In 2014, New York City quietly agreed to pay an $18 million settlement to the hundreds of people who had been ripped from the streets and locked away for peacefully protesting the Republican National Convention. Fittingly, Michael Bloomberg was no longer in office to hand the money out. Apologies don’t come easy to oligarchs.

More than 1,800 people, including teenagers and many uninvolved bystanders, were caught up in the massive NYPD sweep outside the 2004 convention. They were detained, thirty or forty at a time, in dismal pens with oil-soaked floors and chemical fumes. Some were held more than two days before being brought before a judge, a violation of New York law. Released detainees were taken straight to hospital for treatment of rashes and asthma.

The debacle surrounding the Republican National Convention, absurdly situated in deep blue New York City, should never be lost to history, especially now. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York, was then a card-carrying member of the Republican Party, desperate to lure their convention to Manhattan. He endorsed the reelection campaign of George W. Bush, the architect of the worst foreign policy disaster of the last forty years, and brought to bear the weight of a militarized police force that would make any rabid neoconservative proud.