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Example research essay topic: Afl Cio Tear Gas - 2,649 words

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... lament seeks to embarrass Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper and appoint a new chief more favorable to the criminal business establishment. The initial approach by the opponents of police accountability was the circulation of mutinous talk regarding the "softness" of the official strategy for dealing with the demonstrators. In October at a crowd control training session, Assistant Chief Ed Joiner had answered questions about protester violence by saying that there was nothing to worry about and the protests would be non-violent. SPD Officer Brett Smith and others claim the FBI and Secret Service had briefed King County Sheriff's officers training to intervene in the protests to "fully anticipate that five to six officers would be lost during the protests, either seriously injured or killed, " as Smith told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Dan Rate. When Officer Smith and others spoke with their commander about the stories coming from the King County police, they were told not to spread rumors.

It appears likely that statements predicting violent attacks were part of the Sheriff's training and it is certain that the predictions were hysterical and provocative. The success in undermining Chief Stamper's command depended on the breakdown of law and order in the streets. Whose law and what order was the question. If the Mayor and police chief could be maneuvered into declaring a civil emergency, then the regional, state and federal agencies would be able to enter the conflict and the hard-liners strategy would prevail for a while.

The Battle Engaged First use of tear gas Shortly after 10 AM, the Seattle Police Department got their show on the road and began using tear gas to clear the streets. It's still not clear if the order was issued by Assistant Chief Ed Joiner -- Chief Stamper had delegated control of WTO to him and did not arrive at the commanders' meeting until late that afternoon -- or if was a spontaneous decision made by officers in the street. Fragmentary transcripts of recently released tapes of police radio traffic have so far not cast any light on this critical question. The use of gas may have been an effort to open a pathway into the protest area from outside, as the gas was fired at on Sixth Avenue, between University and Union Streets. This is the extreme southern end of the triangular area blockaded by the Direct Action Network. The Seattle Times said "police used gas to disperse demonstrators massing. " Police officials later explained that the gas was an attempt to expand and re-connect their now isolated perimeters inside the crowds.

None of these explanations makes much sense. The events surrounding the decision to use gas continue to be cloaked in confusion and controversy. Later claims that the police resorted to gas in response to widespread violent attacks and vandalism are now known to be absolutely untrue. The counter-claims that police were unprovoked and that the crowds were non-confronting are equally untrue.

The more aggressive demonstrators had moved towards the police positions and videotapes clearly show that there was no buffer space between the opposing sides in many areas. One segment aired on KIRO TV shows members of the Black Bloc confronting police and being extremely provocative, but not attacking anyone or committing vandalism. The police view of the crowd was framed by these more aggressive demonstrators, while the vast majority of the crowd was unable to see the police and was in a giddy, triumphant mood. It will require the investigations by the Seattle City Council, the ACLU, Amnesty International and other groups to determine if the use of gas was ordered by the police command or if it was a decision made in the streets.

After the first canisters were fired, the use of tear gas and pepper spray spread rapidly throughout the protest area. The crowds were now frightened and angry With the release of the gas, mood in the streets rapidly changed. The police were successful in advancing against the crowd. There were no instances where police charges were repulsed, or where the crowds counter-attacked and cut off police. One major effort to re-open the street connecting the Paramount Theatre to the hotels moved the crowds back until running out of steam. In short, the police tactics were of limited success and ineffective.

The net effect of the use of gas and the police charges was to cause the crowds to surge from one point to another without allowing police to gain control of the streets. In the midst of the melee, the "lock-down" affinity groups remained in place, blocking intersections and anchoring the protest to the area around the convention center. Police gassed and pepper-sprayed the immobile groups, but could not arrest them and remove them from the area due to the continued blockade. These tactics were both ineffective in getting the blockaders to move and successful in infuriating the crowds who saw their main mission as the protection of these groups. The crowds were now frightened and angry, but determined to maintain control of the streets. The overall strategic situation remained unchanged, despite the tactical chaos.

The protesters numbers were sufficient to keep the blockade intact, though it was now a blockade of continuous movement. The police remained isolated inside the protest area without an open avenue to the outside through which arrested could be removed. Both sides remained under the overall command of their respective strategies, regardless of the excitement. The area involved in the disorder -- and that's what it clearly was after an hour of tear gas and chaos -- spread down Pike and Pine Streets.

The protests remained centered on the Convention Center and although the crowds expanded into the surrounding blocks under the police attacks, they kept surging back towards the conference site and the "lock-down" affinity groups holding the key intersections. Floating above the tear gas was an info sphere of enormous bandwidth The cohesion of the Direct Action Network was partly due to their improvised communications network assembled out of cell phones, radios, police scanners and portable computers. Protesters in the street with wireless Palm Pilots were able to link into continuously updated web pages giving reports from the streets. Police scanners monitored transmissions and provided some warning of changing police tactics. Cell phones were widely used. Kelly Quick, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network, reports that early Tuesday, "the authorities had successfully squashed DAN's communications system. " The solution to the infrastructure attack was quickly resolved by purchasing new Nextel cell phones.

