The Advocate

At Pier 57 and Central Booking—an RNC Adventure

Maria Cincotta

I was arrested on A-31, the day of direct action during the RNC. The following is an account of my experience in jail. For legal reasons, I haven’t included the details of my arrest here.

When we arrived at Pier 57, we were taken off the police bus and placed in a very large co-ed holding cell at the back of the building. Some people really had to pee, and being that we weren’t allowed to pee for hours previously, they started a pee corner in one corner of the cell. At this point, we were still cuffed, even thought we were confined in a cell. Finally, the police opened up a couple of porta-potties for us, but the lines for the toilets were ridiculously long, as there were hundreds of us and only a couple of toilets. I waited in line, and when I had my turn the police person who was monitoring the toilets took my flexcuffs off so that I could use the toilet. When he put the cuffs back on, he put them on a little looser, fortunately.

We waited in this large cell, still cuffed, for hours, although it’s difficult to gauge the time spent in each cell since I didn’t have a watch. While waiting here, I bumped into an old high school friend of mine, and seeing her helped me out a little bit. Meanwhile, people were engaged in some kind of wild drum circle thing in the back of the cell, tapping their plastic Dixie cups on the floor to a rhythm and chanting. It looked fun, but a little too hippie for my taste. People started to get tired and lie down on the floor, but I hesitated. I had heard a lot of people who had been previously confined at the pier say they had contracted bad rashes from the toxins on the floor. However, we were not provided with beds, and there were only a couple of benches in each cell. Lying down on this toxic floor was practically inevitable.

I was taken to another room to be searched again and further processed. For some reason, a cop tossed my water bottle in the trash. They confiscated everything else and gave me vouchers for its eventual pick-up. I was then put in a different cell with a few other people and given my first jail meal, a baloney sandwich on stale white bread. I’m vegan, so I think I might have had a bit of the bread, but even that was disgusting. After this, I was relocated to a single-sex cell that was fairly crowded. I was reunited with friends here, which was a good thing. We played hackey-sack with the baloney sandwiches, and also bowled with sandwiches and Dixie cups.

Finally, I was too exhausted to stand up anymore. I tried to sleep on the toxic Pier 57 ground. I was afraid of the repercussions to my skin, but I had to rest. There wasn’t much room to lie down on the floor, so we were mostly resting in the fetal position. That way we had enough floor space for everyone to relax for a while.

After attempting to rest for who knows how many hours, I awoke to a cacophonous noise of people yelling in one of the other cells. The men, confined in a large cell at the back of the pier, were howling for the police to let them go. We had already tried that tactic hours ago. It wasn’t working. Regardless of the level of noise we achieved as a collective, there was nothing we could do that would convince the cops that it was in their interest to liberate us at this point. People pounded on their cages, yelled at the top of their lungs, and stomped on the floors, but the cops were unmoved. Which is not to say that the cops were pleased to be there; most of the cops had worked way overtime at this point, and our arresting officers were stuck on duty until the afternoon after our arrest. The cops looked nearly as exhausted and desirous of a warm bed as we were, but they had the added advantage of getting paid. However, the discrepancy between the salaries of the “whiteshirts” (lead officers), and “blackshirts” (underlings), was fairly clear; the whiteshirts were making a ton more money than their underlings.
Most of the cops at the pier were new recruits. This was possibly their first big arrest, and their novice-status was fairly evident. The new officers were not paid a very handsome salary, especially considering what they had to endure. They were paid much less than I was paid as a first-year teacher in the NYC public schools. However, if the schools were actually educating kids instead of serving as holding tanks for kids, we might “need” less cops in general.

The morning arrived after a long night, and we found ourselves still stuck in the same place. We had nothing to eat until the people from the cell next door threw their cereal boxes over to us in sympathy. For some reason he cops refused or forgot to feed our cell, so we ultimately had to grab food that was in boxes on the other side of the bars. We procured our breakfast by force. After hours and hours of waiting and being shuffled around, we were switched to another cell, and finally we were put on a bus headed towards central booking. At this point, we were again confined in the flexcuffs. This time, they put them on especially tight. One girl was loosing feeling in her hands. When she complained to the officer on the bus about the pain, he just ignored her. The bus waited a long time before it left for central booking.

At this point, my memory gets a little hazier. We were searched again, for the third time, and placed in cells that grew progressively more and more overcrowded. At one point our cell had over a hundred women in it, despite only enough rood to fit around twenty-five “comfortably.” We were packed body to body. People started loosing it at this point. People were complaining of not having access to their medications, and one woman was hollering for her anti-psychotic medicine. We were all at the breaking point, and our jail experience was only half over. We watched footage of the RNC protests on the TV in this cell; it was the only one that had a television inside. We found the footage heartening. We even saw a clip that showed one of our cellmates getting arrested.

At this point, we started doing things like jail cell yoga, jail cell musicals, and other games to help us keep our sanity. We were stuck in this cell for most of the night. Here, and throughout our time at central booking, we were fed quite frequently, in contrast to our time spent at Pier 57. They gave us disgusting food—stale “peanut butter” (peanut-vomit) sandwiches, rotten fruit, and lunchmeat. None of the frequent meals made up for the time that we were deprived of food at the pier.

