[Imc] Re: [Prairiegreens] 2 arrested for peaceably observing an arrest - hearing today!

[John Wason]

At 11:04 AM 05/02/2001 -0500, Danielle Chynoweth wrote:

>Two Urbana residents were arrested yesterday for observing Urbana police
>make an arrest.  According to the two arrested, they were 15 feet away and
>were arrested for "obstructing a police officer."
>
>Those arrested were Tim Gibbs and Laura Anderson who attend the School for
>Designing a Society.  They were outside the schoolhouse when they observed
>the arrest.
>
>They will have a hearing today, Wednesday at 1:30 PM in Courtroom F in the
>county courthouse building.
>
>People are encouraged to attend the hearing to show support for peaceful,
>citizen observations of arrests.
>
>This action feeds into recent, local arguments for establishing a civilian
>police review board in both Champaign and Urbana.
>
>
>-- danielle chynoweth
>   urbana independent media center
>   urbana.indymedia.org

I'd like to follow up on this a bit.  Tim and Laura had been held in jail
most of the night.  About 30 of us local "activists", give or take, showed
up at the Courthouse today for this hearing, which was in fact an
arraignment.  There were a couple of Greens, as well as people from the IMC,
the School for Designing a Society, and others, including our intrepid
Urbana City Council members Danielle Chynoweth and, later, Laura Huth.
Please forgive me if I'm leaving anyone out.  Only five of our number were
allowed into arraignment court, and our group was chased out of the building
and even off the ourside steps by the courthouse gendarmes following the
arraignment.  I was reminded of Dave Johnson's hearing, in that the
courthouse officials didn't seem to know what to do with all of us.

I don't want to steal anyone's thunder in reporting the details of this
story, especially since I don't know all the details.  A couple of folks
from the IMC - Sevilla and Ben Emerick, I think - will be writing up the
story for dissemination by the IMC and possible publication in the Octopus.
Tim and Laura have several legal alternatives, and they will have to decide
what they want to do, hopefully with our support no matter what they decide.

As Danielle says above, this ties in with the Greens' initiative to attempt
to bring about civilian police review boards in Urbana, Champaign, and the
County.  Among many other things we accomplished Tuesday at our meeting, we
Greens formed three ad hoc committees, dealing with redistricting, creation
of municipal utilities, and creation of civilian police review boards.  So
far myself, Laurel Prussing, Lance Graves, and Geoff Robinson are on the ad
hoc committee re police review boards, and we're looking for more people who
might be interested in working on that issue, so if any of you reading this
is interested, please let me or one of us know.

Also, Laurel, as a member of the NAACP, has taken the liberty of getting us
Greens on the agenda of the May NAACP meeting to dicuss the police review
board issue with that group. It's near the end of the month; Laurel will
e-mail us details as to the date, time, and place of the meeting.  I would
encourage other interested Greens to attend, though I'm not sure how many of
us in attendance would be optimum.  In my own mind, we want to show the
members of the NAACP that we have some degree of support in the community,
which translates into numbers.  At the same time, and again in my own mind,
we don't want to overwhelm them.  They're the experts on police oppression,
not we, though we've just learned a bit more about it in the persons of Tim
and Laura.  It might be desirable for Tim and/or Laura to relate their
experience to the members of the NAACP, if they so desire.  Other than that,
my own inclination is to make it clear that we're not the experts, but that
we want to offer our support and assistance to the NAACP and to other
interested constituencies in the community in making the civilian police
review boards happen.

I encourage as much feedback and participation on this issue as possible.
The time is ripe, and I urge us to proceed with, in the words of the U.S.
Supreme Court in a slightly different context, "all deliberate speed."

John