Angry in the Great White North

From the New York Daily News:

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan said Tuesday she was hurt slightly in a scuffle that erupted when police broke up a rally as she was at the microphone.

"I was speaking and someone grabbed my backpack and pulled me back pretty roughly," Sheehan said in a telephone interview Tuesday, referring to the rally Monday in Union Square.

"I think their use of force was pretty excessive for someone that didn't have a permit," said Sheehan, who said she was not roughed up directly by police but was jostled when officers broke up the rally and arrested organizer Paul Zulkowitz.

Paul Browne, the chief police spokesman, said Sheehan had finished speaking when officers arrested Zulkowitz, who had been repeatedly warned that he didn't have a permit.

Now people, including Cindy Sheehan, have been making a point about all this fuss over a permit. They would like you to think this was really targeting her.

But the sad fact is, this has nothing to do with Cindy Sheehan, and everything to do with Paul Zulkowitz:

Inspector Michael McEnroy, commander of the 13th Precinct, insisted the shutdown order had nothing to do with the content of Sheehan’s speech, but was instead about the "provocation" caused by Zulkowitz. "This has been going on for much longer than today," McEnroy said, adding of Sheehan, "I don’t even know the woman." That last part prompted one pissed-off onlooker to shoot back: "Haven't you watched the news or read a paper in the last three months?"

Clearly Inspector McEnroy doesn't read Angry in the Great White North!

So what was Inspector McEnroy talking about?

According to a police spokesperson, Paul Zulkowitz, 49, was arrested at Union Square’s south plaza on Aug. 30 at 6:30 p.m. after he was observed erecting a shack and refused to desist. Zulkowitz was charged with obstructing governmental administration, resisting arrest, disorderly conduct and one more charge the spokesperson did not identify. Zulkowitz, who goes by the name zool and said he lives at the East New York Green Tea House, an artists and activists' collective in Brooklyn, said he had had a discussion with the commanding officer of the 13th Precinct, who was at the scene with undercover officers; then, Zulkowitz said, he sat down on a small pup tent and was arrested

Zulkowitz said angrily, "Cindy Sheehan is holding her vigil outside George Bush's ranch in Texas, and here in supposedly the most liberal city in the United States, we cannot exercise our First Amendment rights." Zulkowitz said he was also charged with erecting a shack. He said the permit allows them to have a table, and that they have a table, a gazebo, a display, a banner and two tents.

Like all big cities, the freedom to agitate politically is managed by a complex system of permits that cover all the minutiae of such demonstrations, like what structures you are allowed to have, and what sort of sound system. This level of management is required simply because with millions of people living in close proximity, unregulated activity of this kind could lead to chaos, even violence. Imagine if every person with a political axe to grind started setting up shacks in Union Square.

Wall-to-wall shacks.

If you think about it, regulation also helps maximize the effectiveness of any given demonstration, but keeping them queued up and out of each other's hair.

Paul Zulkowitz doesn't seem like the kind of guy to appreciate the irony that if he obeyed the rules, he'd actually be more effective protesting against them.

Well, his 15 minutes is up. Paul Zulkowitz got himself arrested twice in a space of three weeks riding on Cindy Sheehan's bandwagon. Now that it's pretty much over for him, he can go back to demanding free public transportation and the removal of the Coke machine from the lobby of the local progressive radio station.

[Other views on the arrests at the Cindy Sheehan event by QandO and Michelle Malkin (here and here]