Much of the discussion in this chapter is drawn from my article "The Cop and the Crowd." Kristian Williams, "The Cop and the Crowd: Police Strategies for Keeping the Rabble in Line," Clamor, December 2000/January 2001, 9-13.
This account is based primarily on my own observations, with support from the sources cited later in the chapter.
Seattle City Council. WTO Accountability Review Committee. Report of the WTO Accountability Review Committee (September 14 , 2000), 15. Emphasis in original.
Seattle City Council, Report of the WTO, 3. A more precise definition of "police riot" appears in the discussion that follows.
Seattle Police Department, The Seattle Police Department After Action Report: World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference; Seattle, Washington, November 29-December 3, 1999 (April 4, 2000), 5.
The accuracy of this description is dubious, but it does say something about the way the police view disorder, and exaggerate its dangers Seattle Police Department, Seattle Police Department After Action Report, 41.
R. M. McCarthy and Associates, An Independent Review of the World Trade Organization Conference Disruptions in Seattle, Washington; November 29-December 3, 1999 (San Clemente, CA: July 2000), 132. They suggest making pre-emptive arrests at earlier demonstrations and assigning National Guard troops to the area on "training/standby" status, citing - of all things - the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention as a precedent. R. M. McCarthy and Associates, Independent Review, 38. The 1968 Democratic Convention is examined in detail later in this chapter.
R.M. McCarthy and Associates, Independent Review, 59.
R.M. McCarthy and Associates, Independent Review, 129-130.
Seattle City Council, Report of the WTO, 13.
Seattle City Council, Report of the WTO, 3.
Seattle City Council, Report of the WTO, 10.
Police in D.C. had a secure perimeter in place considerably before the April 16, 2000 IMF/ World Bank meetings. They also had about 600 protesters in jail before the meetings began; earlier in the week, they surrounded an entire march and arrested everyone present. As a result, they relied less on actual force during the conference itself, and were widely praised for their restraint. One commentator noted: "Law enforcement learned from Seattle, and changed tactics accordingly." Geov Parrish, "Lessons From D.C.," Eat the State], April 27, 2000, 3. See also: Paul Rosenberg, "The Empire Strikes Back: Police Repression of Protest from Seattle to L.A.," LA Independent Media Center, August 13, 2000, http://www.r2kphilly.org/pdf/empire-strikes.pdf (accessed March 18, 2003).
Police used nightsticks, pepper spray, and horses to forcefully attack demonstrations against the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. In New York, Washington, D.C., and Seattle, police corralled protesters and arrested them en masse. In Oakland, police fired less-lethal weapons at a crowd picketing docks where war-related cargo was being loaded onto ships; numerous protesters and several uninvolved longshore workers were injured. Silja J.A. Talui, "The Public Is the Enemy," The Nation, May 12, 2003, 30-31.
Both quoted in James F. Richardson, The New York Police: Colonial Times to 1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 143. Richardson comments: "The police of the 1860's did not have either the doctrine or the materials to deal with disorder in any way other than violence. In ordinary circumstances, policemen worked alone or in small groups; their only additional training or experience came in their military drill. The only anti-riot tools they possessed were their clubs and revolvers, and their only recourse in a disorder was to bash as many people on the head as possible. There is no indication that Acton and other police officials ever thought about any other method." Richardson, New Kirk Police, 143.
"That year there came a series of tumultuous strikes by railroad workers in a dozen cities; they shook the nation as no labor conflict in its history had done.... When the great railroad strikes of 1877 were over, a hundred people were dead; a thousand people had gone to jail, 100,000 workers had gone on strike, and the strikes had roused into action countless unemployed in the cities. More than half of the freight on the nation's 75,000 miles of track had stopped running at the height ofthe strikes." Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1492-Present (New York: Harper Perennial, 1995), 240 and 246.
Eugene L. Leach, "The Literature of Riot Duty: Managing Class Conflict in the Streets, 1877-1927," Radical History Review, Spring 1993, 23.
Quoted in Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 24.
Ibid.
Quoted in Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), 15.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 23; Zinn, People's History, 243~244; and Brecher, Strike! 15.
"Chicago was typical: President Hayes authorized the use of Federal regulars; citizen's patrols were organized ward by ward using Civil War veterans; 5,000 special police were sworn in, freeing the regular police for action; big employers organized their reliable employees into armed companies - many of which were sworn in as special police. At first the crowd successfully out-maneuvered the police in the street lighting that ensued, but after killing at least eighteen people the police finally gained control of the crowd and thus broke the back ofthe movement." Brecher, Strike! 20.
