Police and Me

My good friend Brett has an interesting post detailing his less than positive experiences with police. I had heard all these stories before, and in fact somewhat preferred them in their more detailed form in which I first heard them, but I suppose when you combine them all into one post you have to condense a little.

But the post got me thinking about some of my own experiences with the police. The best story I have comes from the protests at the Philadelphia Republican National Convention in 2000. Regular readers of this blog will perhaps note I’ve already used that week as material for two previous posts.

Near the beginning of the week I attended a workshop on non-violent civil disobedience. It was a small group, about 15 people or so, including 3 guys who stood out a bit. They looked to be in their mid to late 30s, a lot older than the rest of us. They were all 3 big guys, probably more fat than muscle, but each with the look of someone who had been muscular at one time, and then let himself go slightly as he got older. And they all had very short hair. I thought that they were cops, and that they were participating in this workshop as some sort of effort towards cop/protester dialogue.

It wasn’t until later in the week, after I had seen those three at various other workshops and demonstrations, that I learned they were not cops, but rather construction workers who were involved in the union. They looked a bit different than everyone else, but they seemed to be generally well liked and accepted, and were very funny guys, always laughing and telling jokes and making me laugh when I was with them.

The beginning of the week was all general marches and demonstrations, but towards the end of the week there were plans for civil disobedience and direct action. In order to protect against infiltration by police and to keep an element of surprise, these actions were not discussed in the big group meetings, but planned out by small groups of ten or 15 people called “affinity groups.”

My first experience at a large protest had been the anti-IMF demonstrations the previous Spring. This had also consisted of affinity groups planning direct actions. My friends and I had been rather clueless about what to do, and had simply asked around the day before. Someone told us to come to a certain intersection at 5 AM the next day, and a large group would assemble there that would then march into the restricted area, using the safety of large numbers to prevent arrests, and block the intersection to prevent IMF delegates from attending the meeting. We did this and the next day found ourselves ending up at one of the most contested points in the battle for the streets between the police and protesters. After just coming out of the middle of nowhere, we had no problem finding our way to the center of the action.

I had done the same thing, more or less, at a demonstration in Windsor, Ontario. Showed up with no connections, asked around as to where the direct actions would be taking place, and had no problem in integrating myself into the center of things.

So I figured that I would do the same thing in Philadelphia. Since the demonstrators have adopted the anarchist model of “consensus democracy” for the structure of their meetings, they tended to be long drawn out affairs. If one person has an objection, any motion cannot pass. Although I agree with this practice in theory, Washington DC and Windsor had taught me that I didn’t necessarily want to be sitting in the meeting while they hammered everything up. Just tell me what time to show up and when, thank you, and I don’t need to be in on all the planning details.

But the plan in Philadelphia was slightly different. In DC the objective had actually been to shut down the IMF meetings, and so although individual groups were organized on their own, everyone was showing up at more or less the same area with more or less the same objective (to shut the streets down).

In Philadelphia it was recognized that it was not realistic to shut down the Republican Convention, so the plan was for scattered acts of civil disobedience across the city. I began to realize that what I had done in DC would not work here in Philadelphia, and I would need to become organized into an affinity group in order to participate.

Because it was late in the week when I came to this realization, and only a couple days away from the planned action, I was viewed with suspicion by everyone I approached. I was grilled a couple times by organizers who suspected me of being a cop.

In one sense it was understandable. Here I was coming out of nowhere, with no one to vouch for me, suddenly wanting to know all the details of the planned direct action.

On the other hand, I don’t think I looked like a cop. Granted I don’t really have a clear idea of what I look like to other people, but I was only 22 at the time and I think I looked young. I was in my “long hair stage” back then. I had been in Philadelphia almost a week, and had been staying at the YMCA with only the clothes on my back. I hadn’t showered or changed clothes in close to a week during the hot summer months of August, and I’m sure I looked filthy. In addition I was with my girlfriend at the time, who really did not look like a cop. She was small, petite, soft spoken, and was dressed in a fashion that seemed to be a cross between Goth and Hippy.

Eventually I was admitted into a group that planned to block traffic at an intersection near the Republican Convention. The group’s leader explained to me that there were three levels of participation. There was the red level, the people who would almost certainly get arrested, who were planning on blocking the intersection. Then there was the yellow level, people who might get arrested, who were supposed to provide support for the people blocking the intersection. And then there was the green level, people who wouldn’t get arrested, who would offer support from the sidewalks. I volunteered for the yellow level.

Looking back on it, it is hard for me to remember why I was so worried about getting arrested. I believed sometimes in protest it was necessary for people to get arrested, and if anyone was in a position where they could afford to get arrested, it was me. I was a student, so I didn’t have a serious job I needed to worry about. And what’s more it was summer break. The idea of spending a night or two in jail wasn’t particularly appealing, but on the other hand it could hardly have been much worse than sleeping on the hard gym floors at the YMCA.

Earlier in the week however I had run into someone I recognized from the IMF protest in DC. At one point, when the police had run into the crowd to grab people, I had managed to get away but he had been caught. I asked him what had happened. He related to me how, even though the police didn’t have anything to charge him with, being arrested had turned out to be a major hassle.