One of the saddest things I witnessed in this cell was a woman who broke down and wept on the floor because she wasn’t even involved in the RNC protests; she was just caught in a police sweep of a street. None of her friends even knew she was in jail. She felt very lonely and isolated. We all tried to console her, but it didn’t do much good. We had very limited access to the phone at this point. There were hundreds of women on line for one phone, so I didn’t even bother waiting for it.

After we were removed from the second cell at central booking, we were handcuffed together in mini-chain-gangs of five each, and brought to the fingerprinting station. As I was being fingerprinted, it was evident that the filth from Pier 57—all of the grease and dirt from the floors of that toxic place—was totally imbedded in my pores, impeding the fingerprinting process. The officer who was taking my fingerprints cleaned my fingers with Windex. I realized how dehumanized we were to the officers. Throughout our experience in jail, the cops had referred to us as “bodies,” a term that we took as insulting and degrading, but the Windex experience solidified the dehumanization.

After the cops put our fingerprints into the system, we were taken to a cell on one of the higher levels of the building. The cop who brought us there told us that we’d be there for just a couple of hours, but we ended up having to spend the whole night in this cell. Fortunately, there were a few mattresses in the cell. But then again, there were about thirty of us there, so we all had to share them. We found we could all get some comfort if we put only our heads on the mattresses. People in this cell sang songs together, songs of resistance and songs of nonsense. I went to sleep heartened by the sounds of the people doing jail-support below cheering us on; if we listened very hard, we could just make out the sounds of these people hollering their support.

When I woke up, I found the people in my cell sharing their arrest experiences with one another. They shared their names, how they were arrested, and the things they were learning or getting out of this jail experience. I was pleased to be in a cell with good people who were so self-reflective on the whole experience. Already I had met many amazing and inspiring people in jail, and I felt almost fortunate to be there. If I had to be in jail, at least I was stuck with the best people in New York. Hearing the stories of others inspired me, and reminded me of the reasons why I am involved with political action in the first place. It felt good to be connected with an amazing community of people committed to social change.

Soon after this we were shuffled into a line to get our “mug shots.” We waited in line for a really long time. My picture was awful. It was the first time in two days that I saw myself, and I was totally horrified by my haggard appearance. As we were getting our mug shots taken, I saw the woman who was weeping on the floor several cells back because she was not part of the RNC protests. She looked even worse at this point. It turned out that she needed medical attention, and the police were attending to her very slowly. She was worried that her problem would not be attended to. And this woman didn’t even do anything to deserve to be in jail. Well, none of us did anything to deserve to be there, but especially not her.

After the mug shots, I was sent to the medical examiner, who asked me a couple of questions and then sent me to another cop who searched me again for the fourth time. At this point, the pen that I had smuggled in and was using to keep notes was confiscated. I was disappointed about this. The cop saw the notes I had taken, and I was worried that she would take them, but she didn’t. I was then sent to another cell, one that happened to have really sour people in it. A lot of people in this cell were complaining about the jail experience. Well, of course jail is terrible, but if you spend all of your jail time ruminating about how much it sucks, that makes it even worse. In this cell, we finally met a couple of people who were in for non-RNC “criminal” situations. We were supposed to be awaiting legal counsel in this cell, but we had no opportunity to talk with lawyers at this point. In fact, I did not once talk with a lawyer at any point during my stay at central booking. We insisted upon seeing lawyers, but our requests were not heeded. I waited in this cell for another endless series of hours.
We heard about court orders for the cops to release us, but the court orders were repeatedly ignored.

Finally, I was released at around 7:40 pm. I was so excited to finally be approaching freedom that I acted a bit elated while being led towards the outside. The cop who was taking us downstairs threatened to lock me up again if I didn’t act solemn. They took us downstairs, where I received a DAT, or a desk appearance ticket. I would have to return to court on October 13th for my arraignment. I could live with that. I trust that I will be found not guilty. As I exited the jail, the cheers of the jail support folks embraced me. I fell into the arms of all of my friends on the outside, ate some nourishing Food Not Bombs grub, and felt the joyous ecstasy of freedom.

Maria Cincotta can be reached at maria@riseup.net.

Talking Points: The following is a collection of “talking points” some jail mates and I composed while we were at Pier 57, in anticipation that we would be able to talk with the press about our conditions after we left jail. We only were able to talk with Dyke TV outside of jail, unfortunately, but through conversations and emails these talking points are heard.

1. We are New Yorkers, and contrary to Mayor Bloomburg’s statements about our right to peacefully protest, we were arrested without warning. Many of us were arrested with excessive violence, including tourists, passers-by, medics, and legal aids. We realize that this experience is common to targeted communities of color, transgender, and queer people, and it is all unjust.

2. As well as being denied access to lawyers and phone calls, medical treatment was withheld for conditions including Crohn’s disease, heat disease, epilepsy, broken teeth, and a bloodied face.

3. In the past 24 hours, we estimate that a minimum of $100,000 was spent in basic labor costs alone at the detention center, Pier 57. These were our tax dollars, which were wasted detaining peaceful protestors, bystanders, medics, and legal observers. In a city where our schools are underfunded, the gap between the rich and poor is growing exponentially, and racism and segregation are ever-present, this is a travesty.