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"MIDNIGHT MARAUDER"
NABBED DEFACING
HATED PEDESTRIAN BARRICADES!!
By Mildred Pierce
Superbowl Sunday night, while most of New York City was at
home watching TV, Bill Not Bored (a.k.a. Bill Brown, publisher of
the situationist fanzine NOT BORED!) was arrested by the NYPD for
allegedly spray-painting graffiti that denounced the outrageous
pedestrian barricades that Mayor Giuliani and Police Commissioner
Safir have installed at every intersection along 49th and 50th
Streets between Fifth and Lexington Avenues in Manhattan. Bill
Not Bored is now facing felony criminal mischief charges, despite
the fact that writing graffiti is a Class A Misdemeanor under New
York State Penal Law.
Originally installed in December 1997 as a "holiday season"
experiment, the barricades -- despite intense criticism of them
by the public, the press and even the cops themselves -- have
been stubbornly defended by the Mayor's Office and have not been
removed. Designed to allow motor vehicles to make turns onto
one-way streets without having to contend with pedestrians, the
barricades must be guarded by police officers, who are supposed
to see to it that pedestrians obey the signs that tell them not
to cross the street between the hours of 9 am and 9 pm, despite
the plainly visible "WALK" signal. Significantly, the
barricades-and-cops "solution" to the problem of hypercongestion
in midtown was not presented or approved of by the Department of
Transportation, under whose jurisdiction matters such as this
should fall. The idea of the barbaric barricades was hatched by
top bureaucrats in the Police Department, in collaboration with
the Mayor -- in other words, by people totally unskilled in the
areas of traffic management and urban planning, but deeply
interested in advanced techniques of social control.
The intersection at Madison and 50th Street (the one at which
Bill Not Bored was apprehended) is quite obviously badly
designed, like so many of our City's streets: it is the
intersection of two very busy one-way streets. Bad planning such
as this -- combined with the super-concentration of both
pedestrian and automotive traffic -- is deadly, especially for
pedestrians and bicyclists.
According to the Office of Safety Programs (NYC Department of
Transportation), every year in New York City 15,000 pedestrians
are struck and injured by automobiles. New York City leads the
nation in pedestrian fatalities. Fully one-half of the people
killed by cars are pedestrians, not other drivers. Contrary to
the ravings of City Hall, the majority of the people killed
aren't fast- walking jaywalkers; forty percent of them are senior
citizens.
Bill Not Bored told the SHADOW that the only sensible
solution to ready- made traffic jams such as the intersection of
Madison and 50th is to re-route all automobiles away from this
intersection and the others in the city like it. Said Bill: "It
makes absolutely no sense to try to keep throngs of pedestrians
out of the intersections, especially in a city that is unique in
the world in that you don't have to own a car to live here; you
can rely on mass transportation and walking or a just a bicycle
to get anywhere you want to go. To install barricades is to
openly display symptoms of severe debilitation by the widespread,
constantly reinforced and suicidal madness once known as the `car
craze.' Forget about the average driver's `road rage' -- the
politicians and bureaucrats have `mad car disease,' which is
caused by sacrificing increasingly precious public space so that
cars, polluting pieces of private property, can travel to and be
parked absolutely anywhere."
Not surprisingly, the barricades -- even on their own terms --
are a complete failure. Studies done at the end of January 1998
by Transportation Alternatives, a bicyclist group opposed to
automotive traffic, show that automobile traffic did not move
any more freely because of the barricades; traffic conditions
remained gridlocked. As a result, the barricades are hated by
both pedestrians and by the police officers who are assigned to
enforce the no-walking zones. Both groups have been vocal in
their opposition to the barricades and surprisingly clear in
expressions of their feelings that the Mayor has too big of an
ego to admit that the barricades are a failure and an affront.
