CHARLOTTE,
N.C. -- In cities hosting large gatherings such as the national
political conventions or international summits, we’ve come to expect a
massive militarized police presence, even as the ranks of protesters
thin. But what happens to all of the new high-tech cop toys and newly
passed ordinances once conventioneers leave town? They stay.
I
was at the alternative journalist flophouse in Charlotte on Sept. 4, the
first day of the Democratic National Convention, when I received
word of kettled protesters a few blocks away. I had just met FireDogLake
reporter Kevin Gosztola, and after forming a mutual admiration
society, we raced outside.
We hoofed past siren-flashing police
cars blocking side streets, hiking alongside an empty roadway. Walls of
blue loomed ahead. Our hands went to our sides and drew cameras. As we
neared a broad intersection, protesters appeared behind a double line of
police using bicycles as barricades. The entire intersection was
encircled by hundreds of ground troops, motorcycle cops, commanders,
surveillance units and vehicles. Media flitted along the perimeter and
uncertainty coursed through observers. Why had hundreds of police
barricaded the protesters, were they going to sweep them up, would
violence break out?
In turned out the protesters were conducting
an impromptu street blockade, preventing delegate buses from proceeding
on their appointed route. The police moved to funnel the protesters into
an isolated grass field lined with metal fencing, the “free-speech
prison.” It was devoid of life, save for CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin on a
loudspeaker demanding: “Free Bradley Manning,” and “We don’t want a war
with Iran.” A dozen anarchists approached the cage and broke into
the “Hokey Pokey,” sticking their left arms in and singing, “You do the
hokey-pokey and kiss your rights goodbye, that’s what it’s all about.”
It
was a replay of the final night in Tampa, Fla., at the Republican
National Convention. There, perhaps 150 protesters also blocked an
intersection, delaying delegates exiting the convention after Mitt
Romney’s acceptance speech. Nearly 400 police penned in the protest, and
at every intersection visible, up to two blocks away, squads of police
waited in reserve. A crew of seven Guardian Angels had deputized
themselves as back-ups in case the police were overwhelmed, their
tee shirts and bodies having seen better days.
Police-to-Protester Radio Incalculably Wide
Protests
in Tampa and Charlotte have been surrounded by media, swarmed by police
and enveloped in surveillance. Perhaps because of the military-like
mobilization, arrests have been rare and police in both cities have not
prevented unpermitted marches, though they have been tightly managed.
There were only
two reported arrests in Tampa, and activists who dropped banners and locked down at a coal-fired power plant were not arrested.
On
Tuesday, Sept. 4, ten undocumented immigrants were hauled off after
staging a nonviolent civil disobedience action. Police also nabbed three
protesters, including one for wearing a mask and another for
allegedly crossing a police line –
something I did multiple times without incident. Of course, I was
wearing a suit, and the protesters were a bit scruffier, lending weight
to activists’ contention that police single them out based on their
appearance.
I moved on to a Planned Parenthood rally taking place
nearby. I talked my way through the first layer of Secret Service
despite lacking credentials. The crowd was a pink haze of tee shirts
bearing the slogan, “2012 Yes We Plan,” with the zero replaced by a
circular package of birth-control pills. With the branded tees, pink
signs declaring “Women are watching and we’re voting Obama,” and canned
speeches for Obama, it had all the spontaneity of a corporate rock
concert, as soothing to the Democratic Party machine as a river of pink
Pepto-Bismol. Unlike the feral anarchists outside, the pro-choice troops
inside the Democratic fold were free of a suffocating police presence.
Drones, “less-lethal” weapons and anti-dissent laws
The
feds gave $50 million each to Tampa and Charlotte for security for the
conventions, and it showed in the police mobilization and shiny new
equipment ranging from bicycles and “less lethal weapons” to
communications gear and medieval-style armor for cops and horses. Given
the fact that protesters amounted only to a few hundred, it’s suspicious
that thousands of police needed to be deployed -- more than were in
evidence for massive protests in Washington, D.C. against the Iraq War a
decade ago.
