When the Police Harass You, Who Do You Call?
It’s just another Saturday in Hoover, Alabama, and the Cell A65 protesters are getting arrested again. This time, for drawing with sidewalk chalk. Thing is, it wasn’t even the protesters who were doing the drawing.
Who do you call when the police are harassing you? How do you stop an illegal arrest, occurring on public property that violates your constitutional right to assemble, and when you were complying with the “lawful order” the police gave you to disperse and leave within five minutes, and then get arrested while walking to your car? This is what happened just today, a few hours ago, in the library parking lot in Hoover.
The Hoover Police Department, emboldened by the supportive stance of the very vocal right-leaning mostly white populace that recently voted in the municipal elections as well as the patterns we see nationally — heavily armed police and militias fighting back protesters in Portland and the White House boasting of being the “LAW and ORDER” party, seem to have taken it upon themselves to pull laws out of thin air when it comes to policing the protests.
I went to today’s protest for an hour or so, attending with my dog. I was just leaving when I went over to see the chalk writing on the sidewalk of the library, and also see if my dog needed to do any business before the ride home. I put my things in the car and then realized I’d left my dog bowl over at the protest site. We dashed over to retrieve it, said goodbye to Satura and trotted back to my car. Within those few moments, multiple police trucks started to pull in. I knew then that there was likely to be trouble but I couldn’t do anything about it other than leave, get to a safer vantage point and try to film it. There was no way I was going to risk anything happening to my dog by getting myself arrested. I was nearly blocked in by police cars as I attempted to leave.
On my way out of the parking lot, I saw some cops handing out zip ties to each other from a bag, getting their “blue lives matter” masks ready. I drove over to a parking spot overlooking the walkway, but even within that minute or so, someone had already been arrested and I knew I was too late to even try to warn anyone. I did the only thing I could do: I posted to Facebook what was happening and tagged the jail bond person so she knew what was going on. And then I got out of there.
The police and the city know what they are doing violate the constitution, and yet they continue to do it. Allan Rice even stated so, in a statement to local NPR station WBHM: https://wbhm.org/feature/2020/activists-make-hoover-their-focal-point-for-protests/. “We’ve seen a recurring narrative where protesters antagonize the police and say and do things that they may have a constitutionally protected right to do,” he said. “But that certainly set the stage and the police have shown tremendous restraint.”
Bail has been set at over $6000 for 4 protesters, all cash. As of this writing, and additional $1000 has been required for one of them. This is harassment, pure and simple and there is no recourse when the police are doing the harassment. Threatening letters have been sent to an associate’s associates (not even a member of Cell A65, and not even to her — to her friends and associates) and some people assume they are from a policeman.
When you anger the police, you have no recourse. You truly have no one to call. “Who will you call when someone is attacking you?” That’s a really scary question, especially when that “someone” is a cop.