Giuliani's response to these criticisms: he got the City
Council to raise the jaywalking fine from $2 to $50, and now he
wants to raise it again to $100. The first big protest against
the pedestrian barricades was orchestrated by Transportation
Alternatives, and featured a group of people who had dressed up
as cows to express their desire not to be treated like human
cattle. An essentially silly protest -- "Remooooooove the
barricades!" was a typical slogan -- it nevertheless received a
great deal of media attention and placed the issue of
pedestrians' rights squarely in the public eye. Dissatisfied
that Transportation Alternatives did not follow-up on their
first demonstration, Time's Up!, a group of radical bicycle
riders, organized a second demonstration in mid-January. Though
the protesters were numerous, placard-bearing and quite visible
(they marched back and forth in one of the intersections, but
not against the new rights-of-way), the demonstration was hardly
covered at all by the mainstream media. Some protestors decided
that bolder steps were needed. The week before Bill Not Bored's
arrest, the entire area in which the barricades are installed
was hit by a massive graffiti attack. According to news reports
that covered the attack in depth the following day, every single
no-walking sign had the word "GO" painted on it; arrows were
drawn on the streets pointing right through the barricades; and
the phrases "THE BARRICADES SUCK" and "BAN ALL PRIVATE CARS FROM
MANHATTAN" were spraypainted on the sidewalks and on the walls
of buildings. While Channel 4's report emphasized that writing
graffiti is considered vandalism and criminal mischief, both
Channel 11 and New York 1 left their viewers with the definite
impression that the barricades do indeed suck, and big time.
Though the District Attorney's office has yet to establish
whether Bill Not Bored was a copycat or the perpetrator of the
original graffiti hit as well as the second one, the zine
publisher was arrested yellow-handed (for the color of spray
paint he was using was yellow), by foot patrolman Hennington as
Bill Not Bored was writing "THE BARRICADES SUCK" -- though he
only got as far as "THE BARRICADES S" before he was nabbed -- on
the sidewalk.
Handcuffed and thoroughly searched, though not
informed that he was under arrest or given his Miranda warning,
Bill Not Bored was taken to the 18th precinct at around 10:30
pm. He was held for several hours in a holding cell before
being formally arrested, finally Mirandized, and interrogated at
length by two detectives who'd watched too many episodes of NYPD
Blue. It wasn't until 7:00 am that he was taken from the 18th
Precinct to Central Booking. But -- because the arresting
officer had found a bottle of prescription medication in Bill
Not Bored's possession -- he was refused by Central Booking, and
sent to Bellevue Hospital for a psychiatric examination. Several
hours later, handcuffed to a wheelchair and in the middle of a
day room in the hospital, Bill was quickly judged to be sane,
though he could have just as easily been judged a danger to
himself and others, and detained for up to 72 hours for
"observation," had the examining doctor been inclined or under
orders to do so.
Returned to and finally accepted by Central Booking at around
noon, Bill was held in the Tombs until his arraignment, which
took place after the sun had gone down. At around 9 pm, he was
finally released on his own recognizance and made his way home in
the cold -- without his gloves, hat or winter coat, all of which
had been seized as evidence by the cops. The New York Post -- not
known for its populist stances on controversial issues -- wrote
up Bill's arrest under the headline "MIDNIGHT MARAUDER NABBED
DEFACING HATED BARRICADES." Once again, it is to the hated
barricades that one's attention is drawn. They are hated; and for
damn good reason. They suck.
In the weeks since Bill's arrest, the barricades have
remained in the news, thanks in part to activists such as Robert
Lederman, who got arrested on a disorderly conduct charge at an
anti- barricade protest in early February. He was wearing a sign
that says it all in a nutshell: "GIULIANI=POLICE STATE."
Activist criminal defense attorney Stanley Cohen has agreed
to represent Bill Not Bored as he tries to get these absurdly
trumped-up felony charges dismissed. If you would like to help
out, write NOT BORED! P.O. Box 1115, New York, NY 10009-9998.
Donations should be made payable to "Stanley Cohen."
If you want to show moral support, Bill's next court date is
April 16, at 100 Centre Street, Part F, at 9:30 AM.
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