March Goes On Without Permit

By Katherine Lemons, AlterNet. Posted August 17, 2000.

Protestors finished the evening elated at completing their first successful, unplanned and un-permitted march.

When 3,000 activists met at noon in Pershing Square to protest police brutality, the death penalty and the national growth in incarcerations, onlookers feared the worst. Yet the spirit of co-operation reigned when people began to congregate.

"Starting out people were peaceful and excited for the march," said Courtney Franklin a 22-year-old protester. "I didn't see anything violent."

Another young protestor agreed, saying, "The crowd was up-beat. There were puppets and a drum beat going on in the background."

Yet despite their non-violent stance, the protesters encountered agressive police.

The group left Pershing Square and marched to the headquarters of the L.A.P.D. and proceeded from there to the Staples Center where they hoped that their gathering would catch the eyes of some of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention being held there. They were accompanied by a truck outfitted with generator-powered speakers and puppets.

When they arrived at the Staples Center, a young African-American woman climbed on top of the truck and took the microphone.

"She gave a very moving speech," said protestor Michal Lando, a senior at Berkley University. The crowd, Lando said, agreed with what she was doing by "letting the public know that the people are out here because they care about these things."

The police department was taking the predominantly college-age group seriously in a different way than they hoped. Rows of policemen on foot stood on every side street, reinforced by rows of police cars and motorcycles. The largest fleet of motorcycles had 22 members, and troops of police, both mounted and on foot, constantly sped from one side of the protest to another, intermittently flashing lights and blipping sirens.

The four edges of the space were enclosed by rows of policemen in riot gear, plastic hand-cuffs, tear-gas cylinders and guns prepped to shoot rubber bullets. As they have been during the last several days, helicopters swarmed the sky above the gathering making the area resemble a war zone.

One policeman even said, "You get caught in there you are a casualty of war."

"Collateral damage," added another.

By 5:15, the L.A.P.D. had decided to enact what one policeman unabashedly referred to as the "divide and conquer" strategy. A line of police in riot gear stormed through the center of the crowd, pushing roughly a quarter of them into the space that had been designated for their meeting.

The stage on which Rage Against the Machine played two nights ago was to be used to voice concern about police brutality and other institutional violence. But protestors never got there. Once the police had divided the group, they forced each section back, jamming the crowd together.

"The cops rushed the line a few times," said Matthew Nicholson, 22.

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