According to the details of a Jan. 24 settlement, a Georgetown University Law professor is among seven plaintiffs who will receive $50,000 each and an official apology from the Metropolitan Police Department. The settlement, which also requires MPD to rewrite its crowd control strategies, promises to have far-reaching effects for the hundreds of thousands of political protestors who demonstrate in the nation’s capital every year.
Law Center Adjunct Joseph Mayer filed the suit after he and over 400 people were seized in a mass arrest by police at an anti-globalization protest in Pershing Park, near the White House, on Sept. 27, 2002. The lawsuit alleged that police arrested protestors and park-goers alike without warning or cause and then held them in unnecessarily harsh conditions for up to 36 hours.
According to the new restrictions ordered by the settlement, police can no longer encircle large groups of protestors unless they intend to arrest all of them. Police are also prohibited from using plastic handcuffs for misdemeanor offenses. Reiterating a standing rule, MPD is also required to give protestors a fair warning and an opportunity to disperse before it makes mass arrests.
“Police must strike the right balance, not just sometimes, but all the time. In the case of Pershing Park, we did not succeed,” MPD Chief Ramsey wrote Sunday in an apology published in The Washington Post. “I promise that I will do everything in my power to ensure that people can come to our city to peacefully protest.”
Ramsey maintained up to the date of the settlement that the Sept. 27 arrests were warranted.
Mayer said that he was happy that police were changing their tactics but emphasized that Ramsey was personally responsible for the arrests, since the police chief stood by while they took place.
“It was not a mistake,” Mayer said. “It was a well-organized maneuver that took hundreds of police and over two hours to complete.”
Mayer, who lectures on professional responsibility in law at Georgetown, said that police shackled his wrists to his ankle and held him on a police bus for 12 hours and in the Blue Plains police training center in southwest D.C. for an additional 16 hours. He said he was outraged at being arrested for attending what he viewed as an innocuous and peaceful protest.
“What the police did on Sept. 27, 2002 was another stark example of the abandonment of the rule of law,” he said.
Georgetown seniors Mike Wilson (CAS ‘05) and Ginny Leavell (CAS ‘05) were among those arrested at the protest and are now involved in a separate class-action lawsuit against MPD filed jointly by the National Lawyers Guild and the Partnership for Civil Justice. Wilson said he was hopeful that the suit would succeed now that Ramsey has admitted MPD’s error in making the arrests.
Wilson said he was detained for close to 30 hours without anything to eat but a granola bar. Georgetown students Luke Baily (SFS ‘06), Nicholas Lashowski (CAS ‘03) and Eu Yenagy (CAS ‘06) were also arrested.
A separate lawsuit filed by seven George Washington University students is still pending.
