Eye witness to F & M police violation and brutality

By Christiaan Hart-Nibbrig

I didn’t want to hear from Ron Harper.  It was June 3rd, 2008, and the two of us had been publishing the Lancaster Post weekly newspaper for a few months, and I was damned tired.

“C’mon, I need someone as a witness while I chain our box to a pole,” he said.  “All right,” I said.  “Give me 15 minutes.”

Reluctantly, I put on a pair of sandals on that warm June day and drove over to where Harper wanted to put the box.  He wanted to chain it to something fixed because the day before another of our boxes had been stolen right across the Lancaster Township street where he now was waiting.

As I arrived, Harper was standing next to his parked car across the street from the bus stop where he wanted to chain the newspaper box.  He already had his video camera set up.

We walked across the street, and Harper chained the box to the bus stop post.  As we were doing this, the gardener for Nevonia (the Franklin & Marshall College-owned president’s residence) approached us and said we couldn’t put the box there.  “The Constitution says we can,” Harper replied correctly.

“We’ll see about that,” huffed the gardener, who returned to Nevonia where he was seen speaking to a woman on the lawn in front of the house.

Harper returned to the car, and I walked up the public road next to Nevonia and took some pictures of the two talking.  As I sauntered back to the car — all captured on videotape— sirens can be heard in the background and Harper starts yelling at me, “Chris, … Chris, … we have company.”

When I walked across the street, several Franklin & Marshall police vehicles screeched up  and surrounded us.  When the last official SUV arrived, three men jumped out, blew right past me, and headed straight for Harper.

As they rushed Harper, Harper kept filming.  “Don’t touch me!,” he yells as the cops grab him and his camera.

I was snapping pictures of this when one of the other officers grabbed my arm, forced it to the hood of a car next to which I was standing and confiscated my camera.  (The camera was later returned, but the pictures had been erased; we were able to recover a couple of them.)

The officers brought Harper around the car where he was rushed by several officers.   Within ten feet and right in front of me, at least three of these men threw Ron Harper, Jr. — American — violently, face first, to the ground.  When they pulled him up, Harper had a large, bleeding wound on his forehead.

The F&M officer with his hand on my back, asked the seargant what he should do with me, stunned in shorts and sandals.

“Cuff him,” shot back Sgt. Ed Carroll, one of the men who body-slammed Harper, and the one who grabbed his camera.

As I was cuffed, I looked into the house in front of which I was standing.  It happened to be the home of NewsLanc publisher, Robert E. Field.  I had spent many days working with Robert behind those very windows.  Now, I was in shackles, for what?  It is humiliating to be handcuffed as your fellow citizens drive by and stare.  We had done nothing wrong.

Ron Harper and I are not personal friends.  We have virtually nothing in common  I have only spoken to him in person three times since our paper shut down in late October, 2008.  And Ron has many enemies in Lancaster.

But Ron Harper is an American.  And both of us always believed that we as Americans were protected by the United States Constitution, the greatest political document in human history.

So when Ron Harper and his Constitutional rights were body-slammed to the ground on a public street right before my eyes, that meant my rights were slammed, too.  And yours.  Just because people don’t like the guy, doesn’t mean he isn’t an American.

It was disgusting what happened to me, and, especially Harper.  And that it happened in the name of Benjamin Franklin, one of the nation’s first publishers, and a leading architect of the First Amendment, is twisted irony, and it makes me sick.