AB Visits the Hoosegow!
An 18-Hour Adventure, Nine Years, Six Months and Some Change in the Making
By: Aaron Brown
Friends, the unthinkable has finally occurred. Unanticipated of course, yet extraordinarily cathartic. Yours truly, known under a bevy of nicknames and monikers, like Mormon Rockwell, The Biz, A-Bizzle (as the Coss-man still calls me), and so forth, has at last received stark legal validation for almost a decade's worth of unique, original, peaceful liberal activism. What follows is an accurate, moment-by-moment accounting of the events that took place concerning one Aaron Samuel Brown on Friday, July 27th in the Woodlands, Texas, starting at 5:30pm CST.
Two days earlier, on July 25th, through an email from friends, I learned that uber-Republican South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and former half-term Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin would be in my neck of the woods to support TX senate candidate and Tea Party up and comer Ted Cruz at an official campaign rally. Naturally, as an almost 10 year veteran of peaceful public protests literally all across the country, I was beyond elated upon hearing this news. Having eyes and ears, I had heard of Sarah Palin in the past and was very excited to get to see her in public for the first time. I immediately began plans to show up on the day in question, about 15 minutes early (as I traditionally do), to engage in my 1st amendment freedom of speech rights with regards to protesting persons and a group of persons that I strongly disagree with. Through my non-profit activities of recent (Foundation Against Religious Extremism, or F.A.R.E.), I now cart along with me to every public demonstration the following core items: various signage, a rolling battery-powered portable PA system, a 50W megaphone, and a fold up camping chair or small collapsible stool. I keep the stool folded up on the side of a medium-sized Camelbak® backpack. In addition to all of that, I use a shoulder mounted, collapsible camera rig, held in place and secured to me by the straps on the backpack. I had the rig on this day in question, but as I had not begun my activism at the time of the arrest, the camera was not attached and not rolling. Lastly, there were two signs I brought to the Palin/Cruz rally, the smallest of which featured a knock off of the almost 20 year-old iconic image from many of the Westboro Baptist Church's most famous picket signs. It is a black outlined stick figure image of a man standing, with another similar image of a man bent over in front of him, tacitly depicting sodomy. I created this sign months ago to use during my protest campaign against the WBC and that very same sign was used and featured in parts of Texas, Los Angeles, Kansas, Missouri, and even the District of Columbia with not even one slight incidence of law enforcement objection. It has no swear words on it whatsoever. On one side, the standing man read "Sarah Palin" and the bent over man read "American Decency". The reverse side was the same image, the standing man read "Common Sense" and the bent over man read "The Tea Party". The larger, more offensive sign was a newer creation, first used back in May at three different locations in Brownsville TX. This sign read on both sides, "Fuck These Assholes" in black, slim lettering. Beneath the text were two red omni-directional arrows, which the sign holder uses to direct the attention of the message as the situation progresses.
On July 27th, at about 5:10pm, I left my home with the gear to make my way to a parking garage near where the event was being held. Also learned throughout years of activism, in many cases, it behooves one to park far enough away from a potential situation. It does add for a long hot slog with a lot of heavy equipment, but ultimately it is worth it, and I have been employing this tactic safely for over five years. After loading up and beginning to exit the parking garage, it was now about 5:35pm. I walked across the street to the side my destination was on, and preceded to walk with all my stuff towards the location. It is now 5:41ish. I was about 50-100 yards from reaching the venue. From where I was stopped, it was around another corner, so I was not even visible to most or all of the attendees and staff. At this moment while walking, I noticed in the car traffic to my right coming towards me a Montgomery County (MoCo) Sherriff's officer in a cruiser pulling up into the driveway area of where I was walking through. He is obviously coming over to engage me, and stops his car with his driver window next to me. I naturally stop to wait for him to exit and question me. Oddly enough, he doesn't exit, or roll down his window to communicate with me, for about a full 3-4 minutes. I kept standing there, politely motioning to him I was ready to speak with him whenever he wanted, yet he kept sitting there, looking me over, looking around him, and talking on his radio. Finally he gets out and asks right away for my ID, which I gladly handed over. Due in part to my activist past, but also my love of the TV show Cops, I know how one should act and ask questions when speaking with law enforcement. I politely asked why I had been stopped, to which he replied he had received "complaints" of indecency on my behalf, based on the offensive nature of the signs I was carrying and (this is important) "yelling of swear words" as well. It was obvious he saw the megaphone swung over my back and so his initial statement was that in addition to the offensive words on my signs, the caller/s reported me shouting obscenities in addition. Friends, I needn't tell you this was 100% false, as I was still dozens of yards away from the protest spot. In the same way very few of us would ever slam a burger and fries in the parking lot before going INTO a McDonalds, I never before, did not that day, nor do I have any future plans, to start a public protest BEFORE I get to where I'm going. For one, it is hard to be actively engaging and performing if you're carrying a lot of heavy gear. So in this instance, and all others in the past and future, my stereo was off and my megaphone was off and on my back.
Again, in a polite but assertive manner, I refuted the claim of the verbal cursing and insisted I was breaking no laws carrying signs with offensive words on them, to which he indicated I was to the contrary. At this point he runs my license back in the car and I am standing outside in front of the cruiser over to the side with all my stuff. With my arresting officer in the squad car still, officer Haines rides over to me on a bicycle patrol as he was passing by (or perhaps he was called over, still unsure at this time) to asses the situation. It is during this time, a middle aged white tall man and his blonde wife are walking to the event and they pass me. He slows down then stops to look at the sign and read it. He mutters something to which I non-confrontationally replied, "It says Fuck These Assholes". The man instantly became irate saying, "did you just tell me to go fuck myself asshole?" I immediately and calmly replied back, "I was just reading you my sign". Incredibly, the man as he is accusing me of this, is moving angrily towards me, as if to start an altercation. Officer Haines even had to restrain the man and move him away from me. After maybe 20 seconds of more aggression and taunts, he and his wife turned back around and continued (I assume) walking over to the event. As best as I could tell, my arresting officer, still inside the car, did not witness or certainly did not get involved in this particular instance.