The biggest impact of militarized policing is not
at the conventions themselves, but in the long term. The two political
conventions coincide with the Summer Olympics. The international
games proved to be a handy way to push out the poor from city centers by
constructing stadiums and Olympic villages that are repurposed for
tourism, consumption and high-end housing. Similarly, conventions and
summits like NATO, G8, the RNC and DNC are part of the trend of
intensifying the policing of poor and dissidents.
In some cases the convention policing leads to a more aggressive posture. In Denver, which hosted the 2008 DNC,
200 police in riot gear used their toys on Occupy Denver last October,
attacking them with rubber pellets, mace, batons and pepper spray. In
Chicago, new laws passed to stifle dissent at NATO protests there in May were made permanent, as were laws passed in
Charlotte for the DNC. (The Tampa laws had a sunset clause.)
The
covert side of policing summits and conventions is more disturbing.
Tactics like infiltration, spying and provocateurs sometimes come to
light when raids of activist spaces, pre-emptive arrests and contrived
terrorist plots are sprung and the victims snared. Other elements remain
covert.
Speculation was rife if drones would be employed during the RNC. A
Tampa police spokeswoman denied that
any of the “60 local, state or federal agencies involved in the
security operation of the Republican National Convention will utilize
air or ground drones.” But a private company, United Drones, was adamant
that it would be flying drones for an unnamed private party during the
convention. The morning after the RNC ended, as I drove into Tampa
across the Howard Frankland Bridge with a legal observer, we spotted a
low-flying aircraft. It looked like a large model aircraft with no
obvious cockpit to hold a pilot, but was moving much faster than highway
traffic.
Militarized and pre-emptive policing
Alex S. Vitale, associate professor in sociology at Brooklyn College and author of
City of Disorder and numerous
reports on protest policing,
told AlterNet that he pinpoints the “intense changes” in policing to
the 1999 World Trade Organization Ministerial in Seattle that was
disrupted by nonviolent protests. (The much-reported window-breaking by
self-described anarchists took place after and away from the much larger
nonviolent actions.) But there is no across-the-board standard, he
cautions. “Policing is more militarized or pre-emptive in depending on
the department,” he says.
“[P]olicing in the U.S. is very
decentralized,” Vitale explains, and “the handling of protests is left
to the local police.” At the 2000 RNC in Philadelphia, says Vitale,
there was a “heavy police response, pre-emptive arrests, mass arrests,
holding people on exorbitant bail.”
In New York at the 2004 RNC,
the police response was “pre-emptive,” as Vitale describes it, complete
with “mass arrests, infiltration and surveillance.” In 2000 at the DNC
in Los Angeles, the ACLU lambasted the LAPD for creating “
an orchestrated police riot”
after shooting tear gas and rubber bullets into a crowd at a rally for
which organizers held a permit. Vitale says there was a “more
militarized response” at the 2008 RNC in St. Paul.
Thus, the
decision to give protests some breathing room in Tampa and Charlotte is
notable because of past convention experiences, as well as the police
attacks on Occupy camps in the last year. That may explain the absence
of outright police aggression. Given the highly scripted nature of the
conventions, 16,000 journalists looking for a story, and the prominence
of Occupy Wall Street, chaos on the streets could have bumped the canned
convention speeches from the top headline.
Vitale says: “Local
officials want to minimize the level of dissent because to them, it’s
all a very high-risk endeavor. They don’t want to get caught with the
protests interrupting the events in any way.”
The danger of speaking out: 'Jesus, it's a war zone.'
I
mention to Vitale that the Occupy Movement succeeded in part because it
was theater: People acted out a new society in public. The flip side
was the theater of the police response -- from the military-style
assault on Occupy Oakland to the stormtrooper gear of Portland’s police
to the cinematic staging of thousands of New York police sealing the
financial district the night of May Day.
Vitale agrees there is an
element of spectacle. He says the militarization of policing
“communicates a symbolic message to participants and public that
speaking out is dangerous and must be treated as a violent threat. The
use of body armor and vehicles is almost never warranted. It
communicates a message of fear and violence.”
