The G8s of Heck, Part Two: The Counterrevolution Will Be TelevisedGot a black uniform and a silver badge,
Playin' cops for real, I'm playin' cops for pay
Let's ride, whoo-hoo, ride.-Dead Kennedys
As the crowd slid into our AO, I saw that what I had been looking at weren't really protesters at all. The poles were boom mikes and cameras, and the bandoliers were battery packs. The protest vanguard was invisible in a thick protective knot of journalists. It was hard to tell at a glance how many protesters there were, but it couldn't be any more than thirty, and we clearly outnumbered them. They were dressed in your basic anti-establishment black, accessorized by greasy hair and Doc Martens. A sign reading "Free Palestine" bobbed above the crowd, but they didn't have any other banners or even those weird-but-kinda-cool giant puppets they always bring. Here and there in the crowd I could make out the protest's "legal advisors", who wore bilious lime-green baseball caps designating them as such, and whose purpose was to advise the protesters on what they could get away with, as well as watch the police for any action that might support a lawsuit. A number of the protesters wore masks, which their crackerjack legal advisors had apparently failed to inform them is a
direct violation of Georgia state law. We could have made numerous arrests on this basis alone, but we did not, despite the
frenzied assurances of activists prior to the G-8 that Georgia was adopting state of emergency rules that would allow cops to shoot demonstrators en masse.
With the crescendo of background noise, covered over by the
whup whup whup of helicopter blades, it was almost impossible to hear what the demonstrators were saying. As they came up to the line, I heard a voice emerge from inside the media people yelling "Something solidarity with Israeli soldiers who refuse to serve something something." Then they began to chant "No something weapons!" over and over.
Our lieutenant stepped up to meet them, flanked by two of our smaller officers. The orders we had from the Secret Service were to tell the demonstrators to take it into the Harris Teeter parking lot, where they would be out of the roadway. If they agreed, everything would be sunshine and kittens. If they didn't, we were going to move them. As our negotiating team stepped up, I found out afterward, our lieutenant was accosted by a colonel from the Georgia State Patrol, who told him not to move them into the parking lot, and in fact, to break down our line and move it to another gate. Our lieutenant responded, essentially, that the Secret Service had placed us, and that the colonel could go pound sand.
Suddenly, there was a rushing and a blur of riot helmets on the left flank of our line. We all keyed up and got ready to move. It looked like someone had breached the line, and, as cop parlance puts it, shit was about to break bad. In the next second, the helmets revealed themselves as members of the Georgia State Patrol riot team, who rushed out and formed a line between us and the protesters. They then began to move forward, herding the crowd back down the causeway from whence they came. Despite being irked at the fact that they had stolen our thunder, our leaders went up and down the line, telling us to stay in place and defend the gate.
A group of about four protesters linked arms and sat down in front of the troopers' line, howling that rousing New New Left slogan, "Something! Something something something!" As the wall of camouflage and hickory batons moved implacably forward, one of the seated demonstrators lost her nerve, got up from the solidarity circle and ran like hell. The GSP didn't even break stride, and stepped over and around the ones who were left, at which point an arrest team moved in, separated them, and put them on the ground for flex-cuffing. As this took place, a number of the onlookers broke into applause. Georgia ain't Seattle, folks.
TV cameras moved in to record the arrests, and one of the protesters started going for an Oscar, howling and screaming a speech that sounded like he had memorized it from notecards prior to marching: "I'm not resisting! I only want to have a discussion! Why are you doing this to me? I'm an American citizen!"
Now, before I am accused of being hard-hearted, let me say that I know full well that being pressed into the sun-baked asphalt by someone's armor-plated knee is not a pleasant experience. But I had a good view of the arrest, and I've handcuffed enough people to know the difference between a cooperative suspect and an uncooperative one. I could see the burly trooper using both hands and no small amount of effort to pull this guy's arm behind his back. The guy was trying to stiff-arm and make the cops pull on him. He may not have been flailing, kicking, and biting, but he
was resisting just the same. And when someone resists, you have to place them under control and
make them comply. The result may look unpleasant, but you can't legislate away the laws of physical combat, and that's one of them.
After the arrestees were dragged away, shouting intelligent and well-reasoned arguments like "Fuck the G-8!", we faced left and marched into columns. They took us back into the perimeter and had us stand ready along a street near the western perimeter fence. That was, I think, the hardest and worst part of the whole thing: the adrenaline was shutting down, we were stationary by the side of the road, the sun steaming us in our gear, and the occasional truck went by to wash us in fumes. Eventually, the order came down: stand down.
When we got back to the camp, word came that our little adventure in people skills had been carried live on one of the cable news networks (CNBC, I believe, but I couldn't find the video anywhere). My squad leader told me that he didn't even have a chance to peel off his armor before his phone was ringing, his relatives in Puerto Rico demanding to know if he was all right. One of my buddies heard we'd been on TV, and said he'd better call his mom. He tried, then told me, "The line's busy. I'll bet you money she's on the phone with my dad right now, freaking out." He called his father next, who answered and said, "Thank God it's you. I'm on the phone with your mother, and she's freaking out." Such is life in the global village.
