Joel Kotkin City Was Well-ServedIn retrospect, it...

Joel Kotkin City Was Well-Served

In retrospect, it may be convenient for some of our local politicians and legal activists to decry the LAPD’s powerful presence around the Democratic convention last week as overkill. Yet this ignores the more important point that, in this case, the much beleaguered force actually learned its lessons and served the city, and its future as a center of commerce, politics and the arts, well.

After the non-response to the disturbances after the verdict in the Rodney G. King case in 1992, and the weak performance after the Laker championship last June, the LAPD was more than justified in emphasizing a show of force. No city can afford to allow any group of people to threaten its civic peace.

This response also was justified by events last year in Seattle. What we saw there was the emergence of a small but dedicated anarchist element eager to cause property damage and provoke a violent police response.

Were there unintended losers in this scenario? Yes, merchants downtown did not benefit from the convention as they had been promised. Threats of violence, which made the police presence mandatory in the first place, shut down much of the jewelry and garment districts. Much of what makes downtown L.A. a fascinating place was essentially put off limits for the conventioneers.

But all and all, the relative peace around the convention was a triumph for Los Angeles, and an important step in rebuilding the city’s battered reputation, as well as that of the police department.

What happened this week also demonstrated something else: that the fringe protesters have very little support from the public, who simply regarded them as nothing more than a nuisance.

Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and a research fellow at the Reason Public Policy Institute.

Jackie Goldberg

‘It Felt Like Martial Law’

My overall impression was that while police were ready, disciplined and usually restrained, the numbers were complete overkill. It felt like martial law, like an invading army. It frightened everybody. It gave everybody a sense of menace. I was told by many people that they just came to watch, and they were shoved around.

There was a gay and lesbian march to Temple and L.A. streets--they had a permit. When they got to the intersection--and we’re talking about 150 demonstrators, mostly women--there were eight rows of police surrounding them back, front and on the sides. They had to negotiate 45 minutes just to get to use the space they had already gotten a permit to use.

It’s an example of, when you let police have as much money and as much equipment and as much weaponry as they want, they become dictators. We become a police state.

The nerves of everybody downtown were frayed. And let’s look at the threat: There was no threat. Not one window was broken. The police didn’t change strategies when they found out there weren’t going to be 50,000 people here for protests. You don’t need 1,500 or 2,500 or whatever number of cops we had on duty, 24 hours a day, in full riot gear, with pepper spray and shooting rubber bullets and bean bags when what you have at most is a few people who didn’t obey orders quickly enough.

Police gave unreasonable and conflicting orders. People were told to “get down!” and when they got down, they were charged with horses because they were not moving fast enough. Why were most of the [foam rubber bullet] wounds in the back? If people were moving, what are you shooting them for?

It left a very bad taste in people’s mouths.

And the police chief and the mayor are claiming victory. Like this was some gigantic game instead of a gigantic chill of our civil liberties.

Jackie Goldberg represents the 13th District on the City Council.

Leone Sandra Hankey

We Saw a Police State

Last week, the Southern California Fair Trade Network held protests against the WTO and sweatshops locally and globally. Thousands participated. As we planned, not a window was broken nor arrest made.

But our events were subjected to a campaign of police intimidation. Police commanders told the City Council our march near the jewelry district was dangerous--as if we came to steal tiaras. Businesses were warned to close down. Some people were terrified to be on the streets.

Monday night at the Staples rally, our members who had been peacefully listening to speeches and music were chased through dark streets by mounted police and shot at with rubber bullets, some next to our legal support center where they came seeking help.

We do not believe that the police action was precipitated by the tiny number of protesters who threw objects at the fence. We believe police wanted to clear the streets before the delegates exited the convention hall.

After Monday, many feared even being near the protest site. Indeed, some protesters were chased and clubbed by police in the Metro late Thursday night trying to go home. So despite the federal court order, the city found a way to curtail our civil liberties. When I hear “our” representatives and the Police Commission praise the police, I literally feel sick.

This is what a police state looks like. But it’s not going to stop us.

Leone Sandra Hankey is a representative of the Southern California Fair Trade Network.

Douglas W. Kmiec

LAPD’s Job Is Hard

There will be many who will second-guess the LAPD for its handling of the protesters during the convention. I will not be one of them.

Los Angeles needed to reaffirm to the world, after Rodney G. King and the 1992 riots, that it is a place of civility and order. L.A. Police Chief Bernard C. Parks and the several thousand members of the department who were on the line last week at the DNC, did just that. Yes, there were individual excesses. In the context of designed, intense provocation, how could there humanly not be?

