A View From the RNC

Remember the big protests at the Republican National Convention, and the police violence that accompanied them?

Well a friend of mine -- Call him Mr. 13 -- was there, and he was good enough to send me his account. It's a fascinating and sometimes unnerving story and written in a delightful noire-ish style.

With that introduction, here is 13's Account:

***

The city might have looked nice from that park, on the outskirts above the Mississippi, the skyscrapers rising up from the flats over joggers and dog-walkers. Might have looked nice if I wasn't constantly checking the rear-view for a tail, might have looked nice if sweat wasn't running down my ribs under the nicest shirt I owned, might have looked nice if it had not been built on occupied land with blackmailed labor. Just maybe, might have.

I spit, and turn LVO around. Lost. Again. The cops closed the exit I had planned to take to get into downtown. I had hoped to discreetly slide into Sector 1 without attracting too much attention to our specific intersection.

You know, before we locked down in the middle of it.

S. had been riding around the area for at least two hours, calling in updates to our Central Comms, safely nestled away in the Rust Belt. I had tried calling him for most of that time. Not being able to get him on the phone made me even more nervous. What if he had gotten pinched? The cops had been doing a pretty good job of roughing up anybody who looked like the word dissent might be on their minds. But S. always looked like he just happened to be training for the next triathlon -- police profiles he did not fit.

I got my contact person, L., on the phone. At Central Comms, we had a person in direct communication with someone from each group on the ground - me in the car, S. on his bike, and the group gathering at a permitted speak-out. So, L. was able to lean over to S.'s contact, and ask what the hell had happened to S. All in all, a pretty efficient system.

Coming into the city, I finally got S. on the phone. He directed me to a parking lot a few blocks down from our intersection. I parked the car, adjusted my bow tie, and made certain that the sleeping dragon in the passenger seat was adequately covered by my thrift-store pinstripe jacket. "Please take no notice of that concrete-filled bucket, officer. Only examine that fancy-looking jacket on top of it. Yup; double-breasted." I got out, stretched, and sat on a nearby bench. S. rolled by; we made the briefest of eye contact. I nervously clicked the carabiner in my pocket. We were only minutes away from deployment.

It should be noted here that I had never done a lockdown. Especially one locked in a car, at a publicly-announced location, while thousands of cops roamed the streets, trigger-fingers warmed up and ready to go. We figured that a disabled vehicle, complete with an uncooperative driver and folks locked to the outside of it, was the most efficient way of holding our intersection with the limited numbers of committed participants. And how I ended up being the designated driver stemmed from separate conversations I had been having with F. about trying to make our way through the world without contributing to the systemic manipulation and exploitation of everything around us. As I volunteered to steer the car into the intersection, F.'s words ran through my mind: "You haven't given your all until you've got nothing left."

My disposable phone started to ring viciously. I answered it: Go time. I hung up and got into LVO. Two short blocks later, I was behind another car, waiting to turn left through our intersection. I saw some of my folks, standing at one corner. On the opposite corners, cops in riot gear milled about, waiting for the pedestrians to try to take the intersection. The light turned green.

The car in front of me rolled through, turned left, and ambled on to wherever. I waited a beat, gunned LVO, and stopped in the middle of the intersection. Everyone charged the car, some locking to it, others filling the intersection. I shut off the car and shoved the key down my pants. The cops started to assess the situation. They called for back up and started pushing people out of the way. I pulled on my goggles and balaclava, fearing that rather than taking the time to cut me out, they would just beat and pepper-spray me until I released myself. Someone I didn't recognize walked around the intersection, singing and strumming on his guitar as he was hustled along by the closest officers. I have no idea who he was, but it sure did a lot to comfort me to hear him defiantly playing.

One of the taller cops walked up to the window and tapped on it. He introduced himself as the sergeant on the scene. His thick Midwestern accent took me by surprise: he was polite, articulate, maybe even nice. All around him, other cops were swarming LVO, the magic words "sleeping dragon" passing between them. The Sarge asked me if I would please unlatch myself.

"Not until the convention has been shut down," I replied through the glass.

"It'll be over tomorrow," he offered.

"Well, that's when I'll leave!"

He frowned, a bit perturbed, and switched tactics.

"You know, it's going to get really hot in there. Just 95 degrees out here."

I shook my gallon-jug of water at him. The Sarge shut up.

By this time, the cops outside had figured out how to defeat the exterior lockboxes. Once my comrades started to get taken into custody, I got the idea to give L. a call back home. [Note: all phone conversations are constructed from memory, nearly a month after the fact. Any omissions and misstatements are purely my fault. For a more exact transcript, contact the NSA.]

"Hey L."

"Hey, what's going on there? Did the action go down yet?"

