HOUSTON POLICE ABUSE DEMONSTRATORS SUPPORTING JANITORS' UNION

ANNA DENISE SOLIS, HOUSTON - We sat down in the intersection and the
horses came immediately. It was really violent. They arrested us, and
when we got to jail, we were pretty beat up. Not all of us got the
medical attention we needed. The worst was a protester named Julia, who
is severely diabetic. We kept telling the guards about her condition but
they only gave her a piece of candy. During roll call, she started to
complain about light-headedness. Finally she just collapsed unconscious
on the floor. It was like she just dropped dead. The guard saw it but
just kept going through the roll. Susan ran over there and took her
pulse while the other inmates were yelling for help, saying we need to
call somebody. The medical team strolled over, taking their own sweet
time. She was unconscious for like 4 or 5 minutes.

They really tried to break us down. The first night they put the
temperature so high that a woman - one of the other inmates - had a
seizure. The second night they made it freezing and took away many of
our blankets. We didn't have access to the cots so we had to sleep on a
concrete floor. When we would finally fall asleep the guards would come
and yell 'Are you Anna Denise Solas? Are you so and so?' One of the
protesters had a fractured wrist from the horses. She had a cast on and
when she would fall asleep the guard would kick the cast to wake her up.
She was in a lot of pain.

The guards would tell us: 'This is what you get for protesting.' One of
them said, 'Who gives a shit about janitors making 5 dollars an hour?
Lots of people make that much.' The other inmates - there were a lot of
prostitutes in there - said that they had never seen the jail this bad.
The guards told them: 'We're trying to teach the protesters a lesson.'
Nobody was getting out of jail because the processing was so slow. They
would tell the prostitutes that everything is the protesters' fault.
They were trying to turn everybody against each other.

I felt like I was in some Third World jail, not in America. One of the
guards called us 'whores' and if we talked back, we didn't get any
lunch. We didn't even have the basic necessities. It felt like a police
state, like marshal law, nobody had rights. Some of us had been arrested
in other cities, and it was never this bad before.

http://scienceblogs.com/mikethemadbiologist/2006/11/update_on_antiunion_brutality.php

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