Breaking Rank (65 page)

Joiner, still in charge in the MACC, remained calm and cool. He held out for accurate updates from the field. Through his own “shock and awe” at what had unfolded that day, he was still very much the kind of operations commander you want calling the shots.

Now, however,
everybody
wanted to run the show—or at least judge it.

Sandberg sighed audibly, rolled her eyes, and murmured under her breath when the conversation took a turn she didn't like. The feds migrated to a corner of the room, mumbled, crossed their arms, put their heads together and shook them vigorously. (Paraphrasing, their position was:
Just clear the fucking streets, for God's sake! We don't care what it takes. We got the Big Guy touching down in a matter of hours. POTUS
[the Secret
Service abbreviation for “President of the United States”]
shouldn't be exposed to this . . . this riffraff.
) And Reichert? The poor guy was apoplectic, his blood boiling over every time Schell opened his mouth.

Those individuals most capable of bringing reason to the table and advice to the decision makers, like West Precinct captain Jim Pugel, weren't in the room. They were, by popular demand, out there on the streets. Pugel was doing a hell of a job under hellish conditions. He and other field commanders reported in regularly, but the situation kept changing, of course, from one minute to the next.

So there we were, a roomful of leaders, accustomed to running things, taking risks, making decisions, getting things done. As individuals we made things happen. Now we were suddenly thrust together as a body, as a
team
of leaders—though hardly a cohesive one. It occurred to me that planning and preparation for WTO should have included at least one tabletop exercise for the “rovers”—the very people in that room.

At 3:52 the mayor declared a civil emergency. The governor called out the National Guard.
*
A curfew, which covered most of the downtown area, was imposed for that evening and the next.

I left the MACC and headed back out on the streets. If anything, the situation was worse. Police officers were being pelted with an amazing array of missiles: traffic cones, rocks, jars, bottles, ball bearings, sticks, golf balls, teargas canisters, chunks of concrete, human urine shot from high-powered squirt guns. Gas-masked militants fired their own teargas at the cops, hurled ours back at us, and flung barricades through plate glass windows. Some moron(s) flattened all four tires on a herd of parked police cars. By nightfall it was no better. Most of the action simply moved to Capitol Hill where innocent café diners got gassed along with rioters.

But at least POTUS made it in to town safely. At about one-thirty in the morning he was put to bed at his favorite Seattle hotel, the Westin.

At five o'clock Wednesday morning, having established a “police perimeter” to keep demonstrators from getting too close to the WTO venues, officers observed people carrying crowbars, rocks, masonry hammers, and bipods and tripods (from which to suspend intrepid activists high in the air, in the middle of intersections). The cops confiscated what they could and began arresting the first bunch of the hundreds who would be jailed that day. Against a backdrop of full-scale urban rioting, police officers and Secret Service agents escorted our national leader and his entourage from one venue to another—from the Westin to the Bell Harbor Conference Center on Elliott Bay to the Four Seasons Hotel. Officers continued to take a pelting but POTUS was never touched.

By mid-morning the ACLU filed for a temporary restraining order in U.S. District Court seeking to overturn the “police perimeter.” A police commander had to break away from his duties to summarize the department's defense of the tactic, but it paid off. The court denied the request. (As if the demonstrators were paying any attention at all to the so-called “no protest zone.”)

All that day and into the night, with action shifting once again to Capitol Hill, cops fought the fight, ducking often as protesters chucked unopened cans of soup and other objects. A platoon commander's car was surrounded by a fun-loving crowd that jumped up and down on the vehicle, then attempted to flip it over. (The lieutenant, who had himself been an antiwar demonstrator at the University of Washington back in the days, told me later, “I've been on every kind of call there is, Chief. But I've never been more scared than I was that night. I thought sure they were going to pull me out of the car, grab my gun, and . . . and who knows what.”) Officers dispersed that group with gas and rescued their boss.

Moments later an employee at a gas station on Broadway called 911 to report that the station had been taken over by rioters who were filling small bottles with gasoline. One officer witnessed an individual dressed in black carrying a Molotov cocktail. A crowd of three hundred to four hundred broke off from the Broadway festivities and moved to the 1100 block of East Pine where they threatened to take over SPD's East Precinct.

At two-fifty Thursday morning the precinct was still under siege, the crowd having grown to somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred.
The officers protecting it were no longer surprised by the pelting they took, or by the infinite variety of projectiles.

A combination of chemical agents and rubber pellets finally secured the peace. The building, which contained weapons, injured police officers, and prisoners, was never breached.

Downtown at dawn was much quieter than it had been the past two days, a portent of positive things to come. Clinton flew out of town at ten, and the “no protest” perimeter was shrunk. A crowd circled King County Jail at about one in the afternoon (triggering a lockdown), but other than that it was peaceful. Most of the violent demonstrators were either in jail, lying low, or scurrying out of town. As day turned to night the crowd continued to hang around the jail, listening to speeches from protest leaders, criminal defense attorneys, and other activists. At seven-thirty they split up, half of them sticking around, the other half, under police escort, heading up to Capitol Hill where they continued their mostly peaceful ways.

