Police and Pirates in the Streets

While Reason's convention correspondents were actually covering the march in New York yesterday, I was experiencing it via C-Span. The best sign I saw said "Raise Pay for NYPD," or words to that effect.

I figure a placard like that functions the same way those Friends Of The Police stickers do when you're driving 15 miles per hour over the speed limit.

Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times reports that many protestors have brought along broadcast equipment and set up temporary pirate stations. From Friday's article:

"It has become sort of a thing that whenever there's a big protest like this, someone sets up a pirate radio station the same as someone setting up the food truck or the sound system," said Pete Tridish, a longtime activist and founder of the Philadelphia-based Prometheus Radio Project, an advocacy group for legal, noncommercial micro-radio broadcasters. "Someone knows how to start a radio station, and so someone does it."

The paper also reports that "RNC protesters plan to use wireless phones to call in live, in-the-trenches reports that will be streamed over the Internet and picked up for rebroadcast nationwide on community-based micro radio stations—some licensed, most illegal." This too has become standard practice at the big protests. Indeed, it's how Indymedia became such a phenomenon.