New Orleans City Council: The One Where Rachel Gets Tasered
Pouring milk over pepper spray by Eli Ackerman.
I was on television this week I am told. I was in the background at a City Council meeting were no one could enter. I’ll have to see what went on inside on Cox 10. I attend a lot of City Council meetings. They are all televised locally and the hard core gadflies watch the meetings that they don’t attend. We call it geek TV.
I was behind the gate, behind the police, in the breezeway, when the police and deputies came through the gate to taser and pepper spray people.
People I knew were on the other side, like Christian Roselund, Eli Ackerman, Bill Quigley and Marshall Truehill Jr. None of them were shaking the gate, of course. Marshall and Eli, especially, are part of the furniture at all events civic.
The WTO nonsense was an act put on by the Coalition to Stop the Demolition, which has been working hard to isolate public housing residents from their fellow citizens and to polarize the issue of public housing with the sort of Marxist rhetoric you associate with juveniles.
The gates were shook in response to people were being removed from City Council chambers and taken to paddy wagons. This could be seen from the behind the gate. A protester jumped the gate to be quickly grabbed and arrested. It was not long after that the crowd of protesters shook the gate again and opened it.
The gates opened. An elderly protester was pulled in. The pepper spray and tasers were discharged. The police and deputies closed the barricades. The New Orleans police came forward with their steel barricades, the ubiquitous ones, the ones that live on the Lafitte Corridor out by the old brake tag station on the bayou. They laid them to create a channel along the roadway in the breezeway, up to the gate. Then they brought forward three mounted police officers. Police and deputies stood by the gates as if they were ready to swing them open and release the cavalry. No one shook the gate again.
A few more mounted came forward so that there were five or six. Chief Warren Riley spoke to reporters. Bill Quigley spoke to reporters. The show was now over. There was shouting through the bull horn by the protesters, but it was more or less a breakout session thereafter.
The videographer that I was assisting was now escorted out at the command of an Orleans Parish Civil Sheriff by New Orleans police. I followed with the clipboard.
We mingled with the crowd outside the gate. There were residents there as well. We residents of New Orleans attend City Council meetings of this sort, we are pretty well engaged.
After interviewing Tracie Washington, we went to lunch. We joined Kimberly Marshall, Karen Gadbios, and Sarah Elise Lewis at Italian Pie on Rampart St. The videographer and I split a small pizza with green peppers, black olives, mushrooms and pepperoni.
By the time we got out the rain was torrential. There were a handful under umbrellas by the gate as we make the corner from Perdido St onto Loyola Ave. When asked if we should see what has happened, I said nothing could have. That was all there was to it.
Other Tellings of the City Council Hearing
Other tales of the incidents at City Council have been offered by Eli Ackerman, Dangerblond, New Orleans Nation and Gwen Filosa of the Times-Picayune.
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