"It's kind of warm in here. Gonna be a hot one today. The cops have told everyone that they've been arrested."

"Who do they have?"

"Oh, not anyone yet. It was one of those verbal arrest things. Oh, scratch that." I tried to turn around to look out the back, despite the fact that my arm was locked to a metal rod sealed in a five-gallon bucket filled with concrete. "They got two of us loose." I could hear L. passing the information along to the others at Comms.

"Ok, and now they're working on the other two folks... They got 'em." Everyone in zip cuffs, orderly led from the intersection to an empty parking lot. Some city workers (presumably one of the two Cut Teams deployed throughout the city) stuck their faces up to the car window, trying to determine what was going on with my sleeping dragon, covered by my jacket. They tried to open the doors and chatted amongst themselves about the best course of action to take. Unlike all of the riot police with cuddly accents, the Cut Team had their names and badge numbers embroidered on their uniforms.

"Hey, L., want some badge numbers?" I started rattling off names and numbers, along with what they were doing. One of the Cut Team folks finally rolled up with a crow bar, a four-foot long number, the color of a cloudy day. I was given one more chance to release; I refused to even acknowledge it. As L. was trying to keep up with the badge numbers, I asked, "Want to hear a window break?" I held the phone away from my face.

The crowbar reared back, and smashed the window behind me. Glass bits exploded onto the back seat. Honestly, I expected the sound to be louder. It could be, though, that after all of these years of not wearing ear plugs at punk shows has dulled the ol' auditory nerves. Someone reached around and opened the back door, then climbed across the back seat to open the passenger-side door. Hmph. Shoulda had those welded shut, I thought. Front doors were soon popped open. I resumed reporting names and numbers, much to the distress of one of the Cut Team members. She heard her information being rattled off and freaked out. She ran over to me, pried the phone from my hand, and kept my hand in a firm grip, like a frustrated parent holding onto a disobedient child. Pissed, she was.

The Cut Team went to work, evaluating the situation underneath my jacket. They poked at the bucket, poked at the concrete, poked at the PVC holding my arm. A Cut Team member started talking to me. He seemed way too nervous of a guy to be dealing with people dedicated enough to their beliefs to lock themselves to large objects in city streets.

"Is there anything in here that's going to hurt me? There isn't a bomb in here that's going to explode when we take you out, is there? I've got two kids, man, I don't want to die." Really, his distress was so over the top that I couldn't help laughing. I reassured him that I, too, had no desire to get blown up. He started going through everything I had within arm's reach: aforementioned jug of water, hippy-ass trail mix, vinegar-soaked bandana in a plastic bag.

"What's this?"

I didn't respond.

"Oh, what, you thought we were going to gas you? We're not those kind of cops."

These jokers, along with 3,000 other cops, did a great job later of proving otherwise.

From a vehicle, they produced some sort of snake camera, complete with little television attachment. They ran it through the PVC to determine that only a carabiner kept me in place, and was stopping them from moving LVO the hell out of the way.

"Carabiner?"

"Carabiner."

"Carabiner."

A Team member disappeared with the camera, while the Nervous Guy tried to talk me out of resisting anymore.

"Now, when we cut you out, sparks are going to fly everywhere. Your clothes could catch on fire, or even melt to your skin." I shrugged. He sighed. Someone appeared with what looked like a router. As they readied the tool and Nervous Guy sweated some more, the Sarge showed back up.

"If you let yourself out, we'll act like we cut you out, and you'll get all the glory, like you want. We won't tell anyone." I couldn't believe he was whispering this to me, this ridiculous proposition that completely failed to accurately gauge anything about me. I mean, there was no expectation that this particular police sergeant should know anything about this particular maniac, locked in this particular car in this particular intersection. But, to assume (out loud) that this maniac would sit through months of meetings, drive sixteen hours, and lock himself to a block of concrete all for glory? It was too much; I laughed and laughed and laughed in this cop's face until he left me alone. Nervous Guy got the go-ahead, someone draped a canvas sheet over me, and they went to work.

Within minutes, I was standing outside of the car, posing for police photographs. Pockets searched, bow tie removed. Goggles and balaclava retained as possessions, not evidence (!). Standing on the curb, watched a giant yellow construction vehicle lift LVO like a hay bale and deposit him in the grassy patch next to the on-ramp. Photographed and searched again. This time, the cop taking the picture had on latex gloves. When he lifted the camera up to take my picture, sweat poured out the gloves. Deposited in the back of a van, driven across the highway to the County Jail. Processed in, processed out. Apart from our group, only one other person in custody; he was missing a shoe. Got free access to phone -- Cold Snap was ready for us. Got bag full of possessions, cited, deposited into another van, and released in an adjacent parking lot.

We got it easy.