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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the April 10, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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AIDS group denounces brutal police riot

By Shelley Ettinger in New York

At a March 29 news conference, members of ACT UP denounced New York police officers for beating, kicking and punching AIDS activists at a Wall Street demonstration five days earlier.

According to ACT UP members and other witnesses, police brutalized people who were protesting drug-company profiteering at the headquarters of finance capital March 24. While they pummeled the protesters-including people with AIDS-cops screamed anti-gay and AIDS-phobic epithets and threatened to kill them.

Cops threw people to the ground. They dragged people by the hair. They banged their heads on the pavement.

They arrested 73 activists. One man says he struggled to breathe as officers held his face smashed against the seat in a police van. Cops knelt on his back and held him down with a nightstick as the van was driven to the precinct station.

There, cops strip-searched women and men.

Holding mayor responsible

Bill Thorne of ACT UP/Golden Gate has been an activist for 15 years. He had come from San Francisco to mark ACT UP's 10^th anniversary-and ended up in the hospital after police beat him bloody. He told reporters he still doesn't know the extent of his injuries.

Thorne said police attacked him from behind and pinned him to the ground. "They slammed my head over and over on the pavement. Then they scraped my head on the asphalt-a piece of which stayed embedded in my head for several days.

"They kicked me and punched me repeatedly."

Cops slammed Thea Mateu, a Puerto Rican lesbian, onto the ground. Then, she said, one stood with his foot on her neck, screaming: "I'm going to break your f-----g neck! I'm going to kill you!"

Longtime ACT UP member Eric Sawyer commented: "The responsibility for the violent behavior of police officers lies squarely at the feet of the mayor. ... As [he has] with many communities in our city, the mayor [Rudolph Giuliani] has made a political decision to use the police to teach us the lesson to keep quiet, not to object to certain policies and to stay in our place. However ... we must confront the drug company profiteers at the root of this treatment-access crisis, and we cannot let the mayor stand in our way."

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