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Remembering
June 1st
Could
the pepper spraying and
tree cutting happen again?
By Alan
Pittman
Five years ago, the city of Eugene was in such a rush
to start building the Broadway Place project that they roasted tree
sitter Jim Flynn alive, dousing him with can after can of pepper spray
while he dangled 40 feet up in a tree.
Early on a Sunday morning, police in a fire truck
rescue bucket cut Flynn's pants to his crotch to expose more flesh,
allowing the spray to burn his genitals and anus. Officers punched
Flynn in the arms and ribs over and over, twisted his feet and yanked
his head back by the hair. After an hour of this torture the police
call "pain compliance," officers tied Flynn to the rescue bucket and
used the hydraulic arm of the truck to wrench him from the tree.
 |
| Josh
Laughlin, Brett Cole and Jim Flynn reminisce at Broadway Place,
the site of the big protest June 1, 1997. |
Last week Flynn stood in front of an empty storefront
at Broadway Place with fellow June 1st tree sitters Brett Cole and
Josh Laughlin and shook his head.
"That's criminal!" says Cole, looking through the
window of the storefront that has stood empty with an unfinished gravel
floor since it was built. "That's what they had to nearly kill us
for? They were in such a rush and five years later they haven't even
put a floor in."
Five years later the Broadway Place project is struggling
but a pepper spray lawsuit is heating up and the legacy of June 1st
endures.
BROADWAY
PLACE
On June 1st 1997, 11 protesters climbed
trees at Broadway and Charnelton in an effort to delay the cutting
of 40 of downtown's largest trees until citizens could appeal to the
City Council at a public forum scheduled for the next night. The city
sprayed every can of pepper spray they had on protesters on the ground
and in the trees, borrowing more cans from Springfield and Lane County
when they ran out. In all, police shot off two dozen cans, including
several large canisters, of the chemical weapon. Police also lobbed
numerous tear gas grenades.
The city cut down the big trees to build a $13 million
parking garage for Symantec topped by $12 million in apartments and
storefronts built by the Lorig Corporation. Today, half the storefronts
are empty at Broadway Place and Symantec has left for Springfield,
leaving entire floors of the garage empty.
"It's a little ghost town down there," Laughlin says.
At 2 pm on a recent weekday afternoon, only one in
five of the spaces in the 742-car garage was occupied. Built at a
cost of $17,500 per space, the garage had 600 empty spaces.
"It seems like it was a pretty worthless project,"
Flynn says.
Symantec announced this month that it would lay off
270 employees to out-source jobs to Software Spectrum Inc. Software
Spectrum will use one of the empty Symantec buildings in downtown
Eugene and the parking garage. It's unclear exactly how many employees
the company will hire and for how long.
Lorig's property manager for the apartments, Elizabeth
Scott, says the 170 units are 90 percent full. An early proposal for
the "public-private partnership" for the building from Lorig called
for the city to waive property taxes for the building for 10 years
(worth about $500,000) and for Lorig to share 10 percent of profits
(about $30,000 to $50,000 a year) with the city. But Scott says Lorig
has made no payments to the city. "There's no profit sharing at all,"
she says.
Flynn faults the project for not including low income
housing. "None of us could afford to live in these places." The apartments
rent from $575 a month for a studio to $1,250 for a two bedroom.
Flynn says the public subsidies for Lorig and Symantec
parking were "incredibly bogus."
"It was a gross perversion of power to serve a pretty
narrow economic interest," Cole says.
Flynn says the memory of the pepper spay and tree
cutting has caused many people to avoid the area. "There's a lot of
people in the community that have no taste for this project."
Broadway Place won a Governor's Livability Award for
encouraging dense urban development. The award, with a picture of
the project with the only large tree left on the site, hangs in the
City Council's McNutt meeting room.
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| Jim
Flynn climbs a replacement tree. |
"I don't think the concept is bad," Laughlin says.
