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Monday, September 09, 2002

Did something get lost in the translation on Neville Island on Labor Day?

The U.S. Secret Service says a designated demonstration area is supposed to be for all demonstrators, yet only those approximately 40 people who carried signs criticizing President Bush were put behind a fence when the presidential motorcade came by.

Those carrying signs that said nice things got to stay outside in freedomland.

"It didn't matter if they were pro- or anti-, that was for all demonstrators," Scott Johnson, assistant special agent in charge of the Pittsburgh Field Office of the Secret Service, said of the demonstration area.

But Johnson added, "We weren't there during the arrest."

Bill Neel, 65, was arrested for disorderly conduct by Allegheny County Police when he refused to get behind the fence with his sign, which said: "The Bushes must truly love the poor -- they've made so many of us."

Whether or not you are sympathetic with Neel's hyperbolic message, he was in a public space when he was cuffed and taken from view. Fencing off demonstrators is not something that began with the Bush administration, and all presidential visits are in some sense staged, but this struck me -- and many readers -- as different.

It is one thing to be removed from a political rally for heckling a speaker or crashing the gate, but when did it become necessary to haul a guy away for quietly expressing dissent in public?

Bush was in town for a carpenters' union picnic, a ticketed event, but the motorcade route was open to anyone. I questioned Neel's arrest in a column Thursday and was swamped with e-mail and phone calls running about 10-to-1 in his favor.

I urged those who challenged my view to give an example of another time when someone was pulled from a public space and charged with disorderly conduct for carrying a sign not obscene to a presidential motorcade. I'd tell that story, too. But for now all I know about is Neville Island.

Neville Police Superintendent Edward Selzer, 65, who has run the township police department since 1975, said it was his decision to set up the demonstration area. It was several blocks from where Bush would speak, but on the motorcade route.

When I asked why no pro-Bush demonstrators were ordered behind the fence, Selzer said those carrying more favorable signs were "people basically sitting in their front yards at their houses." He "knew 80 percent personally."

If any of these residents had carried anti-Bush signs? They could have stayed right where they were, Selzer said. "There's nothing you could do about them."

Drawing these distinctions is where the premise of this free-speech zone gets wobbly. Is it really possible that everyone with a pro-Bush sign that day was either a Neville resident or a ticketed guest, that nobody from Western Pennsylvania drove to the island on a whim to greet our president with a welcome sign?

If true, that would show an uncommon lack of support. If not true, then the demonstration area did not meet the professed standards of the Secret Service, nor the U.S. Constitution, because only dissenters were ordered behind the fence.

"On arrival there, it was as if there was a big phalanx of state troopers approaching, corralling us into the pen" said Michael Drohan, 64, of Wilkins, who was with a group of protesters from the Thomas Merton Center. "We were trying to find out from these guys, what's the deal? This is public property here."

Selzer says he set up the demonstration area to avoid "total disruption."

"You get somebody for Bush and one against, and all of a sudden a fight starts. I've been in this business long enough to know what human nature is."

Of course, if all demonstrators, pro and con, were placed behind that fence, you'd force that very confrontation. But who believes there was ever a chance there would be anyone but dissenters in the Not-OK Corral?