United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Sunday’s News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) features a rare acknowledgment by the paper of police violence in the March 2007 antiwar protests at the Port of Tacoma. -- The News Tribune published a 900-word adaptation of a 1,400-word article by University of Puget Sound student Erick Peirson that appeared on Mar. 14 in the campus newspaper. -- Close comparison of the two articles[1,2] shows that almost every sentence of the News Tribune article has been reworked in ways that dilute Erick Peirson’s message. -- In fact, the changes suggest that the News Tribune is nervous about acknowledging what happened. -- Peirson’s statements of objective fact are recast as personal observations (“This is what I saw”) and expressions of opinion (“I believe”), and disclaimers are introduced (“This has nothing to do with the integrity and intentions of those within the system; it is most emphatically not my intent to impugn them”) that contradict the article’s thesis. -- Back in March 2007, it will be recalled, the News Tribune was uninterested in the police violence at the port, contenting itself with repeating what TPD representatives said. -- As we noted on Mar. 6, 2007, “In its reporting on the Port of Tacoma protests, the [News Tribune] left out essential information, ignored key perspectives, and got some key facts wrong, despite having four reporters on the story.” -- It had nothing to say about police violence early on in the protest, and failed to report observers' outrage at the use of unnecessary force — a silence that perhaps contributed the worse violence that followed. -- So why is the News Tribune publishing this acknowledgment of police violence now? -- Perhaps because Erick Peirson’s piece equates “politically active youth” with “the law enforcement community” in their supposed inability ”to understand or communicate with each other.” -- This is a false equation of victim and victimizer. -- Peirson’s piece concludes, in both its versions, with an assertion that “we can expect only an increase in violent confrontation between youth and the police” unless both change their ways. -- But how about the News Tribune changing its ways? ...

As a middle-of-the-road kid in a middle-of-the-road town, I grew up accepting a premise that is deeply ingrained in American culture: the notion of the “to serve and protect” police officer, the noble knight of “Cops” and “America’s Most Wanted.”

If something goes down and the police step in, we are conditioned to presume the moral infallibility of the law. As a child, I interacted with sheriff’s deputies and city police officers regularly; I was on a first-name basis with more than one. These were the people who attended my family’s church, who lived in my neighborhood, people I trusted.

A year ago this month, I was forced to re-evaluate that paradigm after witnessing police violence at the Port of Tacoma. February’s confrontation between police and concertgoers on The Evergreen State College campus near Olympia prompted more thoughts about youth and police.

Before the port incident, I had never been to a protest of any kind. When one of my more politically active friends told me that police brutality had occurred at protests over the weekend, I was skeptical.

I had to see for myself. Armed only with a video camera and an open mind, I went to the Tacoma Tideflats. I was unprepared for the merciless shake-up of my deep assumptions about police.

At the most peaceful moment of the night, when young protesters were sitting on the ground on a side street blocked off by police, singing mellow peace songs and swaying in a sort of “Kum Ba Yah” fashion, chaos erupted. Without warning of any kind, the police launched canisters of tear gas into the crowd.

As the wall of armored officers advanced, the pops and bangs of weapons marked “less lethal” emerged from the thick cloud of chemicals. People were running and choking and crying, stunned and confused.

Many attempted to return to their cars, only to find them blocked by police officers who threatened them with further violence. Cries of “Where do you want us to go? What do you want us to do?” could be heard as people sought to escape the sudden outburst of inexplicable violence by the police. This is what I saw.

I still believe that the majority of police officers do match the noble stereotype that American culture has apportioned them. But the people who comprise the law enforcement community are just that: people.

What reason do we have to believe that the institutions of law enforcement in our community are not susceptible to the same breakdowns and dysfunctions we see in every other agency or organization we have ever constructed?

This has nothing to do with the integrity and intentions of those within the system; it is most emphatically not my intent to impugn them.

But is it such a preposterous notion that a group of rational people might exhibit corporate irrationality?

This might explain why the Tacoma Police Department was praised by other agencies for its “restraint” at the port protests, and why police representatives passed on what I believe was blatantly fabricated information about the incident to the media.

Events like this create in some young people an intense emotional turmoil that has few outlets. These feelings manifest themselves at rallies and protests, where attendees are hypervigilant (at times irrationally so) for anything resembling police brutality.