On Friday, the final day of the now-truncated WTO conference, the drama ended. (If the demonstrators had been shouting “Truncate it! Truncate it!” instead of “Shut it down!” they would have achieved their goal.) All that remained of the protests was a hastily negotiated, legally sanctioned march by organized labor. It drew a decent crowd, maybe eight hundred to a thousand, but by then the focus had shifted from the WTO to claims of police brutality and to condemnation of the curfew and the perimeter. At its conclusion the marchers headed back to the Labor Temple.

A hundred or so of them broke from the group, marched over to Fifth Avenue, and swarmed the main entrance to the Westin—did they think POTUS was still inside? (Protesters earlier in the week had effectively made hostages of a furious Secretary of State Madeline Albright and U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky—both of whom were unable to leave their hotel rooms for the better part of a day.) Several of the demonstrators chained themselves to the front door of the hotel. It was a lame tactic—the Westin had other obvious entrances but there were too few protesters left to cover those doors. I walked into one of those other entrances and took the elevator to the twenty-first floor where a suite had been set up for officers assigned to dignitary protection at the hotel. I helped myself to
a bottled water and walked over to the window. It was dark outside. A good-size crowd had gathered to cheer on this last hurrah. We could hear the muffled chants from behind the thick glass. A couple of hours later, the chains came off and what was left of the crowd either went home or over to the jail to shout words of encouragement to their imprisoned brothers and sisters. The riot was over.

Saturday, December 4. I made one last round of the still-operating venues, stopping finally at the MACC where I informed the deputy mayor I that I was turning in my badge.

My decision made headlines. And a Horsey cartoon which had the chief of police falling on his sword. Its caption: “I figured I'd do it myself before someone did it for me.”

It took great self-discipline for me not to blurt out publicly what I thought of the mayor. But had I done it, it would not have been for the things the mayor was being accused of (hubris, naïveté, lack of foresight—all of which, if it fit him, also applied to me). In fact, I strongly believe that Schell got a raw deal for his role in the battle. It just wasn't his fault, any of it. The guy wasn't a cop, or a tactician, or a “demonstration management” expert. Hell, he'd only been a politician for two years. But the mayor had acted the fool on other fronts, and it was those occasions that had riled me. First and foremost were his reckless remarks to and about Sheriff Reichert.

Riding around at the height of the rioting with King County Executive Ron Sims, Reichert had observed an act of vandalism. Telling Sims he'd seen enough, he bailed out of the car and gave chase. He didn't catch the suspects, but his actions produced a satisfying sound bite on the evening news—and endeared him to my cops, who had plenty of other reasons to favor the county lawman over their own chief.

As the mayor and the sheriff walked out of a hall following one of Clinton's speeches, Schell cornered Reichert. He told him he didn't appreciate
the sheriff “acting like a fucking hero out there,” or words to that effect. He blocked Reichert's path, and continued to berate him. The sheriff ignored the mayor, and pushed past him. Schell, always the gentleman, shouted after him, “I'll personally destroy you!” The many witnesses to the mayor's actions were not impressed.

After the dust had settled, Schell presided over a special cabinet meeting. He praised all the city departments who'd played any kind of a role during the week (especially the crews who'd cleaned up around Westlake Park over the weekend and made downtown sparkle once again). He thanked us for our personal sacrifices, and so on. It was a gracious statement. Then he said, “You know,
everyone
did a terrific job under incredible stress. Everyone except our lunatic sheriff.”
*

I cornered the deputy mayor after the meeting, Schell having scooted off. “I'm sick and tired of your boss's character assassinations.” I told her he was acting like a “narcissistic sociopath,” and urged her to put a muzzle on him.

“I know, I know,” she said. “He's been under such pressure . . .”

It wasn't that I didn't understand. The week had taken a personal toll on everyone. I, myself, had gone home to my condo in the middle of the night, four nights in a row with only enough time to shower, air out my gas-saturated uniform, and try to squeeze in a couple of hours' sleep. Bone tired, I found it next to impossible to get to sleep. Some nights I could still hear the
whoop-whoop-whoop
of Guardian One, the sheriff's helicopter I'd ridden in with the governor in order to get an eagle's-eye view of the proceedings. As with a song you can't get out of your head, I'd be wracked by a rerun of the day's other noises: drums, police whistles, chants, screams, rocks landing on police helmets and on the face shields of our horses, dueling bullhorns, glass shattering. I replayed over and over in my mind the frantic radio call of one of my mounted officers as the cop reported
being pulled from his horse. I'd responded to that one, Code 2, turning onto Pine Street just in time to catch a faceful of CS gas.

With eyes shut I saw Technicolor images of bipods and tripods, looters, Dumpster fires, intersection bonfires. I saw cops being baited and assaulted. And I saw a cop kicking a retreating demonstrator in the groin before shooting him in the chest with a rubber pellet. That particular scene, caught by a television camera, was flashed around the globe, over and over, Rodney King–style.