The Decision As To What Constitutes a Breach Of This Freedom is Never Yours to Make

From Zunguzungu:

My internet-friend Brian (who I had the pleasure of meeting for coffee in Seattle in December) wrote this piece on revisiting Zucotti Park in NYC, the day before it would be (briefly) reoccupied:

“Once a physical space has been deemed contentious—a site where active dissent has taken place, and threatens to again—it must be closed off and policed by any means necessary…You are ostensibly “free” to walk into the park and sit down, and you’re free to relax in the thin sunshine, read a book, listen to music, or converse with friends and strangers. The police make a big display of letting this emaciated definition of freedom stand unchallenged, for the moment. Not everyone is immediately photographed or questioned or removed from the grounds. There might be months without beatings, arrests, or overt brutality. There might be any number of things you could do before the police suddenly decide that you’ve exceeded the limits of the permission they believe they’ve granted you as a citizen.

"The point is that, in such a space, the decision as to what constitutes a breach of this freedom is never yours to make. It’s the policeman who decides when your sitting becomes loitering, when your free speech becomes inflammatory, or when your right of assembly has transformed, through some bizarre alchemical process, into disorderly conduct. The definition of a police state is not restricted to acts of violence and terror. It must also be understood as that condition in which the police, the authorities who direct them, and the special interests they protect all work in tandem to invest the police with sufficient authority to make those decisions for every civilian in their purview. And again, this is something that many of us who have lived in different districts or whose skin may be of a different color often only come to know in relatively innocuous circumstances like this, where what has long been the brutalizing norm elsewhere extends its reach into those spaces that more naïve people had believed to be somehow outside of it.”