When my arresting officer finally came out of the car, he had a small, cheap silver digital camera with him and asked to take pictures of the signs. I instinctual inquired as to what they were for, but he told me he would tell me in just a moment then asked again for permission, to which I granted him. Finishing, he asked to take a photo of me, and again, I complied. Then he informs me of the situation. Based on the complaint calls, I'm under arrest for disorderly conduct and I am being taken to jail for processing. For a moment, I erupted slightly into laughter, basically having a small, comical freak-out about how absurd this is that I'm being arrested right now and I never even made it to the event I was supposed to be protesting! At one juncture, I speculated that Ted Cruz or Sarah Palin had paid this guy off to stop me (and strangely enough, that might not be totally far from the truth). He loaded my stuff into the car, me next, and we traveled to the local MoCo satellite jail, about 6 minutes away. When we got there, the station officer came out to begin the process. A few snippets of importance, I heard them chuckling about my signs, openly talking about how it was obvious I was breaking the law in their mind.
Inside, while I'm in a holding cell, I distinctly overheard one officer say, "Is that one of those fucking Occupy people?" I then heard my arresting officer (who I presume the other officer was talking to) say, "Yeah, he was sure gonna go down there and try to disrupt things". I'm not a simple unfrozen cave man lawyer, per say, but that sounded to me like a little bit of bias. At the very least, this implies my arresting officer took the law into his own hands, because he said, "try", meaning he knew I hadn't yet arrived at the protest or done anything illegal. One final point of hilarity here. When you are arrested, everything you have on you at the time comes in with you and is checked away. 99% of people come in with whatever is on them, in their pockets, or sometimes with a jacket or coat or purse or bag. I obviously came in with a bunch of crap. The officers file every personal item and write it down line by line as a report, and you initial by each item to confirm everything, and then again when you leave and get everything back. In my official protest backpack, I keep a lot of strange items. For example, I have a painters face mask (in the event of a riot or teargas), an emergency poncho, eye drops, spray sun tan lotion, and of course, a condom. The last item there is a throwback to my old days. The condom was almost expired in my defense, forgot it was even in there. My arresting officer filled out the report with all my items. Guess how this fatter, more pathetic looking version of Wilford Brimley spelled "condom" on the report? "One Condum". C-O-N-D-U-M. Condum. This officer of the law unabashedly misspelled a six letter, Middle-School-level vocabulary word. If that doesn't give you a better picture of the man who arrested me, than nothing will. One cannot fictionalize genius that well, even if you tried.
My incarceration lasted roughly 18 hours; the first 6 were spent in a concrete and metal bench holding cell and then I was transferred (along with others) to the MoCo county detention center, a few miles up the road in Conroe. Here, I would again wait 10-11 hours in three different but similar concrete and metal bench only holding cells before being finally released. To hammer home the point, I understand we are all being viewed as criminals in the eyes of the law at that particular juncture. However, the law does state "innocent until proven guilty", as it has instructed for over 110 years. But at the same token, none of us had actually been convicted yet, only charged. And based on that distinction, the conditions of our holding cells were not just cruel and undeserved, they bordered on 3rd world prison conditions. The last thing I had to eat was around lunchtime on Friday. My next full meal came the following day, July 28th at about midnight when I woke up from resting after the whole ordeal. For the first 13-14 hours in our holding cells, we were offered nothing more than the warm tap water from the prison sink attached to the sometimes full of shit and piss prison toilets. No water or anything like that even during "breakfast". They served us this yellow, banana coconut Tampico® nasty stuff. I took one sip and almost threw up. The "food" was about 100 times worse than the free meal I got a Dallas bus station a couple weeks ago (even longer story). Overhead, in every single holding cell, the row of bright halogen lights stayed on the entire time. The first room I was in with some shade or darkness since Thursday night wasn't until I woke up Saturday night at home. At one point in the holding cell, I look over to see an inmate using a half roll of toilet paper as a makeshift pillow, because literally, there is only concrete floor and wall, and a long metal bench. I tried balling up my socks as a pillow, but that didn't work either. Across the way, over in the general population by comparison, convicted criminals are sleeping soundly on beds, with a pillow and blanket, and their cell lights are off, and they aren't packed into one single cell by the dozen, like human sardines. How's that for fucked up?
At the first jail in the Woodlands, I shared a small cell with two other men 90% of the time. In the county lockup, I was in full capacity cells (8-16 persons, depending on the size) the entire time. The very last holding cell had a max capacity of 16. During the final hour, as many as 18 of us were all jammed in there, with barely enough room to sit or stand. It is not my intention to get every single hard working, honest member of MoCo Sheriff's office in trouble, yet, the ones who are clearly acting either illegally or otherwise morally reprehensibly, should in fact have their employment terminated. Again, not every officer I encountered was a total jerk. I actually joked with one younger gentlemen towards the end of the ordeal, even asked him if he'd seen the new Dark Knight movie, to which he replied he was waiting for the crowds to thin out, then he would go see it. I even made some jailhouse chums, Brian and Brent. We were released at the same time so we fortuitously all shared a cab back to Brian's house, which was near the parking garage with my car. These gentlemen, myself, and the other inmates, no mater what they and I were accused of, were definitely victims of a dysfunctional, sometimes illegal county office. That, above all else, is the bottom line and was unmistakably evident.
