Debate Over Protesters Leaves Both Sides Looking Bad

You’d have had to look hard to find common ground there. The cops and the protesters eyed each other from--literally--opposing turf. The former camp milled in requisite dress blues at the back of the Los Angeles City Council chambers. The latter huddled up front in the usual dangly earrings and indigenous-print shirts. The activists hissed and snorted. The police stared stonily into the middle distance. The protesters promised peace and love and street theater with nice puppets. The cops whipped out a propaganda film.

“Hah!”the protesters yelped, and “Oh, puh-leese!” and “Oh, come on, for God’s sake already!”

“Anarchists,” the police warned tersely. “Crimes of property.” “Mass civil disobedience.”

Nope, there seemed no common ground Wednesday, as there has seemed no common ground for a while now in the strange hysteria that has arisen over the Democratic National Convention’s coming to town. Los Angeles, the thinking seems to go, is now an irredeemable war zone. That political conventions--and their attendant protests--are routinely accommodated every four years in much lesser venues suddenly seems beside the point.

The point, it now appears, is that free speech here is somehow different from in the rest of the places where the 1st Amendment applies. Though the constitutional right to get lippy certainly was on full view, on and off the dais, Wednesday at City Hall.

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At issue was Part II of a week-old argument, one that stemmed, as usual, from L.A.’s crippling ambivalence over municipal involvement of any kind. Faced with a desperate request from Mayor Richard Riordan for $4 million in city money for the convention he’d promised would be all privately funded, the council had last week carped and scolded and finally surrendered to the bliss of sticking it to him. Riordan got his money, but his swing vote was the wily and irritating Jackie Goldberg, who, among other things, forced his allies to designate--and, Wednesday, to reconsider--

downtown’s Pershing Square as a staging site for protesters.

Why Pershing Square needed any designation was a question that left inquiring minds baffled: It’s a public park. The public can go there any time. Not that the public much wants to--the place was so thoroughly concreted over in its last make-over that it looks like a set from that old surreal British series “The Prisoner.” But more to the point, Pershing Square--despite the fact that it fronts on the Biltmore, where some delegates may or not end up staying--is the sidelines. The convention is going to be at Staples Center, blocks away.

Some might have wondered why Goldberg didn’t bargain instead for better access to the real action. The planned police perimeter around the convention is going to be so vast that demonstrators will be lucky if they can be seen from Staples Center, let alone heard. Besides the free-speech pitch, she would have had PR on her side. Picture, if you will, the inevitable, front-page, New York Times photo of the LAPD’s cherished “secure zone” in August: in the foreground, barricades and riot battalions, and far in the background, barely a dot on the horizon, the little Staples Center, the citadel of our friendly police state. Welcome, Democrats, to Fort L.A.

But Pershing Square was the excuse for Wednesday’s face-off and the LAPD’s “Reefer Madness”-style film montage, which featured much footage of “anarchists” storming the Starbucks in Seattle during the World Trade Organization conference, and upsetting the mayor of Eugene, Ore., and the like. By the time it was over, Councilman Nate Holden was calling for the National Guard, the security guys at the metal detector had confiscated the puppet-protest guy’s bird puppet and the activists were uncontrollably hissing. “Hiss all you want!” poor Holden cried.

By the time it all got shunted off to a committee, no one could tell who had lost and who’d gained. In what should have been a simple accommodation of two equally important, equally meaningless political rituals, the police had come off looking like authoritarian scaremongers, and the protesters like dupes for kook infiltrators. An August confrontation seemed certain. And yet, both sides seemed pleased, as they walked away.

Which they surely were. The threat of confrontation means resources for the LAPD’s secret dream of being terrorist-fighters. And it means air time for any demonstrator able-bodied enough to leap a barricade. Of course, there was no speech at all about this way in which the cops and their critics have more in common than it seems.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.