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We went for a walk around Burke Lake, just around the corner from our friends’ house in Northern Virginia. It was 36 degrees (F) when we left the house, but well over 40 by the time we returned. There are still some leaves in their brilliant colors, which made for quite a beautiful walk that was very different from Kaaawa.
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Back at their house with a cup of coffee, I was just checking the APEC news.
Agence France-Presse seems to have a good read of the local reaction.
Hawaiian officials had embraced the summit as a chance to showcase the islands’s hospitality, but it has brought the heaviest security since the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly 70 years ago.
“This is totally not what Hawaii is about,” local resident Tino Fornas said, gesturing at a roadblock manned by grim-faced police. “Yeah, welcome to Hawaii. Now, please leave.”
Security was also ultra-tight behind the beaches, with some of the city’s busiest streets empty because of road closures, and police barking at cars or pedestrians going astray.
“It’s insane. It feels like Communist China,” said Marvin Schuster of Pennsylvania, who shelved plans to leave his hotel because of the difficulties getting around.
“It sort of ruins the vacation when you are forced to just stay in the room and watch TV,” he said.
Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Hawaii+bristles+APEC+security/5703306/story.html#ixzz1db0X3fds
And the Moana Nui conference, held to give a people’s alternative to APEC, was picked up by Al Jazeera English in a video available on YouTube.
According to Google, the meetings are getting a little more attention in the countries represented as media report on the activities of their respective leaders, with articles about the Chinese, Russian, Philippine, Canadian, and Australian leaders.
Civil Beat’s coverage also gets prominent attention in Google’s listing of media coverage.
I wonder whether any city or state officials will admit that their advance purchase of large amounts of crowd control weaponry showed how out of touch they are with their own constituents? They apparently have so little sense of their own constituents that they assumed they had to be ready for the violent protests that have sometimes been seen elsewhere. I think they owe us an apology. Perhaps a refund for their excessive purchases. Do you suppose there’s resale market for unused pepper canisters and weapons?
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If the price were right, I’m sure Dog the Bounty Hunter would be interested in some previously owned pepper spray (-:
I wonder if pepper spray would make an easy, fast, nice, hot barbeque sauce?
Hawaii has a susceptibility to wanting to be like everyplace else even though our economy and culture are based on not being like everyplace else. We’re an island backwater that has pretensions to being a continental crossroads, and APEC has inflamed these tendencies perhaps no where more than in the police department. Selling the police on high-tech equipment must have seemed to the salespeople as if they had achieved sales Nirvana.
they’re gonna keep it and want to use it sometime
Everywhere I go I see shiny new Federal cop cars with K9 or explosive detection squad markings.
Did we lease these? If not, can we sell them? How much did we pay for all this police state stuff, barricades, etc, and where can we find the expenditures in the budget?
Aren’t we supposed to be able to know where our money goes?
What about the sound cannon equipment? Is it here? Is it staying?
SUCKS
I attended all of the public presentations by the Carlisle Administration and the Honolulu Police Department and raised these very concerns at the City Council’s Committe on Safety, Economic Development and Government Affairs chaired by Councilmember Tulsi Gabbard.
As part of my testimony, I submitted a segment of the September 13, 2011, PBS Frontline series which addressed how Homeland Security is underwriting major chunks of municipal public safety budgets all across the US plus addressing the potential for serious violations of the public’s
First Amendment rights.
Although the committee members and the Administration/HPD acknowledged the need to protect those rights, they felt that whatever concerns were raised during APEC would be overridden by not only public safety but also a major boost in the economy both during APEC and afterwards.
Money talks and everyone else walks
Couldn’t even be bothered by a group picture in aloha shirts. The press was housed in a windowless room. Minimal press coverage outside Hawaii. A deficit for the event. One dead.
Yup, sure sounds like a success to me.
Referring to the H-1 this morning, I over heard an officer say we are in “lock-down” now.
Funny they would use a term applied to keeping people in their cells. Scary that they now have all the means in place to lock us down if the right emergency declaration was called. Perhaps it would come over the new national emergency alert system that they just tested. I guess there would be no way to get to Walmart or Home Depot for supplies if a national lock-down was ever called.
Hail Freedonia!
APEC was a test run for all the security technology and planning for when the locals rise up against the U.S. government after enough of them are reduced to living in tents on sidewalks. Maybe a test bed for crowd-control plans being implemented in many other U.S. cities as well, given the economy’s collapse and the Occupy movement’s success. Lockdown is right. Remember it’s the only place in the United States that ever was under martial law, and it lasted into 1946, a year after the war was over. As the Hawaiians say: Imua.
Martial law actually ended in October 1944, but the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t rule on the issue until 1946.
I think that the lesson is clear. If you want to prevent large scale demonstrations and protests in Hawaii, tell everybody that traffic will be hell.
this would work …. but only if people listened, thought about it with common sense and planned ahead rather than whining about things at the last minute!
as such, the smart lesson won’t get learned.
(quote) “It’s insane. It feels like Communist China,” said Marvin Schuster of Pennsylvania, who shelved plans to leave his hotel because of the difficulties getting around. (end quote)
“This is just like living in Auschwitz!” “It’s like the Bataan Death March all over again!” Poor baby. I’m sorry you have to sit in your luxurious hotel room for a few hours.
Such overreactions make any opposition to APEC look silly to those who will lump them all together.
Please, get some perspective. This isn’t helping.
From my perspective and experience, the police acted with appropriate levels of behavior. They were prepared for the worst; but in my encounters, they responded positively to a howzit and a request for direction on how to avoid the traffic tieups.
Think how bad it would have been for the world and for Hawaii if some terrorist had been able to place a bomb in the middle of a meeting between the Presidents of the U.S., Russia, and China. How would you like to have the responsibility for making that nightmare not happen?
My understanding is that a number of protest marches were held, and there were no major incidents of civil liberties being denied. If that is not the case, I would like to hear the details.
Why did you disappear Ken Conklin’s comment (below) about Defend Hawaii apparel? It seemed to be germane to the discussion.
Regarding police having sufficient firepower in case there’s a large violent mob: I think it’s like having enough medicine on hand to control a pandemic, or having enough electric generating capacity to meet more than peak demand. Having too much is wasteful, but having too little could be disastrous. It’s naive to dismiss the possibility of violence in Hawaii. Take a look at the T-shirts being sold by “Defend Hawaii” — there are dozens of scary T-shirts which seem to have plenty of customers. For example, the Kamehameha statue with a machine gun in the King’s hand — scroll down at
http://www.defendhawaii.com/blog/blog/
I actually have no idea what happened to this comment. It might have come while we were in transit to the east coast, and was lost in the shuffle.
Don’t know.