Why Did Police Arrest A Living Statue?

Why was this artist arrested while posing as a statue? He was doing nothing but posing, and the police handcuffed him. It was street artist Johan Figueroa-González, from Puerto Rico, who quotes poetry and Shakespeare while posed as a statue in Washington Square Park. I have seen him personally performing in Puerto Rico and he is amazing. He started doing this in New York since spring of 2017. This man has been written about in the New York Times for being such an unusual and incredible artist. Even the mayor's office wanted to hire him, and this is what happens to him? What crime was he committing? The story came to my attention because someone had posted a video of what happened on Facebook, and he was immediately recognizable to me.

Washington Square Park is the home of many performance artists, but apparently he was targeted, perhaps because he was on the monument, but was he really harming anyone? Are we arresting people for minor infractions of the law in order to garner revenue for the state? Today, Mayor DiBlasio said that mass incarceration ends here in New York City, but I can hardly believe that to be the case when we have four police officers grab and handcuff a man that weighs perhaps 90 pounds.

Last Saturday I witnessed three police officers in Port Authority arrest a man who albeit was drunk, and when the police asked him to put his exposed can of beer in the garbage can (New York City has an open container law - you cannot drink liquor in can/bottle if it is exposed), and since he was too drunk and did not respond quick enough, they handcuffed him immediately out of impatience. Had the police officer just said, "Buddy, I'm going to take the can and put it in the trash, since you are under the weather," and then just told him to be on his merry way home, that poor senior dude would not have been arrested. No, the man didn't move fast enough. Did the man resist? No, he didn't say too much since he was pretty drunk.

This is precisely how we get mass incarceration when you have people being locked up for the smallest infraction of the law, or if they don't move fast enough or blink the wrong way. If we don't address the over use of arrest as a method to deal with the public, then we won't be able to get away from mass incarceration, and this is exactly how we have a police state.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/1...

(The photograph is of Johan Figueroa-González performing in La Plaza de Armas Puerto Rico. He is the statue in center.)