Scars still visible for RNC Convention detainees

Second in a Series (read the first here):

By Chris Lombardi

As Julia Gross took her first shower after spending a week Hudson River Park in the custody of the NYPD, she could feel chunks of her skin peeling off with each scrub.

“One was an inch and a half square,” Gross told Chelsea Now on Tuesday, when asked about her experiences at Pier 57 during the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). The bruises and abrasions on her legs, from lying on the chain-link floor of a police-constructed pen, had become lesions that “itched and oozed.” By then, she added, she had a fever of over 100 degrees.

Gross, who said she still has scars on her legs from those lesions, is one of 550 people who were arrested by the NYPD during the week of the RNC and brought to Pier 57 for processing. Gross now blames those lesions and scars directly on being kept in a steel pen inside the former bus garage; others held there that week report having difficulty breathing or developing coughs that haven’t let up.

As Chelsea Now reported last week, suits by many of these former “detainees” against the city, including the Hudson River Park Trust (HRPT), are moving forward with more vigor, in the wake of new evidence released by a judge’s order in February. With the imminent release of additional documents by the NYPD, the steady stream of lawsuits only promises to pick up steam as plaintiffs and their lawyers again step up to tell their stories.

Evidence abounds...1,000 arrests a day

The evidence released in February came partly at the urging of attorneys from the Environmental Law and Justice Project (EJLP), whose director, Joel Kupferman, met Gross just after her 2004 release.

That day, said Kupferman, “I saw scores of people—about 200—with burns on their feet.” And when he toured the pier months later, he said, “there were still five-gallon cans labeled HAZARDOUS and signs saying, BEWARE—ASBESTOS.”

The documents included May 2004 reports, produced for HRPT, that found dangerous levels of asbestos and other toxic substances at the Pier 57. And last week, NYPD Deputy Commissioner S. Andrew Schaffer signed a settlement agreement that will release even more possibly incriminating information: the NYPD’s own Pier 57 pre-convention environmental assessment, its actual contract with HPRT to use Pier 57 for RNC detentions, and 41 pages of toxic exposure report filed by the officers on the scene.

Even as the new information is set to arrive at the law project, plaintiffs continue to give depositions as the long-delayed case proceeds.

“I have to say, I’m pleased and a little surprised,” said attorney Rose Weber. “I have 120 clients in 13 lawsuits, and almost everyone is coming to testify. They’re in Europe. They’re all over the country. It’s been three years, and they still come.”

For some, she added, it was because their health problems have persisted. For others, the distance of three years makes what happened feel both implausible and unforgivable.

In August 2004, as the RNC approached, Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly declared the city “ready” for the upcoming “National Security Event” after 18 months of preparation.

Using the 2000 protests at the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle as stark example for what they hoped to prevent, the NYPD worked with the F.B.I. to identify and discourage potential “anarchists.” Senior police officials told the Washington Post that they expected to make 1,000 arrests a day. Documents released this spring, after a suit by the American Civil Liberties Union, showed that the NYPD’s spying operations were of unprecedented depth.

And beginning with a Friday Critical Mass ride on August 27, 2004, new policies toward demonstrators took hold. Contrary to long-established NYPD practice for dealing with nonviolent protesters, the latter were not issued “desk appearance tickets” and let go but thrown into buses and taken to Pier 57 for processing.

Orange nets and plastic cuffs

Julia Gross, a longtime activist, thought she knew the rules when she arrived in New York for convention protests. A bisexual woman who self-identifies as “genderqueer,” she joined a same-sex “kiss-in” at Times Square on August 29, 2004.

She told Chelsea Now that her arrest came only after the kiss-in was over and the TV cameras were leaving. “I was just turning on my cell phone to check my answering machine messages from home,” said Gross. “And then there was this police officer with handcuffs, making me lie down.”

Cuffed to two other young women in a group of about 40, Gross was forced down a side street and taken to Pier 57. Similar operations all week swept up more than 1,800 people, some of whom were bystanders, shoppers and stockbrokers trying to bicycle home.

Persian Gulf War veteran Dennis Kyne, protesting at the New York Public Library on August 31, 2004, was similarly cuffed, then enfolded in one of the ubiquitous orange nets used to hem in protesters, and taken to Pier 57. (Charges against Kyne for assault and resisting arrest were dropped earlier this spring, after newly released videos of that day showed him walking as ordered toward the bus.)

Too toxic for the Hudson

Rather than saving the pier as a “secondary processing center” beginning on July 30, 2004, as stipulated in its July contract with HPRT, the NYPD started using it as a primary detention center on August 27, before the convention began and before the police department could clean the facility. According to Sept. 2004 article on Mother Jones magazine’s Website, “A captain on duty at The Tombs, the city holding center where people were transferred prior to arraignment, told [a detainee] that the city had hoped to power-wash the floors before using the building as a place of detention but was prevented by environmental concerns.”

