Free speech and assembly on the line Critics question whether Americans will be able to exercise their fundamental protest rights at the major party conventions this summer in Boston and New York BY STEVEN STYCOS

IN APRIL, a cumulative sigh of relief emanated from the packed courtroom when Philadelphia Judge William Mazzola found Providence activist Camilo Viveiros and two co-defendants not guilty of charges that they assaulted Philadelphia police chief John Timoney during the August 2000 Republican National Convention. The "Timoney Three" were the last of 420 arrested demonstrators, including 43 people charged with felonies, to go on trial. But the prosecutions were a spectacular failure: Not a single defendant was sentenced to jail time, and most had their cases dismissed or reduced to misdemeanors, according to Kris Hermes, spokesman for the R2K Legal Collective.

While the lack of convictions may embarrass prosecutors and the Philadelphia police, Hermes says their tactics were successful. "They were able to chill dissent, to silence dissent," he explains. Philadelphia was an early example of tactics subsequently used by police elsewhere, Hermes says, most notably in November 2003 at the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in Miami, where Timoney is now police chief. Philadelphia is also widely seen as a response to the success that demonstrators had in disrupting the 1999 World Trade Organization gathering in Seattle.

Now, as thousands of New Englanders prepare to demonstrate this summer at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, many worry that the same tactics will be used in Boston and New York, stifling the fundamental American right to protest.

Anti-war activists in New York City, where Republicans will re-nominate President George W. Bush during the last days of August, have been told they cannot hold a rally in Central Park, and their legal requests for marches have gone unanswered so far. They fear a replay of the massive February 2003 demonstration opposing the US invasion of Iraq, which, they say, was disrupted by police. In Boston, where Democrats will nominate US Senator John Kerry for president during the last week of July, no protest permits have been issued, and lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts object to a new permitting process, which they say is overly bureaucratic. They also rap a small "protest zone" as too far away from the FleetCenter to be effective.

Four years ago, similar problems in Philadelphia and Los Angeles led the ACLU to successfully sue police in both cities before the national political conventions began. City officials in New York and Boston, say, however, that they will accommodate non-violent demonstrators. "We’re not looking to discourage peaceful protest in any way," says Paul Brown, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner for public information, "We’re looking to accommodate it." In Boston, "Mayor [Thomas] Menino has said repeatedly, ‘What would a convention be without protests?’ " says mayoral spokesman Seth Gitell. "That’s democracy at work."

The extent to which local officials are calling the shots remains uncertain, however. The United State Secret Service, which imposes a "security zone" to protect major political figures like Bush, Kerry, and Vice President Richard Cheney, has a shadow presence behind local police departments in some instances. The Secret Service, observes Christopher Dunn, associate director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, is "the common denominator" at major protests involving alleged civil rights violations in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Miami. A pending ACLU lawsuit also accuses the agency of discriminating against Presidents Bush’s critics, confining them to protest areas where the president and media will not see them, but more about this later.

Protesters and police frequently clash at political conventions. Four years ago, at the Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles police attacked what the ACLU of Southern California characterizes as an overwhelmingly peaceful demonstration. As part of the melee, the ACLU contends, police intentionally fired rubber bullets at members of the press and hit them with batons. Meanwhile, at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia, police threw scores of people in jail before they even had a chance to start protesting.

And then, of course, there was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police denied protesters a permit to hold a march against the Vietnam War, and then attacked marchers, in what a presidential commission subsequently characterized as "a police riot." According to The 1960s Cultural Revolution by John McWilliams (Greenwood Press, 2000) some police officers took off their badges and started chanting, "Kill, Kill, Kill," before wading into protesters with their clubs. Almost 700 people were arrested, according to McWilliams, and more than a thousand injured.

Thirty-six years later, as activists organize to demonstrate in Boston and New York, many critics charge that the United States has criminalized protest.

THE ANTI-DEMONSTRATOR strategy, says Hermes, involves four steps.

First, prior to demonstrations, protesters are demonized by public officials, who often emphasize the role of anarchist groups and charge that outsiders are coming to town to engage in violence and destroy property. Two months before the 2000 Republican National Convention, for example, Philadelphia Mayor John Street was quoted in local newspapers as saying, "I have strong feelings about First Amendment stuff, but we have got some idiots coming here. Some will come and say whatever obnoxious things they want to say and go home. Some will come here to disrupt, to make a spectacle out of what’s going on. They are going to get a very ugly response." Philadelphia protest leaders also viewed the leaking of a Philadelphia Department of Human Services plan to take custody of 1000 children — if their parents were arrested during the convention — as an attempt to lower turnout at a welfare rights march.

In addition to discouraging public participation in the demonstrations, Hermes says, pronouncements about violence and arrests help police to justify severe limits on demonstrations. In 2000, the ACLU was forced to go to federal court in both Los Angeles and Philadelphia to overturn protest restrictions. In Los Angeles, the ACLU overturned a 186-acre "no-protest zone" around the convention hall, and a new, more lengthy permitting process. In Philadelphia, a no-protest zone was unnecessary because the First Union Center (now the Wachovia Center), where Republicans met, is privately owned and surrounded by huge parking lots, so protesters were unable to get anywhere near delegates. Nevertheless, two protest groups were unable to receive permits to march elsewhere until the ACLU sued in federal court.

During the second step in discouraging protest, Hermes says, police harass and intimidate activists by engaging in surveillance, and illegal stops and searches. In Philadelphia in 2000, two men were seen taking photographs of weekly protest meetings at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom office. Initially, they denied being police, but when the Philadelphia Inquirer traced the photographers’ license plates, they acknowledged that they were cops. In Los Angeles — after police harassed protesters by recording the license plates of those who entered the building, and arrested others for jaywalking — the ACLU won a temporary restraining order barring police from entering demonstrators’ headquarters without a search warrant.

The third step, says Hermes, is, "Arrest masses to destabilize the protests and worry about the Constitution later." Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was the arrest of 75 people on the second day of the 2000 Republican National Convention at what has become known as "the Puppet Warehouse." Police surrounded the warehouse as demonstrators were preparing props, including skeleton figures to represent Texas inmates executed during George W. Bush’s tenure as governor, and a pink paper pig’s head to illustrate the corrupting influence of money on the criminal justice system. All of those inside were arrested, and the props were dumped into a garbage truck. Subsequent court proceedings revealed that four undercover Pennsylvania state troopers, posing as union carpenters, were conducting surveillance inside the warehouse. Activists also learned that police secured a search warrant by using information from the right-wing Maldon Institute, which claimed demonstrators were funded by "Communist and leftist parties."

High bail — reaching as much as $1 million — was imposed for those arrested by police. This kept key organizers in jail until the convention was finished and forced protesters to switch from criticizing the Republicans to fundraising and jail-solidarity work.

As a fourth and final step, Hermes says, police departments determined to undermine protest, "maliciously prosecute, whether or not there’s a viable case." In Philadelphia, prosecutors pursued cases against the RNC protesters, although almost all of them fell apart in court. During Viveiros’s trial, for example, the city pressed ahead with police chief Timoney’s story about how, after Viveiros purportedly struck him with a bicycle, he wrestled the pony-tailed activist to the street and helped arrest him. This assertion came despite the prosecution’s knowledge that a defense video showed Viveiros calmly walking with a patrolman and cooperating with his arrest before the officer shoved him to the ground and punched him in the ribs. Despite being unsuccessful, however, the Philadelphia prosecutions took a toll on activists, forcing them to raise money and assist those on trial, rather than organizing on the political issues that prompted the protests in the first place.