Power to the People's Bags at Tompkins Square Park

Security guards have stopped searching bags belonging to people attending a biweekly movie night in Tompkins Square Park after a group of 15 activists protested Wednesday night. The Villager was at the scene, where critics of the bag checks had vowed to strip naked to ironically facilitate the security searches. Mercifully, it didn’t come to that. Josh Boyd, a co-founder of the free movie series, called off the search “because it was upsetting people.” Jeffrey Rothman, a civil rights lawyer who attended as a legal observer, sounded a triumphant note as audience members filed freely into a screening of Better Off Dead: “Rights that are not asserted wither away.” [Photo: Villager/Jefferson Siegel]