"I'm into keeping the population in the urban core." But he says a
slightly smaller apartment building and garage could have been built
while still saving the big trees. "Obviously, they had the space,"
he says gesturing to an empty storefront where a majestic tree once
stood.
Laughlin also says the city's approach of subsidizing
urban density downtown while zoning and planning for sprawl on the
edge of town works at cross purposes. "They never really look at the
big picture," he says. "We're putting out the welcome mat for Wal-Mart."
City PR staff in 1997 emphasized that new trees would
be planted to replace the old trees, some several feet thick. Flynn
compares that argument to Weyerhaeuser's efforts to portray itself
as "the tree planting company."
None of the replanted trees have grown to more than
two inches in diameter, and several have died and been replanted with
younger saplings. Cole says the trees "encased in cement" and with
iron collars will never grow as large as the ones cut down.
The birds and other wildlife that once lived in the
big trees have been replaced by cement sculptures embedded in the
side of the garage. "There's no wildlife here," Flynn says. "There's
just stone faces."
LAWSUIT
Flynn, Laughlin and Cole are suing the city of Eugene,
alleging police used excessive force in violation of their civil rights
five years ago.
The case was delayed by the search for an attorney
to take the case and by waiting for decisions in related cases that
might set legal precedents. Now the lawsuit is gathering steam. U.S.
District Court Magistrate Judge Thomas Coffin rejected a city motion
to have the lawsuit thrown out and has ordered the parties into mediation
June 17 to see if a settlement can be reached before trial.
As part of a settlement, the tree sitters say they
may ask for the city to change its police pepper spray policy to bar
use of the weapon against non-violent demonstrators.
Flynn says the city's attorney recently sent them
a copy of the city policy and an offer for them to suggest revisions.
Flynn says the policy change is needed but he wonders about the precedent
of having to use a lawsuit to effect the change in police rules and
whether the city is just out to save itself some money in the settlement.
Flynn says the city may need a "financial kick in
the pants" from the lawsuit so it will "think twice about ever brutalizing
anyone again."
Flynn says the spray made much of his body, including
his genitals and anus, feel like it was "on fire" five years ago.
Flynn alleges he still suffers neck pain after one officer jerked
his head violently back and downwards by the hair. "You'd think he
was trying to rip the head off a chicken."
"All I said was 'I don't want to be pepper sprayed'
and held up a peace sign," Cole says. Cole says police saturated him
with pepper spray and the burning chemical even got in his ears.
Cole cites studies linking pepper spray to eye damage
and even death. The ACLU's Southern California office published a
study a decade ago linking pepper spray as a possible factor in the
deaths of more than 100 people nationwide. "It's the use of potential
deadly force," Cole says.
Police officers exposed to spray during training
have compared the experience to "bobbing for French fries in a deep-fat
fryer" or having someone take an electric sander and "grind off all
the skin from the back of your hand to your elbow."
Cole, who makes his living as a photographer and artist,
says the police, "essentially took the risk of blinding me for the
rest of my life for something as silly as starting their development
project a day later."
Flynn, Laughlin and Cole's attorney Linda Williams
say the police threatened the lives of protesters by spraying them
with the blinding, debilitating weapon while they were perched high
off the ground. "The use of pepper spray 30 to 60 feet above the ground
submitted them to a significant risk of bodily harm or death," Williams
says.
The record in the case shows the demonstrators were
peaceful and posed no threat to officers or property and said they
would come down from the trees in a day, Williams says. But police
"doused" them anyway with doses that went way beyond training and
labels on the cans, she says. "We think a jury would conclude this
is a reckless and extremely dangerous use of force."
Police Capt. Becky Hanson, the officer in command
on June 1st, did not return a call requesting comment. City attorney
Jens Schmidt says the pepper spray "wasn't excessive under the circumstances"
but the city is interested in exploring a settlement with the plaintiffs.
He says court precedents give police "qualified immunity" from liability
if a use of force does not clearly violate constitutional protections
against excessive force. "The law was not clear," he says.