A California consulting firm analyzed the Seattle/WTO riot of last winter. The message of the report was: Be prepared. Do not assume that self-proclaimed “anarchists” with para-military training will be peaceful, do not fail to deploy police in sufficient numbers, and do not tolerate minor crime because it invites larger, more serious lawlessness. For the most part, the LAPD made none of these errors.

I am glad the ACLU exists to defend our civil liberties, but their calling is singular. That of the LAPD is multiple and complex: to affirm the right of peaceful, nonviolent protest, while at the same time, securing and defending the rights of others to personal safety and the customary enjoyments of work and life in a diverse city.

Douglas W. Kmiec is a constitutional law professor at Pepperdine University.

Susanne Blossom

Treated Like Criminals

I’ve never been on any group bicycle ride before. I read about the Critical Mass ride in the L.A. Weekly. I was excited about the convention. I thought this would be a good way to view the convention without being stuck in a car. The article said to meet at the Central Library. I went by myself and didn’t know anybody else on the ride.

I felt comfortable because we had a police escort. I’m a slow rider, so I was right next to the police the entire ride. They seemed friendly and like they were there just to make sure things went smoothly.

After a while the group stretched out, and it was clear we couldn’t all get through the light at one time. As we approached the first red light, I stopped, but the police blocked traffic and encouraged us to ride through. They did this several times.

Then, as we were riding past Staples Center, the tone of the ride completely changed--there was a sudden urgency and busyness among the police. They split apart in formation and flanked the bicycle riders with newly arrived motorcycle police and squad cars. I pulled over and stopped between two parked cars, but one officer yelled at me to get back on my bike and get with the other riders. “You chose this ride, you can’t leave it now!” he said.

There were police, sheriff’s officers, the highway patrol. They formed a complete 360-degree circle around us. As we were trying to drop our bicycles, police approached us with batons drawn and were screaming at us to face the fence. It was clear to us we were herded to a place under the freeway where people wouldn’t see us being arrested.

Someone asked what we were being arrested for, and he was told to “shut up--you’ll know soon enough.” When they ultimately wrote out our tickets, they had a lot of pow-wows about what they were going to charge us with. What they charged us with that night--felony reckless driving--was different than what we were arraigned on. In the end, I was charged with one misdemeanor--willfully and maliciously obstructing the flow of traffic, which was ironic as there was no traffic to obstruct because the police blocked the street for us and waved us through intersections.

We were held outside, cuffed, for three hours. Then they put us on sheriff’s prison buses. At one point, on the bus, we found out that one of the riders was celebrating his 32nd birthday, so we all sang “Happy Birthday” to him, very loudly. That apparently angered the police. A sheriff boarded the bus and turned on the stereo full blast--I will never forget the song: “Two Tickets to Paradise.” It was so other-worldly, like we had joined some police state where they had subtle forms of psychological terror to break us.

We were taken to Twin Towers for six hours of booking procedures and various forms of humiliation. They made us remove our clothing one piece at a time and do body contortions so they could get complete views of all body cavities. A couple of the women were put in solitary confinement. We were finally put in cells at 3 a.m. They woke us at 4 a.m. and gave us breakfast--none of us could eat, though--and told us we were going to court. Around 25 women were held together in a concrete cell for 18 hours that day. We finally got arraigned about 7 p.m. When they took us into court, they had us dressed in royal blue prison uniforms. Even though we had broken no laws, we were made to feel and look like criminals.

I was released on my own recognizance onto the street outside Twin Towers at 5 a.m. Thursday. I had been in custody since 6 p.m. Tuesday. I now have a court date: Sept. 1.

We agreed in jail that we’d meet Thursday at 8 p.m. to unwind, to talk about it. I wanted to go, but the meeting place was downtown and I was afraid. I don’t want to be anywhere where the police might arrest me and hold me without any reason.

Susanne Blossom is a law student at UCLA.

Bruce Hoffman

No De-Escalating Now

The security net thrown over the Democratic convention last week was neither unique nor peculiar to L.A.

The reaction, decried as disproportionately harsh, if not repressive, should perhaps be seen as the inevitable consequence of a nation whose intense fears of violence and catastrophe have imposed increasingly stringent security requirements around all major public events.

Having allowed our anxieties and responses to ascend to higher levels of suspicion accompanied by more stringent precautions, it becomes difficult--if not impossible--to then ever lower our guard or do anything less extensive next time.

Thus, a self-perpetuating myth of threat and vulnerability has taken hold where public fears and expectations impose heightened security requirements on elected and appointed officials alike. In this new environment, one therefore reflexively prepares for the worst. That way, if anything does happen, absolution can be found it in the claim that everything possible had been done to prevent its occurrence.

Bruce Hoffman is a terrorism expert at Rand Corp. in Washington.