Bloomberg Played Key Role in Stifling Protest During Republican Convention
by TChris
Documents suggest that New York City Mayor Bloomberg lied when he denied that politics played any part in his decision to deny protesters access to the Great Lawn in Central Park during the 2004 Republican Convention. The Bloomberg administration claimed to be "motivated by a concern for the condition of the expensively renovated Great Lawn or by law enforcement's ability to secure the crowd," even though documents produced in a lawsuit show that the police preferred to have protestors gathered together in that location.
Those documents ... suggest that officials were indeed motivated by political concerns over how the protests would play out while the Republican delegates were in town, and how the events could affect the mayor's re-election campaign the following year. ...
[T]he documents, which are part of the lawsuit brought by the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, an antiwar civil rights group, indicate that politics and appearances were at the center of the administration's strategy and that Mr. Bloomberg was more intimately involved in the discussions over demonstrations in the park than he said.
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