Denver's Secret DNC "Prison"

[RAMSTORIA]

DENVER - Activist groups say the converted warehouse poses a threat to civil liberties. The city maintains the facility is needed in case of mass arrests during the Democratic National Convention.

The makeshift holding center, dubbed "Gitmo on the Platte" by activists, is located on city-owned property near Steele Street and 38th Avenue. Newly-installed security cameras guard the exterior, chain-link fences and barbed wire form cells inside.

"We feel the city should be ashamed of this secret prison they've set up," said Re-create '68 organizer Glenn Spagnuolo.

Spagnuolo and other activists gathered outside the formerly-secret facility on Friday to protest the city's plan to use it as a processing center for all those arrested outside the DNC.

"The public was never going to view this place, it was just found out," Spagnuolo said. "They got caught with this place. They told our lawyers in negotiations that this place didn't even exist."

"This was never a secret site," said Undersheriff Bill Lovingier, the city's director of corrections.

Lovingier said the city had long planned to build a new holding facility for the DNC, which triples the processing speed of the city jail. Lovingier said the Steele Street warehouse will be able to process 60 arrestees an hour.

"This center is designed as an arrest processing site," Lovinger said. "There will be no housing or long-term detentions."

Activists said that claim was doubtful.

"What's going to happen here is police are going to detain people for an inordinate amount of time," said Unconventional Denver organizer Ben Yager. "They're going to use this as an excuse to keep people out of the courts and off of the streets."

Protest groups questioned whether the makeshift facility would be suitable for inhabitation after years as a storage facility.

Lovinger said air-conditioning has been installed and the Denver Fire Department has certified it meets fire codes.

"We've provided for restroom facilities, water, medical assistance," Lovingier said. "We tried to mirror in this facility what we do every day in our city jail."

The VS. forum is slow, what do you kids think of this?

I don't think the facility is so much a problem as hiding it is.

http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=97741&catid=188

 

[dmaul1114]

I see it no different that the same type of facilities that have at many NFL stadiums and other places where you're likely to have a lot of people arrested and it would be near impossible to take them to normal police booking/holding areas in a timely manner.

I don't see why it needs to be secretive either though, so I'd agree that's the one thing that casts it in a negative light.

 

[mykevermin]

Abuse of police power and so-called "free speech zones" raise my ire more than this.

This is a makeshift response to increased exposure and travelers to the city. Sloppy, but necessary.

The causes of placing people in these cells (i.e., the hair-trigger reactions by police and abuse of power, again) bother me much more than the actual cell themselves.

As for Gitmo, that protestor mentioning it is kind of a fool. It's not the conditions of Guantanamo Bay that bother me, but the destruction of habeas corpus, the abuse of power (limitless detainment of suspect and the assumption of guilt, coinciding with the lack of a fair trial that our constitution would-in the past-have guaranteed its citizens), and what it symbolizes in terms of a police state.

THAT bothers me. Why people are in Guantanamo and why it's such a terrible place. But not the actual idea of people being incarcerated.

Misguided aggression here, IMO. Wait to you see what people are arrested and detained for, then you have a story and a protest, I'm sure.