That spectacle was
on full display in Tampa and Charlotte. The day after Hurricane Isaac
swiped Tampa, I wandered through the security zone, perhaps a quarter
mile around the convention’s outer security perimeter. Stopping at a
Salvation Army truck for some cold water, the only other civilian was a
sun-crisped local. Appearing dazed, he gestured to the empty streets,
speaking to no one in particular, “It’s a military zone. Jesus. It’s a
war zone.”
Squads of camouflage-clad cops marched by; pelotons of
bicycle police cruised streets; posses of horse-mounted police stood at
the ready; heavy-duty golf carts crammed with law-enforcement personnel
zipped by; platoons of riot police shadowed protesters; two-man teams on
overpasses scanned areas below with binoculars, Secret Service in
bulletproof vests secured checkpoints; assault boats plied the water;
choppers circled above.
While there is federal involvement in
policing conventions says Vitale, “I’ve always resisted the notion that
we can explain the intensification of policing as a result of federal
intervention. The military, fed law enforcement and local law
enforcement have all become less tolerant of dissent. They are all
experimenting with new techniques and technologies to aggressively
contain the dissent. They are all learning from each other.”
Keeping away all but militants and fanatics: "making money off orange jumpsuits"
In
the security state, democracy has withered. In Tampa during the
Republican National Convention, what was known as the “free speech
zone” was a portable stage on a crumbling road slicing through barren
brownfields. The
Westboro Baptist Church –
the “God hates fags” gang that pickets the funerals of dead U.S.
soldiers based on the logic that they were killed as divine retribution
for believing “it’s OK to be gay” – entered the zone one afternoon. As a
handful toted flamboyant posters of hate, more than 100 police took up
position.
A minute after I chanced upon them, a hundred or so
anarchists marched on the scene chanting, “We’re here, we’re queer,
we’re anarchists, we’re going to fuck you up!” Dozens of reporters and
cameraman stalked the edges like lions hunting antelopes. As the
protesters encircled the Westboro crew, mixing insults with pleas for
tolerance, 100 riot police pounded the street as they rounded the
corner. More police poured in from every direction and a helicopter
swooped in.
Despite the tension, no violence occurred.
Vermin Supreme,
the performance activist who sports an upside-down boot affixed to his
head, gently dissuaded the police from breaking heads by pointing out
over a bullhorn that there was no need for aggression against peaceful
protests. The anarchists had made their point and went on their way. But
the city of Tampa had also made its point. In the militarized
convention space, the only groups exercising the right to dissent are
left-wing militants and right-wing fanatics.
There is a strategy
to this. Vitale says, “We are producing urban spaces in many cities that
are hostile to dissent. The summits accentuate that by adding in a
layer of barricades and intensive policing.” The purpose of the
intensive policing, he argues, is to insulate the rich and powerful who
attend the conventions “from the rabble.” He adds: “Dictators have been
doing this sort of thing for generations.”
I asked Vitale if these
conventions are pop-up police states. He countered, “I’ve been to
police states, and you get shot if you demonstrate, not spend a night in
jail.”
That’s true -- for most Americans. But at a rally against
voter suppression in Tampa, Life Malcolm, a member of the Black People’s
Advancement and Defense Organization, described his hometown.
“Tampa
is a police state," Malcolm said. "Twenty four hours a day, seven days a
week we are under constant surveillance. We see the police on every
street corner, in their cars, on their bicycles, or on foot patrol in
our communities. All night long their helicopters are whirling overhead
when we are trying to read with our children, put them bed or be
romantic with our mates. The police beat us up, scare us, lock us up,
harass us. You can’t even walk down the street being black, drive down
the street being black.”
As a consequence, said Malcolm, “In our
neighborhoods nobody comes outside. Everybody is boarded up in the house
because they are afraid to come outside the house and be caught by the
police like some kind of animal. In the state of Florida, they used to
make their money off oranges, now they make their money off people in
orange jumpsuits.”
Long after the media and politicians are gone,
dozens of local and state police agencies will be back at work, showered
with new weapons, technology and laws to contain troublemakers and
undesirables. No matter who wins in November, the march toward a police
state will continue unabated.