It is still unclear who prevented the power-wash from taking place that week, since both the Trust and the NYPD told Chelsea Now that they don’t comment on pending litigation. (Three years later, according to Thomas Panzone, of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC), the Trust is not planning to “power-wash” Pier 57.)

On August 30, 2004, the day after Gross’ arrest, staff of the Hudson River Park Trust wrote a letter to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, protesting the NYPD’s “violation” of their July memorandum. “HRPT wishes to express its extreme disappointment that the NYPD did not disclose certain aspects of its operations before signing the agreement with our agency,” wrote president Connie Fishman. That precise, formal expression of outrage constitutes “fighting words for one governmental entity to say to the Police Department,” said a local reporter who asked not to be named.

To other observers and the plaintiffs’ attorneys, the letter was an obvious hedge against the legal battles to come.

It was dehumanizing

One young woman still figuring that out is Philadelphia activist Gross, who entered Pier 57 cuffed to two other young women. “It was a 20-by-20-foot space, and dozens of demonstrators were placed in these pens made out of chain-link fencing. We had no benches, so we had to sit in all that oil.”

When her feet started to hurt and she demanded medical attention, said Gross, “they handcuffed me to a chair and told me that if I didn’t sign a waiver saying I had refused medica attention, I’d have to spend a week at Rikers Island.”

Gross was careful Tuesday to mention that many of the police officers she met during the RNC were not hostile at all. Her arresting officer “was this amazing woman,” she said. “She kept talking about how ‘there’s real crime happening in the Bronx, and I should be there and not having to guard these kids.’” Others, she said, were noticing that the conditions at the pier were “really nasty.”

By the time Gross was released from the pier after 23 hours, “I was covered in the gook, and had these weird kind of abrasions on my skin.” By the time she appeared before the judge, “my fever was so high that I was delirious.”

The law project’s Kupferman, who had been acting as a legal observer to the RNC protests when he learned about the Pier 57 “Guantanamo,” immediately started taking pictures of detainees’ injuries, including those of Julia Gross. Kupferman, who has long worked with police and fire unions on 9/11-related health issues, began to wonder if those same unions would soon be looking at Pier 57. (More on the police officers’ own possible exposure in the next piece in this series.)

After Labor Day, with the convention over, most detainees were released, and the first lawsuit was filed. As of October 2006, there were 95 civil actions against the city stemming from its actions to quell dissent during the Republican National Convention, with 546 plaintiffs. Many, if not most, of those suits were based on what happened at Pier 57 and name Hudson River Park Trust on the long list of defendants.

Some won’t even know for years

“Totally dehumanizing, totally degrading,” Dennis Kyne said of Pier 57, talking to Chelsea Now by phone from his home in San Jose, Calif., this week. “Some 1,800 people crammed into these tight spaces, with all that crap on the floor…. I’m a 15-year combat veteran, so I could take it, but here were 16-year-old girls in those cages with me who were falling apart. A lot of them won’t even know for years how bad it hurt them.”

Including, perhaps, Julia Gross, who said she still has scars on her feet and legs.

Kyne said that public-private entities like HPRT need to hold themselves just as accountable as any elected official. “This Hudson River Park Trust—who are they to condone this? To attack, incarcerate, take pictures, fingerprint people who didn’t do anything? If they do, they’re no better than Saddam Hussein,” said the former Army medic, whose decorations include a Kuwaiti Freedom Medal from the first Gulf War.

As stated in one of the Critical Mass lawsuits: “Defendants were aware at all relevant times that Pier 57 contained toxic chemicals and substances. Defendant THE HUDSON RIVER PARK TRUST was aware, at the time that it leased Pier 57 to defendant THE CITY OF NEW YORK, that the pier would be used to house human beings for an extended period of time.”

Such knowledge brings with it inherent responsibility, attorneys interviewed by this piece uniformly told Chelsea Now, of the sort that can’t be mitigated with some sort of waiver.

All the RNC lawsuits first charge violation of protesters’ free speech rights and civil rights. But the hazardous conditions at the pier, said EJLP’s Kupferman, violated the rights of both arrestees and police officers to “bodily integrity,” long established by law as including the right to a safe environment.

“Remember the judge’s decision against Christine Todd Whitman, where she said that Whitman’s words [declaring the air after 9/11 to be safe] put people in harms way?” Kupferman asked. “In this case, it’s the city buses that dragged people in harm’s way…and the Trust that didn’t seem to mind that much.”

Next week: What 21 officers reported about their exposure, why the NYPD’s own union may get involved, and why some are calling for hearings about unelected city-state trusts