Breaking Rank (64 page)

Early the next morning officers discovered evidence of a possible breakin at the convention center. They'd been guarding the facility (a sprawling, multistory building, with a complicated layout, in the heart of downtown) throughout the night. But as Lt. Robin Clark, our SWAT commander, showed me, it looked like someone could have slipped through the outer perimeter, scaled a temporary wall at the back of the facility, busted open a padlock, and entered the place.

This was serious. Police commanders had not taken as idle the threat by militant protesters that they would, indeed, “shut down the WTO.” It wasn't hard to imagine the mess they'd make if they'd breached security of the main WTO venue. They could set off the fire sprinklers and flood the interior, spraypaint choice antiglobalization slogans all over the walls, unleash stink bombs. Or real bombs. Officers
had
to search the whole convention center. So they did. Meticulously, with SWAT and police dogs. It took hours.

The opening ceremonies were delayed, and a few delegates got their noses bent out of shape—mostly because they got yelled at a good bit by throngs of raggedy demonstrators as they stood in line in their western business suits and native attire. One of them, a “minister,” pulled a gun on some demonstrators.

A couple of hours later everyone was safe and snug inside the building. We breathed a collective sigh of satisfaction, and I returned to the streets to resume my “roving.”

In the Incident Command System, which we had adopted (and trained for) long before WTO entered the picture, the chief of police has, by design, no “operational” role. His or her name and title might appear at the top of official documents, but if you searched those documents for a job description you'd find none.

There are compelling reasons to keep police chiefs out of the operations arena. They are simply too busy, across a broad range of organizational and community duties, to master the kind of continuously updated specialized expertise needed to handle a SWAT incident, a crime scene, or a major demonstration.

The last thing you want is a police chief actually running the show. So, I “roved.”

I walked the streets, encouraged my cops at their posts, stopped by the various hotels set aside for WTO delegates and dignitaries, and moved in and out of the convention center. I spent time with my commanders in the Multi-Agency Command Center (MACC), the Seattle Police Operations
Center (SPOC) next door, and the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) at the fire station at Fifth and Battery. (My four assistant chiefs, with Joiner taking the point, were split between the MACC and the EOC, each pulling twelve-hour shifts, for around-the-clock coverage.) I received regular updates and teamed up with the mayor and the fire chief to make frequent announcements to, and to field questions from, the huge international press corps.
*

The first press briefing on Monday was upbeat. I had just come from an intersection clogged with demonstrators. David Horsey, two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning political cartoonist with
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer,
had been standing next to me as a local protester approached. She told us she'd traveled downtown for two reasons: to protest globalization, and to keep people from hurling insults and/or bottles at her cops. She wanted me to know how much she respected and admired the job our officers were doing. It was one of those lovely peace-love-harmony moments. I envisioned the next morning's political cartoon, and felt all warm and fuzzy.

Veteran cops told me they'd never seen so many people on the streets. There was sea of sea turtles and anti-WTO signs, choruses of chanting, and street theater performances, replete with colorfully costumed actors on stilts playing out the various points of opposition to globalization. That night, thousands of protesters filed into Key Arena where the Sonics and the Storm play their basketball. They heard speeches from local politicians, including the mayor (who at one point bleated, “Have fun but
please
don't hurt my city”) and various protest leaders and organizers. There were songs by Laura Love and other politically active musicians. Day One ended peacefully.

Which was in stark contrast to the way Day Two began. Starting at two in the morning (those protesters needed a union!), demonstrators began assembling, quietly, but not unobserved (cops do work 24/7). Throughout
the night the MACC and the EOC fielded reports from officers monitoring the increasing size of the crowds. By five-thirty a large group had formed at Victor Steinbrueck Park just north of Pike Place Market. Sprinkled within the crowd were gas masks and chemical munitions. At seven-thirty large groups began marching to the convention center from five different locations. Between seven-thirty and eight o'clock, seven distinct, large-scale disturbances erupted within a two-block radius. At nine minutes after nine the incident commander authorized the use of chemical irritants. One minute later he put out the call for mutual aid.

