems like that is the tactic folks use to break solidarity/association among folks right? So am I cool with that philosophy? No. Do folks have some responsibility within/outside organized groups (be it the cops or the protestors) to check eachother or become complicit? I think we agree there. Cheers.

I regret that I may have seemed as being "rude" by the fact that I am apprehensive of what I saw occur on March 20th. And I am sorry that you have a bone to pick with my comments.

The fact of the matter is that I tried to justify the reasoning behind Matt's original statement and reasoning behind posting that picture.

I also took pictures of Officer Bardoni that day, which I have never had any intention on posting to indybay. Not just because I was unsure as to whether he was the officer who commited the original act of violence. But also because I feel commited that it does no good to target one individual on a personal basis for the amount of criminal and thuggish activity that was commited by his fellow coworkers.

Also, I would like to point out that the first officer who struck the first blow was not the person who went insane. It was --as far as I could tell-- the motorcycle cops who brutalized these folks. And yes, it was an officer working with the crowd control unit who made the first attack. Officer Bardoni looked very similar to this officer.I still stand by the fact that I want someone to prove me wrong on account that the officers involved in this situation should be held fully accountable for the thuggish acts they commited.

And JS - seriously - I am not trying to cage or frame anyone with my comments or with what I saw occur on the 20th. Nor is anyone on this site. Nor can anyone who was there that day consider themselves fully objective. Like I said earlier, it was a very hectic situation.

-j

Thanks for your response. I did not intend to offend. I totally get it. It was hectic down there. I hear you. It makes sense what you are saying. Cheers.

I-Witness is the classic example of an occupational bigot. A cop is a cop regardless of how they think or act. A protester is a protester. Whether they hold signs or throw rocks is irrelevant.This type of reasoning has been around since the dawn of humanity. What is really cool about occupational bigots is that they can easily adjust there bigoted views to suit other needs. I mean why just hate some one over how they occupy their time when there are so many other categories to choose from.