Those who feel this way characterize the police as the enemy, perpetuating authoritarianism, searching for ways to trample the rights of the individual.

Personally, I doubt that the average police officer – even the average riot cop – fits that description in the slightest.

On the night of Feb. 14 at a hip-hop concert on the Evergreen campus, an agitated crowd confronted police during the arrest of a concertgoer. In extracting their trapped and overwhelmed comrades, police used “less-lethal” weapons to disperse the crowd. The scene exploded.

A Thurston County sheriff’s officer was quoted as calling the situation “Lord of the Flies-esque.” Although the use of weapons known to be powerful icons in the youth-police dichotomy may have been unwise, it was in fact the youthful crowd that was irrational that night.

The “Evergreen Riot” was the Port of Tacoma 2.0, but this time it was the youth who were out of control.

Both events are part of a cycle of irrationality that is perpetuated by an inability of the law enforcement community and politically active youth to understand or communicate with each other. Mediation between the police and protesters was unsuccessful at the Port of Tacoma. Attempts at later dialogue failed.

The only venues used to debrief after altercations between these groups is in the courts. The police advance ludicrous criminal charges: a University of Puget Sound student was arrested for “spitting in public” at a demonstration last fall. Demonstrators respond with emotionally charged civil litigation: Evergreen students and faculty have filed suit against Olympia police over alleged brutality at the Port of Olympia protests of 2007.

This cycle cannot end without open and honest introspection on the part of the law enforcement community regarding its practices, and within the community of politically active youth concerning their views of and interactions with police.

Unless these two groups can find venues for critical and honest dialogue, we can expect only an increase in violent confrontation between youth and the police.

Erick Peirson of Port Townsend is a junior biology major at the University of Puget Sound. This article is adapted from a longer version that appeared in The Trail, the campus newspaper. Peirson can be contacted at epeirson@ups.edu">epeirson@ups.edu.

Any attempt to reduce the vents of Feb. 14 on the Evergreen campus to some central cause or "bottom line" would be at best naïve, and easily deceptive. This is evident in the wide range of reporting that has circulated throughout the Puget Sound region in the aftermath of what is now referred to as the "Evergreen Riot." [You will find in this issue of the Trail a thoughtful critique of the journalism surrounding this event by Joe La Sac that should give us all reason to pause.] Most discourse centers around where the blame ought to be allocated for what has widely been labeled a "breakdown of order" resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in damage to Thurston County property and a dark cloud over the Evergreen campus community. These casual analyses are diverse: false accusations were made; the performers incited violence; the hype of the music robbed concertgoers of their reason; the arrest was racist; anarchists monopolized on a ripe situation; the police escalated the incident unnecessarily using violence; the rioters were out of control. What occurred that night is not reducible to single cause, but is the product of an emotional and irrational interaction between two equally fallible groups of humans.

On one hand, a default reaction to an event such as the Evergreen Riot might be to characterize the rioters as delinquents, crazed by extreme music, striking out in naïveté and requiring the reluctant but firm hand of the police to restore order and serve justice. This position seems to be based on a premise that is deeply ingrained in American culture: the notion of the "to serve and protect" police officer; the noble knight of "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted." If something goes down and the police step in, we are conditioned to automatically presume the moral infallibility of the law. This is the assumption I grew up with. As a child I interacted with Sheriff's deputies and city police officers regularly, and was on a first name basis with more than one. These were the people that attended my family's church, that lived in my neighborhood, that I trusted. What a wonderful sense of security this paradigm affords us! To their credit, I still believe that the majority of police women and men do approximate to a high degree the noble stereotype that American culture has apportioned them. But the people that comprise the law enforcement community are just that: people. What reason do we have, therefore, to believe that the institutions of law enforcement in our community are insusceptible to the same breakdowns and dysfunctions as we readily acknowledge in every other agency or organization we have ever constructed?

An equally indefensible reaction to the Evergreen Riot is to chalk it up to "yet another display of police brutality." There is growing unrest among the youth of the present toward law enforcement. In this sector of societal illusions about the moral infallibility of the police have eroded, and an anger is growing. Perhaps this phenomena can be attributed to the rebellion inherent in youth, or to the anti-establishment cultural messages that have the Tacoma government paranoid this month. These feelings often manifest themselves at rallies and protests, where attendees are hyper-vigilant (at times irrationally so) for anything resembling police brutality. The police are characterized as the enemy, perpetuating absolute authoritarianism and actively searching for ways to trample on the rights of the everyperson. Although there are certainly always exceptions, I find it highly unlikely that the average police officer -- even the average riot cop -- fits that description in the slightest.