Strike duty accounted for fully one-half of all deployments between 1877 and 1892. Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty,"
"The events of the [l870s] in particular led many persons to fear another insurrection, and as a result legislation was introduced to improve and provide better arms for the organized militia. In 1879, in support of this effort, the National Guard Association came into being in St. Louis, and between 1881 and l892 every single state revised its military code to provide for an organized militia, which most states, following the lead of New York, called the National Guard... Through the efforts of the National Guard Association, the Guard succeeded in seeing an act in 1887 that doubled the $200,000 annual federal grant for firearms that the militia had enjoyed since 1808." Maurice Matloff, ed., American Military History (Washington, D.C.: United States Army, Office of the Chief of Military History, 1969), 287.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 25.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 26-28.
Quoted in Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 28.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 29.
Quoted in Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 30. Emphasis in original.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 29-30.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 33-34.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 31.
Quoted in Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 34.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 41.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 35-36.
In 1914, National Guard troops used a machine gun against striking workers in Ludlow, Colorado. They then set the miners' tent city on fire burning to death two women and eleven children. All told, sixty-six people died in the clashes. Zinn, People's History, 243-244; and Brecher, Strike! 347-349.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 37.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 38-40.
Quoted in Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 41.
Quoted in Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 41-42. Emphasis in original.
Bellows specifically favored the riot stick because, unlike rifles, crowds understood that the troops would really use them. Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 41.
Leach, "Literature of Riot Duty," 44.
Clark McPhail, David Schweingruber, and John McCarthy, "Policing Protest in the United States: 1960-1995," in Policing Protest: The Control of Mass Demonstrations in Western Democracies, ed. Donnatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter (Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1998), 53.
McPhail et al., "Policing Protest," 53.
Donnatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter, "Introduction: The Policing of Protest in Western Democracies," in Policing Protest: The Control ofMass Demonstrations in Western Democracies, ed. Donnatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 2.
"During the WTO protests, the City made decisions to clear downtown streets well away from the conference facility and streets in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. The City did not do this to protect any person or thing from physical harm, but rather to pursue the ill-defined goal of gaining control of the streets." ACLU Washington, "Out of Control," 18.
McPhail et al., "Policing Protest," 50-51.
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Win Against Domestic Dissent (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 220-221.
Paul A. Gilje, Rioting In America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 160.
Rodney Stark, Police Riots: Collective Violence and Law Enforcement (Belmont, CA: Focus Books, 1972), 5-6.
Tariq Ali and Susan Watkins, 1968: Marching in the Streets (New York: The Free Press, 1998), 43.
Stark, Police Riots, 6.
Quoted in Ronald Fraser et. al., 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 195.
Fraser et al., 1968, 199.
Gilje, Rioting, 164.
Stark, Police Riots, 6.
Ali and Watkins, Marching in the Streets, 72.
Joe R. Feagin and Harlan Hahn, Ghetto Revolts: The Politics of Violence in American Cities (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1973), 105. The Oakland police took the opportunity to have a shoot-out with the Black Panthers, who were actively (and successfully) discouraging rioting. The cops fired over 2,000 rounds into a house where Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Hutton were hiding in the basement. They then filled the house with teargas, starting a fire in the process. Cleaver and Hutton surrendered. Cleaver, who stripped naked before leaving the house, was beaten by police. Hutton was shot and killed after he surrendered. He was seventeen years old. Ali and Watkins, 1968, 76-77; and Henry Hampton et al., Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950: Through the 1980s (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 514-517.
Stark, Police Riots, 4-5.
Stark, Police Riots, 6.
Ibid. Police vandalism was a common response to riots, especially those with a racial component. The "Soul Brother" signs that marked Black-owned businesses offered them a level of protection from the angry crowds, but made them targets for the police and National Guard. Feagin and Hahn, Ghetto Reuolts, 175 and 192-193.
Stark, Police Riots, 6.
Ali and Watkins, 1968, 204.
Quoted in Ali and Watkins, 1968, 201.
Stark, Police Riots, 5-6.
Fraser et al., Student Generation in Revolt, 302.
No exhaustive study of the year's events is available; likely, none is possible. The National Student Association counted 221 demonstrations on 101 college campuses during the first half of the year. Likewise, a review of the New York Times and Washington Post covering September 16 to October 15, 1968, shows reports of 216 separate protest events, 35 percent of which involved violence. Jerome H. Skolnick, The Politics of Protest: Violent Aspects of Protest anti Confrontation; A Report Submitted by Jerome H. Skolnick [The Skolnick Report; Report of the Task Force on Violent Aspects of Protest and Confrontation to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence] (Washington, D.C.: Supt. of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 15 and 3.
Stark implies that television was the crucial factor in creating the DNC's infamy: "[E]vents in Chicago were unique only in the quality and quantity of media coverage." Stark, Police Riots, 4.
Gilje, Rioting, 166.
