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By Bob Lonsberry
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PHILADELPHIA -- If God in his glory has an
unrealized ambition, it is to be a bike cop in Philly.
A gun on his hip, an embroidered badge on his chest, riding second row in
a squad of Good Guys whipping down the street to keep the peace.
There was a lot of that yesterday, cops and protesters and various Republican
grandees looking on, a gridlock of thousands and thousands in the heart of
a great city. Legions in blue and a shifting sand of anarchy, smelling of
filth and clove cigarettes, dashing from spot to spot to sow the seeds of
chaos.
Unsuccessfully.
The Good Guys won and the Bad Guys looked like a bunch of punk-ass kids.
I half expected onlookers to break out in applause. I think most of them
went home and wished they had.
This is a city of narrow streets, pressed in by buildings and heavy traffic.
And the scum planned to shut it down. Sit in the road, link arms, shout things
about what do we want and when do we want it. And they pulled it off, to
an extent. For hours they roamed through the heart of Philadelphia, choking
off street after street, moving and marauding until a phalanx of Good Guys
would set up ahead of them, like a machine deploying itself to consume them,
and the advance stopped and turned.
I followed it for hours through the afternoon and evening, in the heat of
the day and the dusk of the night. An amazing balance of good versus evil,
the foundation of society versus the decay of society.
And if God doesn't want to be a Philly cop, then he wants to hire them to
guard the gates of heaven.
With the bicycle cops in the lead.
They were the tip of the spear in all the confrontations I saw, the ones
who drew the line in the sand and plucked up the fools who crossed it. Hale
and hearty men and women who pedal in at breakneck speed, in a formation
of twos, and dump the bikes and push them back. Three or four or five of
them stopping a hundred, holding them down and taking their blows and guarding
them in a pile of three or four, the zip-lock cuffs behind their backs, while
the cavalry came over the hill -- quiet, measured, detached.
I saw them first near the Convention Center when the vermin lay down in the
road, road after road, taxing the police and snarling the traffic and stopping
the shuttle of conventioneers. They were a lightning squad, moving and staging
and moving again, riding for all they were worth, flying around stopped vehicles,
like leaves on the wind.
That's how it was downtown.
And that's how it was at my hotel.
When we sat down, the reporter I'm working with and the crew from R News,
in the dining room, they asked us to move back, to move back from the window,
because they were just down the street. The security men scurried around
more than seemed necessary and we enjoyed our dinner and the pedestrians
ambled by as they will.
A bunch of guys in red dresses ran by, out for an evening's jog, but that's
Philadelphia and we thought nothing of it.
And then as we got up to leave for our rooms they started coming. Some in
dreadlocks, many in ratty clothes, a few speaking into radios, skirmishers
out in front, like an infantry advance, running into an alley and wheeling
dumpsters back into the street and turning them over in a barracade. On the
avenue in front of the opulent hotel where the elite of the Empire State
were ensconced. From the windows people with convention credentials around
their necks looked out frightened.
In the bar, by the side door, you could see the bicycle cops wheel up, coming
around to meet the skirmishers head on. They grabbed one or two and then
the main body of the protestors got there and they circled the cops, pushing
them and pulling them and grabbing the people in custody and trying to drag
them free.
The protestors threw the punches and the cops took them.
And then the magic happened. In front of the hotel, almost without being
noticed, the Good Guys set up, one line behind another, night sticks at the
ready, rock steady, and the advance stopped there. A good 30 feet between
them, the arrested ones in a pile waiting for tempers to cool, a couple hundred
milling ragamuffins chanting about rich people and corporations and some
cop-killing bastard named Mumia.
Slipping outside I moved into the middle of the crowd, unmolested, seeing
them mostly as young ignoramuses, walking to the leading edge, across from
the Philly cops, various in the group trying to incite chants, but mostly
it was just standing, a milling about that slowly climbed down from the boiling
point.
And the cops didn't move. They were passive, standing there, stubby batons
diagonally across their chests, like thousands of their brothers and sisters
had been through the day, just standing. Even the bike cops, looming above
their prisoners, just stood there, looking down or away. No words, no looks,
no confrontations. Two giants standing on the brink, pretending it's a stroll
in the park.
And maybe 15 or 20 minutes into it, after the kids were bored and the prisoners
were away, a cop captain in a white shirt strolled across the gap with a
partner, smiling and friendly, ok, they said, it's time to go. And the protesters
smiled in return and they exchanged pleasantries and they turned back, and
the captain and the cop, two guys alone, walked them back a half a block,
the hundred or two of them, and then the two lines advanced silently, passing
scattered applause, to take up a new position behind the captain.
And a bus came through, like it was supposed to, to pick up a load of delegates
who would go home with a story to tell.
Minutes later the bike cops mounted up and rode off by twos leaving nothing
but a line of motorcycle cops flanking the street.
Yesterday was an interesting trial. Anarchists, in a clear example of organized
and orchestrated crime, sought through roving guerilla bands not to make
a point or to raise an issue, but to throttle a city. To choke it into
submission, to spread chaos and disorder, to steal time and commerce and
freedom of movement. And the cops who defend that city were hamstrung by
the critical eyes of a thousand reporters and a bias against them.
It was mission impossible in the real world.
And the Good Guys won. They won by restraint and they won by professionalism.
Because it wasn't about the streets. It was about a powder keg and lighting
the fuse. The protesters were pushed forward by their puppeteers in a mission
intended to end with injury and confrontation. They wanted the kids to attack
the cops and they wanted the cops to fight back. They wanted the cops to
club back.
And they wanted it on the evening news.
But the cops held steady. Big, brassy, hard as a rock. They stood their ground,
they flew in on bikes, they wrestled when they had to.
But mostly they just stood there, unflinching, taking the blows.
And they won. And the Bad Guys lost.
Sure, the traffic was snarled. But the fuse wasn't lit.
Score that a win. |