I stood in the rain at the intersection of Sixth and Union and witnessed a single line of ten King County Sheriff's deputies holding off more than a hundred raucous demonstrators who were trying to penetrate the underground parking at the Sheraton. The militants taunted the deputies, pushed up against them. I worried for the thin tan line, the tiny handful of county cops who rarely saw this kind of “big-city” action. And realized, for the first time, that we didn't have
nearly
enough cops to get the job done.

Moments later hundreds of demonstrators surged into the middle of the intersection and took a seat. They completely choked off Sixth Avenue up to University, a block east. If a police car, a fire truck, or an aid car had to get to an emergency in or around any of the high-rise buildings it would have been impossible. Police commanders had spent months negotiating with protest leaders, but this wasn't in the plan. There was no choice but to declare an unlawful assembly and clear them out. Which wouldn't be pretty, given what the sitters did next.

In response to the command to leave the intersection, protesters locked arms, making themselves one massive knot of humanity. Only force would unlock them from one another. A field commander told them they were in violation of the law, and that they would be arrested if they didn't leave the intersection. He did it by the numbers: He used the proper language, stationed cops around the perimeter to verify that the bullhorned warning could be heard, and warned them and warned them and warned them. Then he warned them again. Then he gassed them.

Why didn't he and his squads just wade in, pull the protesters apart, and haul them off to a prisoner transportation unit? This particular demonstration wasn't violent, after all, but a classic civil disobedience tactic. But
there simply weren't enough cops to pluck them off one at a time. And violence had broken out at several other locations around the convention center.

At noon, a scheduled AFL-CIO march left Seattle Center in the shadow of the Space Needle and headed downtown. It grew from twenty thousand to forty thousand on the way, and soon converged with another ten thousand demonstrators already on the streets of downtown. Suddenly, my minuscule police force seemed microscopic.

Even the reinforcements from other agencies, streaming in and en route, struck little confidence into the hearts of police staffers. Our cops were clearly in trouble. The department had co-planned with organizers from the AFL-CIO and other groups, and had gotten assurances that they would largely police themselves. These were honorable people who'd kept their word in the past. One could only hope they'd be able to hold their own against interlopers.

Those hopes were dashed when even before the tail end of the march reached downtown, self-described anarchists and Beavis-and-Butthead recreational rioters unleashed a round of criminal acts.

Thugs in uniform—black with black bandannas—popped out of the throngs of peaceful protesters and chucked bricks and bottles at cops, and newspaper racks through shop windows. They even smashed a Starbucks window and ripped off bags of Arabica, Colombian, and French roast (a hanging offense in Seattle). Then they scurried back into the crowd where they cowered behind senior citizens, moms with jogging strollers, and kids dressed up in those cute little sea turtle costumes.

I walked into a hastily called meeting at the MACC, Joiner's windowless headquarters. The mayor was there, so was Washington governor Gary Locke, Chief Annette Sandberg of the Washington State Patrol, King County Sheriff Dave Reichert, and a couple of feds who were in town to do advance work for the president's visit. Clinton was due in late that night. The meeting had one item on its agenda: whether to declare a state of emergency and call in National Guard troops. Tension in the room was palpable, as you might expect with a city under siege. But there was also an undercurrent of something else.

The place reeked of fear. It couldn't have been a fear for our own safety—we were, for the moment, safely hunkered in and bunkered down, far away from the din of battle. So what were we afraid of? I can't speak for the others, but here's what I was afraid of: (1) My cops were out there on the streets, taking a licking; (2) nonviolent protesters, store owners, office workers, and shoppers faced a clear and present danger; (3) the president of the United States, leader of the free world, wouldn't be able to address the ministers—if he could get in to the city at all; (4) my beloved city looked more like Beirut, or Baghdad; and (5) I didn't know what the hell to do, other than close down the city and call in the National Guard.

Mostly, I was afraid I'd failed. I had let down a lot of people I cared about. Sitting next to me in the MACC was Sheriff Reichert who wanted nothing more than to get back out on the streets to kick some ass and take some names. Reichert, angry at our insufficiently “aggressive” plan for dealing with the demonstrators and disgusted by the dithering in the room, leaned over and whispered, “Let's just throw the damn politicians out of the room.” I liked the sound of that, but we needed them: the mayor to put the official request for a declaration of a “state of emergency” to the governor, the governor to act on it.