Quoted in Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968 (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1968), 179.
Quoted in Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 177.
Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 175.
Daniel Walker, Rights in Conflict: Chicago's 7Brutal Days (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1968), vii.
Walker, Rights in Conflict, xii.
The term "police riot" is not the hyperbole many assume it to be. During the June 19-21, 1968, disturbances in Berkeley, police not only beat, gassed, and threatened scores of peaceable citizens, they also threw rocks at crowds, broke windows, and engaged in other vandalism. "A policeman was seen knocking in a window at a bookstore. . .. Several persons reported damage to their residences after the police had forced their way inside. A number of others claimed that police beat their automobiles with riot batons, causing dents and breaking headlights." Stark, Police Riots, 48.
Stark, Police Riots, 18-21.
A Berkeley police memo dated August 21, 1968, notes, "Both civilians and officers have reported observing a sort of 'one-upmanship' phenomenon in squads without leaders of a supervisory rank. Each officer seems not to want anyone to feel he is less zealous than anyone else in the squad, and in tense encounters, a spiraling force-level was observed." Quoted in Stark, Police Riots, 53.
Walker described the attitude of the Chicago police going into the 1968 Democratic National Convention (with echoes of Henry Bellows, half a century before): "They believed that even an orderly crowd of peaceful demonstrators could easily develop into a mob led by a few determined agitators into violent action." Walker, Rights in Conflict, 59.
Stark, Police Riots, 138.
"Thus, it is not the use of violence that makes police riots unusual events, but simply the concentration of police violence in a limited time and space... This is what makes it a riot - that the police are doing collectively in a short period of time and in a small area what they would ordinarily be doing in pairs or very small groups across a very large area over a longer time. " Stark, Police Riots, 12 and 84, Emphasis in original.
82 Stark, Police Riots. 126.
Stark, Police Riots, 128-129.
Quoted in Stark, Police Riots, 127.
Walker, Rights in Conflict, vii.
Stark, Police Riots, 186.
Walker, Rights in Conflict, xi.
Stark, Police Riots, 18.
Stark, Police Riots, 20.
Stark observes. "There was a strong negative correlation between the amount of force applied and the cessation of rioting in Detroit." Stark, Police Riots, 137.
President's Commission on Campus Unrest [The Scranton Commission], The Report of the President‘s Commission on Campus Unrest (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), 2.
McPhail et al., Policing Protest, 52.
Della Porta and Reiter, "Policing of Protest in Western Democracies," 6-7.
Permit requirements have been in place since the Progressive Era, but had not previously been used to this end. Instead, permits were routinely denied. though the requirement provided a pretext for declaring gatherings illegal. Frank Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 50.
John T. Brothers, "Communication Is the Key to Small Demonstration Control," Campus Law Enforcement Journal (September-October 1985): 13-16.
See, for example: National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence [The Eisenhower Commission], To Establish justice, 7o Insure Domestic Tranquillity: final Report on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Washington. D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969), 88; and Scranton Commission, Report. 145.
For a critical overview of riot commission politics, see: Feagin and Hahn, Ghetto Revolts, 205-226.
Brothers, "Communication is the Key," 15.
Eisenhower Commission, To Establish Justice, 75,
McPhail et al., Policing Protest, 53.
PAJ. Waddington, "Controlling Protest in Contemporary Historical and Comparative Perspective," in della Porta and Reiter, Policing Protest, 122. Emphasis in original.
As early as 1966, inspector Harry G. Fox was publicly writing of the units intelligence potential: "Members of a good Civil Disobedience Squad should have daily contact with the various leaders, planners and rank and file of these [protest] groups. They get to know them by name, sight, and action. The CD Officer talks to them, establishing rapport. He develops intelligence about their connections, background, personal life and ambitions. He influences them to give him a phone call prior to demonstrations or meetings.... Prior to any group action, he secures advance copies of literature, group size, techniques to be used, routes of marches, and duration of demonstration.... in short, a Civil Disobedience Squad can develop files, photos, informants, plus the ability to secure advance tips on impending demonstrations. Through reports or interviews, they can alert the police administrator of the who, where, what, why, when, and how." Harry G. Fox, "The CD Man," The Police Chief; November 1966, 22.
Donner, Protectors of Privilege, 206.
Unlike their allies at the University of Kansas, Black people in South Africa actively resisted the institutionalization of protest. "Protest, especially in the townships, was not an institutionalized expression of specific grievances but an integral part of the ANC's strategy of making the townships ungovernable." Waddington, "Controlling Protest," 137.
Seattle Police Department, Seattle Police Department After Action Report, 18.
Seattle Police Department, Seattle Police Department After Action Report, 40.
Seattle Police Department, Seattle Police Department After Action Report, 3.