Like me he was not from the DC area, so having to constantly return to the Washington DC to clear the issue in courts proved to be a strain both on his time and money. “The police use the judicial system as the penal system,” he explained to me. “Because they can’t find anything to charge you with, they punish you by making you appear at court again and again, even if you don’t live in the area.”
And I thought to myself, “boy, I need that like I need a kick in the balls.” It had been project enough getting out here in the first place (close to 24 hours on the bus), and the last thing I wanted to do was to make that trip repeatedly. Plus I was starting student teaching in September, and it would be a major inconvenience if all that wasn’t cleared up by the time I started.

So I opted for yellow. There were about 25 of us in all, ten reds, ten yellows, and about 5 greens. Included in the reds were the 3 union workers I had met earlier in the week.

We did a couple practices in an abandoned building somewhere. The plan was that us yellows would meet at the station. Then we would march down to the intersection. The reds would drive to the intersection in a van. Once the van was in the intersection, us yellows would jump out and block all the traffic. This would allow the red people to stop the van in the intersection, jump out and use their equipment to lock themselves down around the van, making it very hard for police to remove them, and effectively shutting down the intersection for a long time. During this time we yellows would make sure they kept getting water, and give them any other support they needed.

The practicing was a little bit silly, but it helped give everyone a feel for positioning. I practiced blocking imaginary traffic while others jumped out of an imaginary van. The 3 union fellows, although laughing and joking as always, also expressed concern that because of their big size they might become targets of the police. At one point Harry, the biggest of the three, put his hand on my shoulder and said, “If they start hitting me, you’ll help me won’t you?” I told him I would do my best.

The day of the direct action I was very nervous. There were police everywhere, and there were many reports that they were arresting anyone who looked like a protester. We were instructed never to go anywhere alone, and always stay in large groups.

We weren’t supposed to meet at the station until 12, and I didn’t know where else to go until then. With my week old clothes and long hair, I looked like a protester and didn’t dare just wander the streets by myself. As always, we were kicked out of the YMCA at an early hour. My girlfriend and I spent some time at a large warehouse that was one of the headquarters of the demonstration, and where a lot of people were inside making puppets for the demonstration. We left at one point to get some food, and when we came back the police had the building surrounded and were arresting everyone inside. We didn’t stay long after we saw all the police cars and heard from someone else what was happening.

We went into a bar to kill a couple hours, but even the bar had police in it. Eventually we started heading for the bus station where we were supposed to meet up with the other yellows.

Because even the bus station was being watched by the police, we were supposed to arrive separately, pretend we were there alone, and then wait until everyone was present and assemble together. I’m not sure how many people I fooled, but I did my best to keep my head in my newspaper and make only occasional glances at the others in my group that I spotted around the bus station.

When everyone was there, we came together, but someone had bad news. “The van was stopped,” he said. “The police arrested everyone inside. Somehow they knew.”

It turns out the 3 union construction workers, who I initially thought were cops, really were cops. I suppose that punch line has been obvious all along since I introduced this as a story about police.

It was a shock to all of us when we found out, but at the same time it had sort of been obvious all along. I mean, could these 3 guys have looked any more like cops? Because they seemed so well liked and accepted by everyone else, I had just assumed that everyone else had known something I didn’t, and that these guys probably had a long history of social activism, and had people that could vouch for them, and that’s why no one thought they were cops. In fact I had convinced myself so much of this that it really did come as a big shock to learn that they had been cops all along.

The other people in the van were arrested and charged with conspiracy to obstruct traffic. The story, and the resulting court case, was not quite national news, but it was followed both by the local media in Philadelphia, and independent media concerned with issues of freedom of assembly and police abuse of power.

Since the incident received a fair amount of attention, and since I was one of only about 25 people involved, I used to scan the articles on the internet looking for some reference to myself. Something like, “Also present was a tall, squirrelly looking, unkempt and unwashed Dutchman, with a small petite girlfriend who looked like a cross between a Goth or a hippy.” I never found anything.

Five years later, there seem to be a lot of articles on the web that reference the incident as part of a larger case against police over-reaching, but few articles that deal with the incident in detail. I did, however, manage to find four articles (here, here, here and here).

(You’ll notice, if you read these articles, there are some small discrepancies between their account and mine. Most accounts talk about 4 undercover police officers instead of 3. I only remember 3, but it was 5 years ago and I could be remembering wrong. Or the other one could have been in a different place at the times I was there.
Also, a couple of the articles mention a bizarre detail about the protesters wearing adult diapers to avoid bathroom breaks during the lock down of the intersection. I don’t remember this, but as a yellow perhaps this was just a detail among the reds that I wasn’t privy to. Still, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I mean, how long did they think they would be there before the police cleared them away? Couldn’t they just hold it for a couple hours?)

My personal take on it: blocking traffic is a well-established form of non-violent civil disobedience, and was used often during the civil rights movement. Now one can argue about whether we had the same moral authority to use that tactic as the civil rights protesters (I’m sure we didn’t), or if we had any moral ground at all (depending on what your political affiliation is), but I don’t think anyone can argue with a straight face that it is a form of violence. It is certainly a form of non-violent protest, and in that regard the fact that the police department found it necessarily to use 3 under-cover police officers to infiltrate a non-violent group of 25 people that planned to block traffic: well, it just seems a bit excessive to me.