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This incident took place five days after the meeting between Messrs. Rice and Hammond, and it afforded the pretext for which the police were waiting. “You’ve lost your constitutional rights now!” shouted Captain Plummer, and he arrested twenty-eight men for the crime of raising the red flag. Again and again, in negotiations with the police officials, and with Mayor George E. Cryer, we were told that this act of raising the red flag afforded complete justification for the abrogation of all civil liberties at the harbor. It seems therefore worth notingnoting what happened some three weeks later, when these men were arraigned in court upon the charge. Police Magistrate Crawford declared that in his opinion everyone who displayed a red flag should be sent to prison, but unfortunately the Supreme Court of California had declared the red flag ordinance of the city of Los Angeles unconstitutional!

In the three days that followed, the police arrested a total of six hundred men; they arrested hundreds for attempting to speak on Liberty Hill; they arrested hundreds for singing and cheering on the street. Any slightest sign of sympathy with the strike or with other arrested men was enough to cause a man to be tapped on the shoulder by the police and told to report at the police station. Crowds of men were surrounded on the street, loaded into trucks, carted off to the police station, and packed away in cells. George Chalmers Richmond, Episcopal clergyman from Philadelphia, was arrested when walking along the street, having in mind the criminal intention of addressing the strikers when he reached the place of meeting. A restaurant proprietor was dragged out from behind his counter and thrown into jail, upon the charge of helping to prolong the strike—that is, he had fed the strikers and their children. In describing these incidents, the Los Angeles “Times” stated that the police announced their intention “to arrest all idle men at the harbor.”