All arrests involved being handcuffed, booked and held for 4 to 24 hours in custody. Most resulted in confiscation of original art as well as leaflets, protest signs, petitions, arrest photos, press materials and portraits of the Mayor. Each case resulted in an arraignment in Criminal Court and in some cases as many as twenty separate appearances before the case was finally dismissed. The Mayor has wasted a great deal of tax money trying to silence me. None of the cases resulted in my paying a fine.
Arrests are clearly separate from summonses.
On some days I received multiple summonses and was later arrested. Sometimes when multiple summonses were issued each summons was written for a different court on a different day in order to occupy as much of my time as possible. On two occasions I was arrested twice in the same day having returned to the demonstration area after being released and then being re-arrested. The names of all arresting officers, copies of the arrest paperwork, summonses etc. are part of the official record in three Federal lawsuits filed against the Mayor, the NYPD and the Parks Department. The first lawsuit was won in June of 1997 and resulted in street artists now being fully protected by the First Amendment and therefore needing no license.