abbreviated protest, no property was damaged, no businesses were disrupted (nothing was open downtown), and the only people on the street were drink vendors and a few facepainted,air horn-honking fans watching the game at kiosks and pushcarts. still, cops managed to arrest at least 15 of the protestors,including all of the passengers who boarded a bus through the back door aftercops insisted that the driver open it.the cops conduct wasarrogant, authoritarian, and also just plain stupid: if they had just let the protestors march, entirelysurrounded by several columns of police, the mainstream media would haveignored the protest or laughed it off, and everyone would have been able to gohome sooner. but individually andas an organization, the police here want to crush any and all dissidence. in this sense, the arbitrary arrests gowith the gun-waving and warning shots we saw on sunday night near maracana: theyre meant to scare protestors offof the street. and it seems to beworking (although its worth pointing out that calling a protest fordowntown an hour after the brasilianteams game began was a major scheduling fuck up).ive written aboutpolice brutality before on this blog, and true to form, there were plenty ofother police actions throughout brasil in recent days that completely overshadow the arbitrariness of my friends and other protestors arrests. in cidade de deus, a pacified favela, cops shot and killed an unarmed 13-year-old on sunday (officially he was killed in a shoot out, and no responsibility has been assigned yet, but this usually signals police culpability). this happened again in manguinhos, another "pacified" favela, onwednesday night, this time with a 25-year-oldvictim. meanwhile, in recife, in northeastern brasil, military police wounded dozens of young people occupying land at the center of a development debate. comparatively, my friends had it easy: fivecostumed performers getting picked up by cops is not nearly as worrying as young people getting killed, and watching high armored robocops squint carefullyinto paint cans in a desperate effort to invent some sort of criminal intent wasat least as funny as it was infuriating. our network of friends operated quickly enough so that there publicinterest lawyers waiting for them by the time they got to the police station,and 10 more of us mostly in costume, or covered with tattoos, or both cameto support them, pass around snacks, and wait for their release. a combination of all this attention, thefact that all of my friends are college graduates, and the flimsy logic thatriot cops gave the station police to justify the arrest (that my friendsfacepaint and the single bandana among them qualified as hiding theiridentities, and that the paint cans they were drumming on were actuallyintended as projectiles) meant that the police went easy on them: apart from the illegal interrogation,the illegal photo registry (which is apparently part of an internationaldatabase), and a constant stream of harassing and provocative questions, theycame and went without major problems. but the fact that the rights to freeexpression and free assembly, both guaranteed by brasils constitution, arebeing actively and meticulously undermined in the hopes that everyone will shut up and get back