Judge Coffin disagreed with the city's immunity argument
in March when he rejected a city motion to have the case thrown out.
Coffin cited the precedent of a recent ruling by the 9th Circuit Court
of Appeals. In that case, Humboldt County deputies had used Q-tips
in the fall of 1997 to apply pepper spray directly into the eyes of
anti-logging protesters who had locked themselves together. Video
of the incident was aired on the national news and the deputies were
accused of torture.
The case originally resulted in a hung jury mistrial,
then was dismissed by the judge and then appealed to the 9th Circuit,
which reinstated the trial. Humboldt County appealed to the Supreme
Court, which sent it back to the appeals court for reconsideration.
The appeals court ruled again this year that the case should go to
a jury for retrial. The appeals court found that "regional and statewide
police practice and protocol clearly suggest that using pepper spray
against non-violent protestors is excessive."
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| The
old trees were quickly cut and removed after the protests and
arrests. |
The city argued that the Humboldt case was different
because the Eugene protesters were perched in trees. But Coffin said
the cases were "too similar" to ignore the precedent and noted that
plaintiffs had argued that their perches made the use of pepper spray
even more unreasonable because of the risk of falling. "I am not sure
this distinction helps them."
Schmidt says the city will appeal Coffin's ruling
to the 9th Circuit and try to distinguish the two cases from each
other.
LEGACY
The lawsuit is not the only enduring legacy from June 1st.
The incident "changes a lot of people's attitudes
toward police and toward trust in government," City Councilor Betty
Taylor says.
Taylor says she was "horrified" when she saw the police
action five years ago. "I saw people spraying people. I saw people
screaming," she says. The site made her so upset, "I had tears running
down my cheeks. It was just awful."
The city has never admitted any wrong-doing or apologized
for June 1st. But the city has been more careful with cutting down
trees since then. City forestry and management staff have been sent
out to successfully negotiate with protesters, avoiding a police response.
"The city seems afraid to cut trees without doing
some public process," Flynn says.
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| Cars
are scarce in the parking garage during work hours. |
The city has planted more street trees downtown and
saved trees at the site of the new library that might otherwise have
been cut. LTD included a large oak tree in its design for a new bus
station.
The City Council passed a somewhat strengthened tree
protection ordinance, although the new rules have been held up by
legal appeals by developers.
Although not entirely the result of June 1st, the
city has stepped back from controversial urban renewal projects. The
council dedicated all the resources of the downtown urban renewal
district to building a popular new library instead of more city parking
garages. The city's controversial Riverfront Urban Renewal District
near the UO has refocused on the area surrounding the new federal
courthouse.
A vote to establish a police review board narrowly
failed, but the City Council set up a Police Commission to review
police policies. The commission recommended minor revisions to police
pepper spray and demonstration policies. The police policy now states
that pepper spray should not be used to disperse crowds and restricts
the use of the chemical weapon against people engaged in passive resistance
by going limp on the ground.
Pepper spray is apparently still allowed if a non-violent
protester is holding onto a tree or another protester, although the
new policy is unclear.
Many of the key city staff involved in the June 1st
incident have since been fired or resigned. Planning Director Abe
Farkas and Police Chief Leonard Cooke resigned under pressure from
then City Manager Vicki Elmer in the wake of the June 1st incident.
A backlash by city executive staff then lead the City Council to fire
Elmer. Farkas's deputy Lew Bowers and then Assistant City Manger Jim
Johnson left the city recently.
"We're all still here," says Laughlin. "It's kind
of an interesting irony."
After June 1st, protests became more radical in Eugene,
with some anarchists breaking windows and police conducting mass arrests
of demonstrators. Some of the demonstrators linked the rise of more
violent protests to the police escalation against non-violent protesters
on June 1st.
"It definitely stepped up the activism in Eugene,"
Flynn says.
Remembering June 1st makes it less likely that something
like it will ever happen again in Eugene, Taylor says. "It makes me
sad to even remember it. I don't like thinking about it," she says.
"But I think we need to remember it."
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