Did the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane get arrested in NYC?

Mandeep was the only member of the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane arrested at the RNC. He was arrested (and illegally held for 42 hours) while taking part in a peaceful march. He was not doing Republican Street Theater with the Ronald Reagan Home for the Criminally Insane at the time. This happened on Tuesday, August 31st, the day where most of the mass arrests occurred. We had just finished our "Shut-up-a-thon" at Fox News and went down to the main Library on 42nd street where we were going to put on our Bill O'Reilly, Brit Hume and Sean Hannity masks and do one more performance of our Fox News Republican Cheerleaders. The police had started to make preemptive arrests and Reagan Home members Mike, Roger and Joel decided to stage an acting strike. They informed us that they were willing to get arrested and they were willing to wear cheerleading costumes but they were not willing to get arrested wearing cheerleading costumes. I guess there are some lines that even members of the Reagan Home won't cross.

The Reagan Home as a group did have many close calls. The police continually threatened to arrest us for wearing our homemade masks. There is a no mask law in NYC that dates back to 1845 that was aimed at cracking down on tenet farmers who wore disguises while protesting and rioting against their landlords. The law applies to three or more people who wear masks or disguises in public. According to the National Lawyers Guild, "The courts have held that the anti-mask law furthers the important governmental interest of deterring violence and facilitating the apprehension of wrong-doers who seek to hide their identity. Since 2001, both the New York City Criminal Court and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have held that the anti-mask law is not overly broad or factually unconstitutional. Moreover, both courts have rejected all case-specific challenges that the law was unconstitutional "as applied." Nonetheless, both courts recognize that the law could theoretically be applied in a manner that violates the First Amendment's protection of expressive conduct, also referred to as communicative conduct or symbolic speech."

We admit that some people might think wearing oversized two-dimensional masks of the Bush Administration's cabinet while flashing fake boobs that display the logos of war profiteers and grinding to 70's porn music makes us "wrong doers" (link). However we were not hiding our identities and were clearly engaging in symbolic speech. We got away with wearing the masks most of the time if there was media around. When there was no media to be found, the police made it clear that they did not give a damn about our First Amendment rights and were going to arrest us.

The police also threatened to arrest us many times for playing our boom box in public. We pointed out that New Yorkers play boom boxes all the time in public and that they were being selective with the law. The police responded by saying that we were protesters and that at protests you need to have a permit for sound amplification devices. We responded by saying that we were Republicans, not protesters and that we were doing street theater. The police didn't think what we were doing constituted as theater and threatened to arrest us – everyone is a critic.

The police also threatened to arrest us several times for blocking the sidewalk although we were incredibly careful about standing up against walls and leaving plenty of space for people to walk by. In these cases the police were just looking for an excuse to arrest us and we were not going to give it to them. We would comply the best we could or move to a different location. While we respect and admire the commitment of our friends and fellow activists who engaged in civil disobedience our goal was for our protests and skits to annoy Republicans and to be seen by (and hopefully inspire) New Yorkers, and people throughout the country and world. We feel that we would not have been able to do this if we were spending our days in "Guantanamo on the Hudson".

Go to the Republican National Circus page.