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My friend Brackin was hanging out with these guys in Phily all the time and had given them her voicemail number and taught them radical cheers and stuff. They turned out to be cops, like it was in the newspaper and stuff. They turned her and a whole warehouse of people in and then the cops were always leaving dumb joke messages on the voicemail. It was really a bad turn. But as for my cop stories.... There was one time when I was living here in NYC and the cops who murdered Amadou Diallo had just been acquitted. I remember going to breakfast with a bunch of people the day it was all over the papers. I was so angry, so FUCKING revved up and these breakfast eaters were sort of ambivalent. I got more frustrated and decided to pour myself into the situation. THere were marches and protests being scheduled for the following forty-one days (in a harsh reminider of how many times the four officers had shot at Diallos unarmed body). I went to one alone and met up with some friends there, but soon ended up trailing away from them. The rage, the emotions flowing out of these thousands of people who were completely unable to accept any more loss and brutality, disoriented me. I wandered around with a video camera, in tears much of the time as older women walked by singing Amadou's name and screaming at the police the names of all the sons, daugters and husbands they'd lost, all the fetuses kicked out of their stomachs during police attacks, all the rapes in the jailhouses and back of police cars. The march built into a riotous climax. All of us younger people and punks, those with plenty of energy and nothing to lose, split off into different sections and began taking the streets. The group I was in ran down 6th avenue and through the Wall Street area. Everytime the cops caught up with us we ran right through their lines. It was like a marathon. But this was about standing up, and there was no fucking way we were going to let them tell us what to do tonight. We were on Broadway, I think, outside of a big department store thing when the motorcade suddenly dashed in front of our march. We were a few hundred kids at this time and made a run for it, right into the bikes. I was grabbed by a blue-eyed, Irish looking fat cop. He twisted my arm and tried to push me so that my back was against the wall. He was smiling. I felt like it was somebodys uncle molesting me. I mean, you had to see how sick this smile was, he was totally sexualizing this. I had a bottle of water in my hand because we'd been running for hours. He grabbed it and I said "it's just water" and pulled my bottle away. He used his nightstick to smash at my wrist with way too much force to get me to release the bottle. I was yelling "ouch stop" and still pleading my case for the water. He then pushed me back near the wall and aimed the spout of the bottle at me, proceeding to squirt it into my eyes, mouth, and all over me, soaking my clothes and causing me to cough up alot of stuff since it all went into the wrong pipes. I caught a glimpse of his wild stare as I backed up, saying "I can't belive you just did that!" He was coming closer to me, saying "you're damn RIGHT I did," and tried to grab me again, when I ran away as fast as I could. I ran right into the wrong place. Trying to get around the police bikes, I followed a running guy against this wall and watched as the cops schreeched over to the wall and hit him. They crashed into the wall, pinning his body there with a crunching sound until he collapsed to the ground. I screamed, and was almost grabbed by a cop who must have taken pity on my totally freaked out face as I ran inside. I could see a woman I knew running up to the scene to help the guy but by then he was surrounded by cops and she backed off looking worried. I was Shaking and saying "oh fuck, oh fuck" over and over in the department store. I was trapped for awhile as the cops weren't letting anyone in or out. The perfume clerks looked at me like I was an alien. Later, after the march had dispersed and met up again at a specific point, we were coralled again by cops near Astor Place. Most of us bust ass out of there and stood accross the street. For some reason, there was one woman left behind and the whole squad of cops seemed to surround her. We watched as numerous policemen began beating her. She was laying on the ground as they kicked and punched her but we were all on the outside of lines and lines of them. I still wonder if we should have all rushed the scene. That woman surfaced in the paper days later with like a broken arm and neck. I saw our friend on the news too, the guy who got hit by the bike. The caption said something about "protester gets hauled away. Ten police injured in riot." Nothing, of course, about him being violently hit with a vehicle. All this happened one night in, I think, Febuary of 2000.
That's what came to mind.
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