That was our last day on the line. The conference ended that afternoon, with the international bigshots all going their separate ways. It was, in the end, the quietest G-8 in some years. The protester turnout was paltry,
if not pathetic, in spite of the
grandiose promises of many activists. Maybe they're just saving up for the political conventions. Or maybe people are just starting to notice that the hard-core protest cadre are, um, kind of kooky. As an example, in another small protest in nearby Brunswick, demonstrators were moved onto the sidewalk by police after they had moved into the road to block an intersection. They linked arms and chanted at the dozen or so cops, "This is what a police state looks like," which is true, I suppose, in the sense that the Paris Hotel/Casino in Las Vegas is what the Champs-Elysee "looks like". They also rebuffed the local news crews, accusing them of being part of the "corporate" media, when they would only speak with the "independent" media (i.e. "the media that agrees with us already"). It seems that the patchwork anti-globalist movement, already heavily flavored with navel-gazing, will settle for nothing less than total irrelevance.
But we were done, and repaired back to the hotel, where we ordered pizzas and spent our last night in Georgia playing mild drunken pranks on each other. We have been told that we impressed the feds, and that our unit's name was being thrown around with regards to the Republican national convention in New York. I doubt this will happen (the NYPD is famously territorial, and is unlikely to welcome a pack of yahoos from the podunk South), but if it did, wow. It's kinda cool being part of history. I read where one activist has promised that the GOP convention will be the anti-globalization movement's "Chicago '68".
Buddy, you
do know who won the '68 election, don't you?
Ofc. Krupke at 11:36 PM
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14 June 2004
The G8s of Heck, Part One: Georgia On My MindI went down to the demonstration,
To get my fair share of abuse. -The Rolling Stones
If nothing else, the Group of Eight summit in Sea Island accomplished one worthy international goal: scoring the Officer enough overtime that I can pay my Visa bill.
The SCPD contingent was positioned around the entrance to the Sea Island causeway, a lightly fortified perimeter and a symphony in the key of Glock: besides several contingents of city cops and sheriff's deputies, there were crews from the FBI, ATF, Customs, Homeland Security, Miami-Dade Fire Rescue, Georgia State Patrol (more on these pricks in a minute), GBI, the Georgia National Guard, and the Secret Service, who were running the show. Our purpose was to be an on-call mobile field force (which is a polite term for a crowd control unit, which is a polite term for a riot squad) to prevent any hostile crowds from overrunning our little Club Fed, which sat on the only land route to the summit location. The meetings themselves were held on Sea Island, a remote and easily defended spot we never saw. Well, most of us, anyway: at one point, while driving the SCPD's marked Suburban, I was separated from the convoy and shunted onto the main causeway, where with happy obliviousness I breezed through several checkpoints and onto the island itself. I took note of the flags, limos and SWAT vehicles and thought, "This is WAY too nice to be where we're supposed to be." At that point I turned around and got the hell out of there before I became the subject of a "tragic misunderstanding" with an Apache gunship.
Before deployment, we'd been briefed on what ugliness to expect (to be fair, our training also emphasized that the majority of protesters are peaceful). SCPD veterans who'd been to other protests in other cities told horror stories of bamboo spears, water balloons full of urine, pneumatic guns firing marbles, and de facto hostage-taking by attackers who shield themselves with bystanders. With ominous predictions of a 50,000-strong Army of the Night, it began to sound like we were about to star in a splashy remake of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
As it turned out, this was, to put it lightly, exaggerated. For the first four days of the summit, protesters were like Bigfoot; anybody who saw one would breathlessly report it to the rest of us ("No, seriously! He had a sign and fake chains on and everything!"). The earliest representative of the Fearless Will of the People was an unpleasant woman holding an American flag upside down (she kept checking it, as if to ensure it was still properly upside down), who called one of our officers a "Nazi cunt". Though the officer in question admittedly has a German surname and a vague resemblance to Eva Braun, this seemed a tad unfair. Anyway, this worthy was surrounded by a clutch of heckling Georgians with flags in the regular position, so we had no need to mess with her. Most of our day was spent standing dull foot posts at checkpoints, monitoring the civilian traffic that was still being allowed through. We bought a small grill and cooked hamburgers at the base site. Flies, boredom, and the steamy Georgia heat were our worst enemies.
