Jamie Loughner was arrested near the Inter-Continental Hotel on the
afternoon of November 20 and hers is a twisted tale indeed. Police
nabbed her at a spot along the fence erected to keep protesters of the
Free Trade Area of the Americas talks away from the hotel, where trade
ministers from across the Americas had gathered. Loughner alleges that
while she was face down on the trunk of a police car with hands cuffed
behind her back, at least one Miami Police Department officer severely
rotated one of her thumbs, repeatedly, to get her to state her name. She
went to jail as Jane Doe but not before being forced to sing the theme
song of a popular television cartoon show and, she says, having her very sore digit bent again.
Loughner, known in some anti-globalization circles by her
nickname, Bork, was the first anti-FTAA protester to file a complaint
with Miami's incipient Civilian Investigative Panel. The CIP is charged
with investigating allegations of police misconduct and has subpoena
power to do so. Voters approved the body in a November 2001 referendum,
after concerns about fatal police shootings of black suspects converged
with Cuban-American outrage over the MPD's aggressive response to the
Elian riots in April 2000.
Loughner delayed her return
home to Washington, D.C. in order to attend a December 2 appearance by
Miami police Chief John Timoney in the CIP's small conference room
downtown. She has a special bond with him. He was Philadelphia police
commissioner when cops arrested approximately 400 protesters during the
2000 Republican National Convention. Among them was Loughner, who
sustained bruises allegedly from police boots and torn fingernails from
clinging fiercely to her anti-death penalty banner ("Stop the Texas
Killing Machine").
She sat in a corner and filled out a complaint form while the
thirteen-member panel listened to Timoney deliver an hour-long
"overview" of the "policing" of the FTAA demonstrations. Protesters had
thrown "a whole host of objects" at police for ten minutes before units
of helmeted cops began to fire back with rubber bullets and beanbag
projectiles, he noted. "A lot of tear gas had been thrown at this point.
Not by police, by protesters," the chief asserted. "Liar," Loughner
muttered as he spoke. As Timoney concluded his speech and left the room,
Loughner followed him and said, "I was tortured by your officers,"
before an officer lightly bumped her away from the exiting chief.
The 39-year-old Loughner is a member of Mayday DC and Homes Not Jails, two groups that decry the lack of affordable housing.
She had relocated from rural West Virginia in 1998, fleeing a sordid
past in which her husband was sent to prison for 50 years in 1996 for
raping their then five-year-old daughter. She lost custody of all three
of her children after insisting upon her husband's innocence. In D.C.,
though, Loughner is more media darling than tragic tabloid character.
She has turned up in reports by such radical dailies as the Washington
Post and Washington Times and even the anarchical news service UPI. For
example, in February 2001 she was among a group of activists arrested
for illegally entering an abandoned row house in the nation's capital
and refurbishing it for homeless people. (She represented herself at the
trial and a jury acquitted her.) During a cold snap in January 2002,
she was among twelve protesters arrested for unauthorized entry into
D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams's office. They demanded the city open a
shelter in an abandoned school building to keep people from freezing to
death. (Two people later died of hypothermia on the D.C. streets that
winter, UPI reported. Loughner and three others were arrested again
several months later after they barricaded themselves inside a
boarded-up school.) In June 2002 Loughner was quoted in a Washington
Times article about a federal court ruling that scuttled a law banning
protests at the front steps of the U.S. Capitol. "This ruling allows for
a freer voice at a time when it's definitely needed," Loughner was
quoted as saying.
Loughner is a certain type of protester who came to Miami to
express opposition to the FTAA. She and her people-over-profits ilk
follow the "creative nonviolence" tradition, which emerged during the
anti-Vietnam War movement and whose contemporary followers engage in
civil disobedience for sundry anti-corporate causes. In other words, she
wasn't about to let police or a police barrier stand in her way, if she
could peacefully get by.
In fact officers did peacefully allow her past, as Loughner, with
picket sign in hand, walked south toward the fence surrounding the
Inter-Continental Hotel at about 1:00 p.m. on November 20. "They let me
through. They said I should look for somebody in charge," Loughner
recounts, then confesses: "I never really cared if I found somebody in
charge. I just wanted to get to where I had a legal right to protest,
which was the fence." She would have gone farther if possible. "If I
could peacefully persuade my way past, of course I would have. Why
wouldn't I? I should have had the opportunity to protest right in front
of the building."
Loughner says that before her arrest she had spent several hours
at the fence holding a sign that read: "Stop privatizing housing. No
FTAA. More public housing. Stop Hope 6, which is a really bad HUD
program." The incident report states she was "observed using her
cellular phone and providing vital information to individuals that were
participating in this breach of peace. In addition this defendant was
heard relaying information such as when officers were wearing their
protective equipment and other strategic data that would possibly
interfere with the safety of the operation."
