Who's Getting Arrested on North Carolina's Capitol Steps?

[illegaloperation]

Over the past several weeks in North Carolina, throngs of clergy members and other citizens have been parking themselves on the steps of the state capitol to pray, chant, and protest the conservative policies of the Republican-dominated legislature. Participants at the “Moral Monday” events decry the lawmakers for blocking the expansion of Medicaid, introducing voter ID laws, allowing hydraulic fracking in the state, and moving millions of dollars slotted for public education into a school voucher program. Many of the clergy members and other protesters are getting arrested for civil disobedience.

The conservative policies are in part the work of Art Pope. The chief executive officer of Variety Wholesalers was named the state’s budget director by Governor Pat McCrory this year. The largest political donor in North Carolina, Pope has funded a network of think tanks and nonprofits dedicated to promoting free-market policies. These groups poured outside money into local races that helped flip the North Carolina legislature from blue to red for the first time in more than a century, according to the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer.

The sight of religious leaders being arrested en masse has attracted national attention. Now one group funded by Pope, the Civitas Institute, is waging a social media campaign against the protesters. Its website features a game called “Pick The Protester, which lets players scroll through photos of arrested protesters’ police mugshots and answer such questions as, “Which protester has the last name Hawkins? Which protester is a professor? Which is a physician? Which is unemployed?

The game is silly and kind of lame. But Civitas has also compiled a database—“Anatomy of protesters”—that features graphs and charts detailing the demographics of the people arrested. “Questions have been raised about who is really involved in these protests,” said Civitas President Francis X. De Luca in a statement on the website. “We decided to get some answers. They provide surprising insights about those arrested and where they come from.” According to Civitas, the arrested protesters are most likely to be white and 55 to 64 years old. They’re more likely to work in the private sector than for the government or nonprofits. And the site provides a county-by-county breakdown of where in the state the protesters live.

As a pressure campaign to embarrass the protesters, the Civitas site doesn’t seem to be working very well; they’re still coming to the Moral Monday events and still letting themselves get arrested. But as a data exercise examining who protests and why, it’s fascinating.

Read more: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-20/whos-getting-arrested-on-north-carolinas-capitol-steps

"Pick the Protestors": http://www.nccivitas.org/moralmonday/

[hue]

1. "Pick the Protester" is an attempt to entice youth (gamers) & shame Protesters...

This feeble attempt showcases the Tea/Repukes inability to connect w/young people and in general their inability to connect with humans. It is just one example of how stupid and unemphatic & pathetic they are.

[John2]

2. So is this a private

business, gathering personal information on the protestors? Where did they get this information and what are their motives for gathering this personal information? Is it for the public interest, or to harrass the protestors by the GOP, for exercising their rights to assemble and protest? Why wouldn't people be offended for Mr Pope doing this and the police giving his political organization information like this for harrassment purposes? What are they, the Gestapo or something? It is a good example of abuse, and these organizations in concert with Government officials violating people's rights. Why is this use not abusive?

[okaawhatever]

4. Arrest records and mug shots are public info. nt

[Downtown Hound]

3. E.T. for the Atari 2600 is said to be the worst video game ever made

As somebody who owned it when I was a child, I can tell you it was about 1000 times more fun than "Pick the Protester." If this is their attempt to entice gamers and young people, let's just say I'm not too worried about it being successful.

[mnhtnbb]

5. The publication of protesters names, addresses, employers, etc.

is linked to historical attempts by southern anti-civil rights organizations from the past
to intimidate and harass people.



Civitas' database brings to mind another troubling episode of mid-20th century U.S. history: how in some Southern cities at that time the white-supremacist White Citizens' Councils (WCC) would publish in local newspapers the names of NAACP supporters and those who signed anti-segregation petitions in order to encourage retaliation against them. The WCCs, like Civitas, also had close ties to powerful government officials.

UPDATE: The Civitas database got the attention of the Indy Week, an alternative newspaper based in Durham, N.C. The day after the conservative group's project came to light, the Indy ran a story titled "Who's who at Civitas? Let's name names." Noting that "turnabout is fair play," editor Lisa Sorg compiled a comparable list of people on staff and on the board of the Civitas Institute and its 501(c)(4) sister organization, Civitas Action, along with their age, residence, party affilation, and other publicly available details.

Interestingly, while Sorg was assembling her list in the morning, all the staff names were listed on the Civitas Institute's website. But by that afternoon, the only one still listed was Civitas President Francis X. De Luca. But as Sorg points out, that's nothing that the Wayback Machine can't fix.

http://www.southernstudies.org/2013/06/art-pope-funded-group-launches-database-targeting-.html