Ramsey's disregard for constitutional rights as Chief of the D.C. MPD was publicly condemned by the Council of the District of Columbia.

D.C. local media is reporting that Police Chief Cathy Lanier has activated 17 civil disturbance platoons and the special operations division (which include K-9, the bomb squad and the emergency response team), instructing that they will be working on Sunday and Monday in preparation for Ferguson-related protests.

Congress is in recess, but the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has scheduled a hearing about security at the White House. We need to flood Congress with letters now.

Attorneys from the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) on Oct. 4 filed a class action lawsuit against Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Kelly and the City of New York, charging mass violations of constitutional rights in the trap and detain mass arrest of 700 demonstrators on the Brooklyn Bridge this past Saturday, October 1, 2011. The lawsuit charges that the NYPD engaged in a premeditated, planned, scripted, and calculated effort to sweep the streets of protestors and disrupt a growing protest movement in New York.

Washingtonians are pushing back against suggestions that the U.S. Secret Service might make it harder for the public to get close to the White House.

Take a moment right now to tell your representatives, the Secretary of the Interior and the Director of the Secret Service that we will not allow them to take this space away from the American public.

Closing the White House sidewalk or Pennsylvania Avenue to protest, or setting up checkpoints, would be an outrageous assault on free speech rights in the United States.

The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a Washington-based civil liberties legal group, called proposals to further restrict the area around the White House, frequently the site of protests, “an outrageous assault on free speech.”