Loughner admits she had been talking on her cell phone to FTAA Resistance Radio and to a friend from Indymedia a few blocks away. "I was giving a live
report of what I was seeing. I had Herald reporters behind me doing the
same thing," she explains. "When the police marched out I'm like, 'Oh my
God, they're sending another hundred cops your way!' When they moved
the armored cars out I was on the radio at the time. I'm like, 'Oh my
God, two armored cars just went by.'" When chants turned to screams and
police moved toward demonstrators, she phoned to update. "I said, 'Well,
now they're tear-gassing you, in the crowd. People need to go help the
people that are getting tear-gassed.' I talked about what I saw."
This is Loughner's account of what happened next: Two Miami cops,
one of whom had been "nice" to her earlier, approached her and took her
sign. "The sign was in the shape of a house," she notes. "The stick was
the same stick that everybody had, which was just a little wooden
stick. I'd passed through three police lines and had it checked every
time.... But suddenly it's illegal, and I'm like, 'I don't think it is.'
So we're in this little minor argument about
is-it-illegal-I-want-my-property-back-that's-mine-you-can't-steal-it.
And they're like, 'You're leaving now or getting arrested.' And I'm
like, 'OKAY, but can I have my sign back?' And they said, 'Oops, you
didn't leave.'"
Realizing her moment to avoid arrest was gone, she sat down. The
police cuffed her, lifted her up, and took her to a squad car. She was
forced to lean face down on the trunk of the vehicle. She refused to
identify herself. "They asked me my name. I said I have the right to
remain silent until I speak to an attorney. I will only answer questions
in the presence of my attorney. I kept saying that." They searched her
bag. They waited about 45 minutes for another officer to arrive.
It was during that time that the alleged thumb-twisting took
place. The third officer had arrived, whom Loughner refers to as "the
big guy."
"My hands are behind my back," she recounts during a sit-down
interview at New Times, then stands and asks a reporter to put his hands
behind his back. "I'm just going to sort of illustrate with you. Your
hands are cuffed, pretty tight, and this somebody is like doin' this,
and goin' as hard as they can in that direction. 'Tell us your name,
tell us your name!' And I mean hard. I thought they were going to break
it, the joint, something. It was excruciating ...."
"He says, 'Okay, if she sings a song, we won't have to go into
all this.' And he starts beating [a rhythm] on the car, and I'm like, 'I
don't even know what you're doing.' He's like, 'C'mon, you know the
song,' and he starts beating on the car again." It was the theme song of
the Nickelodeon cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants.
Loughner says she didn't know it before that day but does now,
after singing it numerous times while slumped over the police car.
"Finally he teaches it to me. Because I have to then answer it or be
threatened with physical violence again," she continues, then sings:
"Who is yellow and lives in the sea? SpongeBob SquarePants.
"They had their hands on my hand, which was what was hurting.
That was the choice. Sing the song or ... " Her voice trails off. "And I
did it. Repeatedly. It wasn't just once they made me sing the song. It
was a lot of times," she says, her eyes tearing up. "I've been through
protest hell. I've been beaten, I've been wrapped in my banner, stomped
on by cops. I've never been as scared. I never felt [before] that the
cops had no bottom limit to what they'd do. But I felt these did. I felt
that the next thing was the batons and whatever."
It reminded her of stories from the G8 Summit in Genoa, Italy two
years ago, when police allegedly forced detainees to sing the national
anthem of Italy from the Mussolini dictatorship era. "This has happened
before," Loughner assures. "It's just that SpongeBob's a lot sillier.
American fascism's a lot sillier than Italian fascism."
"There is no reason we would do anything like that to extract a
name from a person," Miami police spokeswoman Herminia Salas-Jacobson
insists. "You see that in the movies but we don't do that on the
street." If necessary, police are allowed to use a thumb hold when
making an arrest, she adds. "If I need to control you, I can use your
thumb to control you."
Loughner was charged with two misdemcounts of resisting arrest
without violence and one of obstruction by a disguised person,
apparently for concealing her name. With attorney by her side, she
finally stated her name at a November 25 court appearance. She was
released without bond after five nights in jail. Her public defender,
Manuel Alvarez, says the disguised person charge was dropped because it
doesn't apply to refusal to tell an officer one's name. The case is set
for trial. Loughner remains charged with one count of resisting arrest
and one of failure to obey a lawful order. "We felt that the arrest was
completely unfounded," Alvarez concluded.
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