COPS MOBILIZED AGAINST DRAFT PROTEST IN NEW YORK
By Les Evans
Thousands of New Yorkers participated in the militant and effective "Stop the Draft Week" here December 4-8. Similar actions took place throughout the country, but we do not have full reports yet on those outside of New York.
The tone for the week was set here by the police who moved in in massive numbers, determined to split up and fragment the demonstrations. The focus of the antiwar protest was the Whitehall draft induction center in lower Manhattan island.
On December 5, 5,000 protesters gathered at Battery Park, near the induction center, at 5:30 a.m. The objective of the group, largely under pacifist leadership was to march to Whitehall where peaceful picketing would take place while a token number would stage a sit-in.
The police mobilized 5,000 cops with another 24,000 on standby. They set up wooden barricades surrounding the induction center. When demonstrators arrived they were herded into wooden "pens," allowing only a few hundred to remain in front of the Whitehall center, in violation of police agreements to permit a single unified demonstration.
At one point cops on horseback rode into the crowd, using clubs to drive demonstrators participating in the sit-in out of the street and onto the sidewalk.
The demonstration the following day was organized by the Stop the Draft Week Committee, a coalition of 50 student, antiwar and political groups.
Five thousand demonstrators, mostly students, were met by an equal number of cops. The committee had been promised by liberal Mayor Lindsay that they would be permitted to march in three groups from Battery Park to the induction center. The police, in violation of the agreement, set up mazes of barricades, cutting off the march and preventing it from getting near the building. One group of about a thousand was cut off by police, who forced it to march uptown, away from the induction center. Blocked at every turn by police, they marched for almost three hours trying to rejoin the main demonstration.
On Thursday and Friday demonstrators abandoned Whitehall, marching uptown.
Cops followed them on foot and horseback, mounting occasional brutal at-— tacks on groups which they succeeded in splitting from the main march. Almost 600 were arrested by the end of the week.
Large numbers of police provocateurs were infiltrated into the demonstration. Many of these agents revealed themselves when arrests were made by helping to arrest other demonstrators.
The effect of these agents -- and small ultraleft groups, that advocate violent actions out of political conviction -- was nullified by a large contingent of volunteer marshals who maintained order and prevented the cops from having an excuse for attacking the demonstration.
Thus, when the attacks and arrests were made, it was clear to any fair-minded observer that the police were wholly responsible. Even an army geologist who witnessed a vicious police attack on several hundred demonstrators in front of a midtown army installation was driven to say to the New York Times that "kids were knocked over and stepped on....What the police did was un-American, unchivalrous and disgusting."
The aim of the police and of the government, from New York's Mayor Lindsay to Lyndon Johnson, is to isolate the students from the massive sections of the population who also oppose the war. Their tactic is twofold: to make people afraid to participate in antiwar demonstrations, but even more important, to make the students appear responsible for the violence of the police.
It is extremely important that the antiwar movement weigh very carefully the demands it raises from the standpoint of whether or not they can be accomplished with the forces at hand, and whether or not they lend themselves to distortion or misrepresentation by the press and the government.
One of the slogans this week was "close Whitehall." Everybody in the demonstration recognized when they saw the . cops that the police had the sheer military force to keep Whitehall open. But the cops used this "threat" as their excuse to break up the demonstration and trample on the right of people to protest a foul, undeclared, illegal war. The press also took advantage of the demand to "prove" that the demonstration had been a "failure" because it had not succeeded in closing the draft headquarters.
There is a danger of substituting radical talk for radical action. The thing the capitalist rulers of America fear most is the student movement forging links with the massive numbers in the black ghettos and among white workers. Then and only then will the antiwar movement have the power to close down the war against the people of Vietnan.