What struck me most was how nice the locals were. And I'm not talking about the "Hi, I'm Bob Toady from the governor's office, and we really appreciate your being here" types, I mean the regular people who lived on Sea Island. Here we had seized their neighborhood and instituted a paramilitary occupation, complete with fences, ID checks, and omnipresent grim-faced men with sunglasses and big guns. We made them carry special passes all the time, we made them go through checkpoints where their cars were swept by large dogs and mysterious electronic doohickeys just to go to their homes, we descended (albeit politely) on anyone taking pictures of our encampment, and we snarled the hell out of their traffic. And we did this for the better part of a
week. Still, people would come by and chat with us, they brought us cookies. Little old ladies said, "Oh, we're so glad you're here. We feel so safe." Schoolchildren handed candy out to National Guardsmen. Volunteers delivered bottled water with hand-written labels reading, "Glynn County thanks you!" The local Wal-Mart donated food. One guy opened his million-dollar home as a care station for the National Guard, where they could come in out of the heat or avoid the toxic port-a-johns. There are times when being a cop in America is the best job on earth.
Then, on Thursday at about 1300 hours, our radios crackled at the checkpoints. They were calling us back to the base camp to suit up. We pulled on our padded riot armor which makes us look like extras from
Starship Troopers, buckled on our helmets, issued out shields and long wooden batons, and within seconds, the sweat was cascading off of us. If nothing else, the crowds would hopefully be driven off by the smell.
A group of protesters had come marching up the causeway, approaching the west gate of the perimeter. The Secret Service had spun us up to stand in front of the checkpoint in ranks under the merciless Georgia sky and convey the message, "Do NOT come in this gate. We are SO not kidding."
In the distance, through the shimmering heat rising from the asphalt, I could make out a police cruiser parked crossways across the causeway. Beyond, were flashing blue lights moving slow up the road, and an amorphous, undulating mass creeping imperceptibly our way. A helicopter hovered overhead, its rotor blades whipping the air and washing us with noise. Camerapersons strolled this way and that, aiming their lenses at us like a firing squad, and light gaggles of onlookers hovered off to the sides of the road and in the parking lot of the Harris Teeter which stood just outside the perimeter.
The crowd grew slowly closer, and I could start to make them out. I could see long poles in their hands and what looked like bandoliers strung across their chests. Vague, unsubstantiated rumors had circulated through Club Fed that a shadowy intelligence service had word of a suicide bomber planning to hit the G-8, and that thought swam laps in our subconscious. The order came to snap our face shields down (I'm not sure what the shields are made of, but written on them is "Exceeds Z87-1", which I guess is supposed to be comforting). Loud clicks echoed from the less-lethals team as they slid shells into their gas guns and snapped them closed. I could feel my heart pounding, and tried a combat breathing exercise I learned at some point. Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Hold. It didn't really work. Fear and anticipation blur together in situations like this, and it's not always easy to tell which one you're feeling. I remember that I didn't so much care whether they speechified peaceably or charged the line, but I didn't want them to be turned away before they got to us. As another man standing on a line once said,
"We didn't get dressed up for nothing." All I knew was, they weren't getting past me.
To be continued...
Ofc. Krupke at 12:19 PM
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12 June 2004
Hi everybody, I'm back from the G-8 summit. It was long, hot, and often boring, but fun nonetheless. I'm okay except for a little sunburn and walking with a slight limp. Nothing dramatic, I'm afraid. I cracked my knee while navigating between a couple of Jersey barriers.
I'm writing up a post about it, but it is turning out to be quite long. I mean, really long. No kidding; by blog standards, this thing is Fidel Castro long. I'll have it up as soon as I figure out how to present it. Maybe I'll break it down into two parts to make it easier to deal with.
Ofc. Krupke at 10:51 PM
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02 June 2004
Analogcabin: The Right will be on a short hiatus in the coming days.
The reason is that the SCPD Riot Squad, of which I am a fledgling member, is being deployed. To that end, we were bundled into the police bus and taken to the Southern County building, where we were knighted as temporary Special Agents in the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, as auspicious a career advancement as I have yet received. We are to be part of the riot line (or what the officials who swore us in euphemistically called the "Mobile Field Force") for the
G-8 conference in Sea Island. While the international swells are discussing whatever the hell it is they discuss at those meetings, we of the Mobile Field Force will be in spirited scuffles with sullen post-adolescents hell-bent on bringing down the corrupt system of global capitalism and maybe impressing those hot chicks over at the Rainforest Action Network. Fun times to be had by all, I'm sure.
Naturally, the other issue in play at the G-8 is the fact that it is climbing the terrorist hit parade. I think it probably annoys the protestors that they aren't the main threat anymore; one NYPD official interviewed for
New York magazine snorted that the terrorists are a concern, and the protestors an afterthought. With any luck, the only dirty bombs I will have to worry about will be the feces, Clorox, and blood thrown at me by peace advocates. But in this strange new war, the front line has a habit of shifting. So we'll see.
After my training day was done, I went to the Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies for the deployment: deodorant, rechargeable batteries, and a groin cup. Promises to be a fun trip.
Ofc. Krupke at 4:57 PM
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