There are lawsuits over it now.
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Protesters challenge NYC arrests
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Cindy Fiore came to New York on Aug. 31 to see her daughter, go shopping and protest the president during the Republican convention. She got home to Connecticut 36 hours later, dirty, hungry, sore, fingerprinted and, she says, angry "on every level."
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• The New York Civil Liberties Union filed two wrongful-arrest lawsuits in federal court on behalf of protesters. The group is also challenging why the police fingerprinted nearly 1,500 protesters. Fingerprints are not supposed to be taken for misdemeanors. As a result, the city destroyed 1,481 sets of fingerprints taken during the convention.
• The Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based legal advocacy group, is seeking class-action status on behalf of all those arrested. The lawsuit charges police with illegal arrests and holding demonstrators in unsafe conditions. The city used a former bus garage on a riverfront pier to hold those arrested.
• The city may be held in contempt of court for holding protesters more than 24 hours, and as long as 66 hours, despite a judge's order to release them. As many as 560 protesters remained in jail after the judge's order. The city could be fined more than $500,000.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-02-06-nyc-protesters_x.htm?csp=34_________________________
Arrests at GOP Convention Are Criticized
Many in N.Y. Released Without Facing Charges
By Michael Powell and Michelle Garcia
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 20, 2004; Page A01
NEW YORK -- One late August evening, Alexander Pincus pedaled his bicycle to the Second Avenue Deli to buy matzo ball soup, a pastrami-on-rye and potato latkes for his sweetheart, who was sick with a cold.
He would not return for 28 hours. As Pincus and a friend left the deli, they inadvertently walked into a police blockade and sweep of bicycle-riding protesters two days before the Republican National Convention began. "I asked an officer how I could get home," Pincus recalled. "He said, 'Follow me,' and we went a few feet and cops grabbed us. They handcuffed us and made us kneel for an hour."
Police carted Pincus to a holding cell topped with razor wire and held him for 25 hours without access to a lawyer. The floor was a soup of oil and soot, he said, and the cell had so few portable toilets that some people relieved themselves in the corner. Pincus said a shoulder was dislocated as police pulled back his arms to handcuff him. "Cops kept saying to us, 'This is what you get for protesting,' " said Pincus, whose account of his arrest is supported in part by deli workers and a time-stamped food receipt.
Pincus was one of 1,821 people arrested in police sweeps before and during the Republican convention, the largest number of arrests associated with any American major-party convention. At the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, which unlike New York's was marked by widespread police brutality, cops made fewer than 700 arrests.
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In the days after the convention, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly stated that "every NYPD officer did a great job." But interviews with state court officials, City Council representatives, prosecutors, protesters and civil libertarians -- and a review of videos of demonstrations -- point to many problems with the police performance. Officers often sealed off streets with orange netting and used motor scooters and horses to sweep up hundreds of protesters at a time, including many who appear to have broken no laws. In two cases, police commanders appeared to allow marches to proceed, only to order many arrests minutes later.
Most of those arrested were held for more than two days without being arraigned, which a state Supreme Court judge ruled was a violation of legal guidelines. Defense attorneys predict a flood of civil lawsuits once protesters have settled the misdemeanor charges lodged against them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34245-2004Sep19.html_________________________