Della Porta and Reiter, "Policing of Protest in Western Democracies," 30. Robert Reiner describes the pattern as it emerged during a protest cycle in England. He writes: "Violent protest - 'collective bargaining by riot' - gave way to more formalized modes of collective bargaining. Strikes became one weapon in negotiations, not all-out class war. Demonstrations and industrial conflict came to be seen as accepted processes within the confines of particular rules, not inherently subversive threats to the social order." As a result, violence decreased on both sides, However, in the 19705, this tendency was reversed. The turning point came in 1972 when picketers closed the Saltley coke depot despite police efforts to keep it open. Following their defeat, the police returned again to open combat with strikers. RobertReiner, "Policing, Protest, and Disorder in Britain," in della Porta and Reiter, Policing Protest, 43 and 45.
In the Progressive Era, "The image of worker violence that came to dominate popular perceptions of industrial conflict was powerfully reinforced by the deployment through employers' instigation ofstate militias and federal troops in such conflicts. The fact that the soldiery was called out in itself served as proof that workers and their allies had once again disturbed the public order...." Donner, Protectors ofPrivilege, 24.
In effect, the McCarthy report urges a return to Escalath Force as a primary strategy, using permits and meetings with organizers to collect intelligence and explain the rules. The report justifies this approach, in part, by constructing a revisionist history: "During the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s, there were two basic philosophies regarding law enforcement's response to large scale demonstrations. The first doctrine held that law enforcement's response to the affected area should be limited to the normally assigned patrol force. A larger mobile force staged in preselected locations out of view would be deployed only if absolutely necessary.... As a result of a number of major disruptions which occurred throughout the United States, wherein police officers literally had to fight for their lives while hoping the mobile field force would arrive in time, many law enforcement administrators abandoned this approach in favor of one that had been used in the past with great success. The intent of this second doctrine was to preempt problems by deploying a sizable, highly visible mobile field force in advance of scheduled demonstrations or unrest so that the agency's response to trouble would be quickly recognized. Following this doctrine, arrests are made as soon as violations occur, whether they are the result of passive demonstrations or violent conduct." R. M. McCarthy and Associates, Independent Review, 129-130.
Seattle City Council, Report of the WTO, 15.
These designated areas, or "protest pits," are one of the few real innovations in protest policing to appear during the 1990s. They generally consist of a parking lot surrounded by chain link fences and concrete barriers. While meeting the technical requirements of the first Amendment, they are designed to maximize police control and minimize the mobility of the crowd.
Tina Daunt and Carla Rivera, "Police Forcefully Break Up Melee After Concert," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2000 [database: NewsBank Full-Text Newspapers, accessed March 28, 2003].
Quoted in Bette Lee, "LA. Protests: Moving Beyond Seattle Victory," Portland (OR) Alliance, October 2000.
Lee,"L.A. Protests."
City Council member Jackie Goldberg described the situation in L.A. "There is an atmosphere of intimidation that is unbelievable. What we are doing is creating a climate of fear." Quoted in Tina Daunt, "Council Affirms Rights of Protesters," Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2000 [database: Full-Text Newspapers, accessed March 28, 2003].
Christian Parenti makes a more general observation: "[R]itualized displays of terror are built into American policing. Spectacle is a fundamental part of how the state controls poor people." Christian Parenti, Lochdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (London: Verso, 1999), 135. Emphasis in original.
McPhail et al., "Policing Protest," 54. Previously, the FBI had been responsible for crowd control training, since the 1964 Rochester riots. But by 1968 the responsibility for civil disorder preparation had been transferred to the military; the Defense Department was spending more on riot control than was the Justice Department.
See also: Frank Morales, "U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: The War at Home, Part One," CovertAction Quarterly (Spring-Summer 2000): 82-83.
McPhail et al., "Policing Protest," 62-63.
"Perhaps the most important organizational innovation undertaken by many local police agencies was the development and utilization of special police squads. Spurred by military advocates of special anti-riot task forces, the number of departments with some of these highly trained and mobile riot squads (termed 'lightning strike forces' and 'sniper control teams') increased significantly between 1966 and 1969. The overall increase was 31 percent although the greatest increase was in cities below 250,000 in population. By 1969 paramilitary police units-resembling the counterinsurgency teams developed in Department of State programs for foreign export - were now a permanent fixture in nearly half of these municipal law enforcement agencies in the United States." Feagin and Hahn, Ghetto Revolts, 237-238.
National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders [The Kerner Commission], Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1968), 328.
Waddington, "Controlling Protest," 122-123.
Della Porta and Reiter, "Policing ofProtest in Western Democracies," 11-12.
In this respect, it is worth remembering that SWAT teams are commonly used in hostage situations - that is, they serve as a tool for negotiation.