And yet violence is prevalent in interactions between politically conscientious youth and the police: pepper-spray, tear-gas, and batons are common fare at many protests. Even high-school students are finding themselves drawn into this pattern, as exemplified by the protest-turn-bloodbath at Miami Edison High School on Feb. 29. But does the noble-cop vs. insolent-youth paradigm truly capture what is going on here? How do we account for the fact that student-reporters wielding only cameras were singled out and attacked by officers at the incident in Florida last month? Consider the pandemonium of last spring's protest at the Port of Tacoma: I myself (attending as an observer and videographer) watched as riot police -- without warning of any kind -- fired tear gas and pepper-pray at a group of protesters who were doing nothing more than sitting on a side-street (which had been blockaded by the police since before the protestors arrived) singing peace songs. Clearly there is something going on here.

Could it be that truly unnecessary acts of violence by members of the police force are growing more numerous as a result of deleterious cultural evolution within a relatively autonomous human system? This has nothing to do with the integrity and intentions of those within the system; these it is most emphatically not my intent to impugn. But is it such a preposterous notion that a group of rational humans might exhibit corporate irrationality?

Similarly, rhetoric about alleged police brutality is becoming increasingly common among politically conscientious youth. YouTube videos alleging police brutality grow more numerous on a weekly basis. Anti-police slogans can be heard at many protests. On our own campus, an anti-police brutality march was planned as part of the Northwest SDS Convention last fall. There is a vast amount of emotion behind all of this, and it is cumulative in the greatest degree.

In order to adequately understand the Evergreen Riot, we cannot rely on a simple causal paradigm. At protests and rallies around the country youth find themselves toe-to-toe with police. As a function of their humanity these two groups are susceptible to the same irrationality, the same alarmism, the same propensity to overreact. Anger and frustration toward violent police tactics (justified or not) manifests itself in the language and posture of protestors. This public agitation can be equally exaggerated in the perception of the police, and consequently "less-lethal" reactions on their part might seem to them to be quite reasonable. This assessment is demonstrable: the TPD and supporting agencies were praised by their peers for their "restraint" in the Port of Tacoma incident described above, and police representatives to the media passed on blatantly fabricated information about the incident without seeking even a cursory confirmation of the evidence. In the other camp, exaggerated allegations of police brutality are not rare. These two groups do not understand each other in the slightest -- their views are incommensurable -- and they have not yet found a way to communicate. Mediators between the police and protestors were not present at the Port of Tacoma, and I suspect that this is the norm. Following the Port of Tacoma incident last spring students and police commenced preliminary dialogue to debrief, but this fell through in its early stages.

On the night of Feb. 14 an agitated crowd confronted the arrest of a man widely believed to be innocent. In extracting their trapped and overwhelmed comrades police used "less-lethal" weapons to disperse the crowd. The scene exploded. *Seattle Times* writer Nick Perry quotes Thurston County officer April Meyers describing the situation as "Lord of the Flies-esque." Evergreen Professor Peter Bohmer (in the same article) described the police as "the original aggressors" who "came in swinging." The crowd was certainly irrational that night, nearly all accounts agree. But the police were equally irrational in their implementation of weapons that they knew were powerful icons in the youth-police dichotomy. The aftermath is a witch-hunt that the Thurston County sheriff department has all but stated is retaliatory, and the perpetuity of troubled emotions toward the police among the Evergreen community and its sympathizers.

As youth in the middle of this tumultuous relationship it is critical that we (I most emphatically do include myself in this group) evaluate ourselves corporately, and tease out the roots of the intense emotions toward law enforcement growing within us. By the same token, this cycle cannot end without open and honest introspection on the part of the law enforcement community regarding their policies and practices. The public perception of the disintegration of civil rights and privacy on a national level, with the passage of PATRIOT-esque legislation and revelations of potentially unconstitutional surveillance rampant in press, only aggravates this need. Unless critical and honest dialogue regarding protest violence between and within these groups occurs, we can expect only an increase in violent confrontation between youth and the police.