According to Han Shan, the Ruckus Society's WTO action coordinator, his organization and other protest groups that formed the Direct Action Network used the Nextel system to create a cellular grid over the city. They broke into talk groups of eight people each. One of the eight overlapped with another talk group, helping to quickly communicate through the ranks. In addition to the organizers' all-points network, protest communications were leavened with individual protesters using cell phones, direct transmissions from roving independent media feeding directly onto the internet, personal computers with wireless modems broadcasting live video, and a variety of other networked communications. Floating above the tear gas was a pulsing info sphere of enormous bandwidth, reaching around the planet via the Internet.

Labor's U-turn Would police dare cancel union parade? By 11 AM, the rally at Memorial stadium had been underway for an hour. Roughly 20, 000 people only half-filled the stadium. The union numbers were swelled by the anti-WTO organizations which had opted not to engage in the direct action to shut down the conference.

Environmentalists have received most of the media coverage for their participation in the labor parade, but the role of human-rights organizations, particularly those working through churches in a "faith-based" network, got even shorter shrift from the media than the unions. Human rights groups are the critical bond between labor and the left. If the labor alliance fractures, it will be along these lines, not because of any action taken by "mainstream" environmental groups. The rally at the Seattle Center represented a major turn to the left on the part of organized labor. There will be considerable attention to how this new alliance proceeds in the coming months.

Fault lines run through it in every direction, but the fact remains that when the AFL-CIO brought their national agenda to Seattle, they looked to the right and saw Pat Buchanan standing alone and without meaningful support, while on the left was a broad array of grassroots support reaching not only across America, but around the world. How this alliance proceeds will hinge on the ability of labor leaders to shift their overtly nationalist agenda to a more international viewpoint. The disorder spreading through the streets downtown was instantly communicated to the crowd through cell phones, radios and the rest of the info sphere. Behind the scenes, furious activity was taking place to prevent the parade from being canceled by city authorities. Chaos at police command center Meanwhile, back at the police command center, Assistant Chief Ed Joiner was turning down demands from his field commanders to declare a state of civil emergency which would cancel the parade. Joiner said he overruled a recommendation by Assistant Chief John Pirak to declare a state of emergency Tuesday about 11 AM.

The veto, Joiner said, was made in consideration of plans for the AFL-CIO march towards downtown. "I felt declaring a state of emergency at that time, before the march ever got under way, was going to send a very strong public message that we already had major difficulties as a city, " Joiner said. Joiner's statement underscores the widespread fantasy on the part of city officials that the uproar which followed the decision to deploy tear gas was somehow a secret which they could keep. This air of unreality was demonstrated by Seattle's KOMO TV, which tried to implement a censorship policy by not covering the news as it unfolded in the streets. KOMO has received richly deserved ridicule for their censorship of "illegal demonstrations", but the attitude was not theirs alone.

Anyone with an internet connection could plug into live video and audio feeds from the street battles from the alternative media. The commercial media struggled to keep up, but was continuously hampered by their inability to understand what was going on. The whereabouts and activities of Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper continue to somewhat mysterious during this period. Given the intense concern centering on the AFL-CIO parade on the part of law enforcement officials, it is a reasonable guess that much of the mayor and chief's time between 11 AM and 1 PM was devoted to negotiations with the labor leaders. The post-WTO investigations by the Seattle City Council and the ACLU lawsuit over the constitutionality of the city's civil emergency law may lift some of the veil which currently hides this period. The final decision was to allow the AFL-CIO parade from the Seattle Center to downtown.

This sealed the fate of the street actions as a victory for the Direct Action Network. If the march had been canceled and the additional protesters had been prevented from joining in the chaos downtown, the city stood a better chance of restoring order. Instead, the strategy of using the AFL-CIO to contain and neutralize the Direct Action Network protests was drastically modified. The city's capitulation to the protests was underscored at 1 PM by the announcement from the WTO that it was canceling the opening ceremonies. The decision by Mayor Schell and Chief Stamper to allow the march was bizarre.

A December 16 story by Seattle Times reporters Mike Carter and David Postman chronicled the decision: About 11 AM, SPD Assistant Chief Pirak -- watching events unfold from the city's emergency operation center -- called Joiner at the MACC and "asked whether we wanted to ask the mayor if we wanted to declare a state of emergency, " Joiner said. Despite the fact "we were getting hit with much larger numbers of protesters than we had anticipated, " Joiner refused. Instead, he opted to let the AFL-CIO march proceed, a move that aimed as many as 20, 000 more people toward downtown as skirmishes between police, demonstrators and anarchist vandals were escalating. Joiner believed the march would actually work in favor of his stretched police lines.

The strategy, he said, was for the peaceful march to sweep the other demonstrators into its ranks and deposit them several blocks away... toward a "dispersal point" [where] the police intended to move in behind the demonstrators and expand the perimeter around the hotels and convention center. Instead, thousands of the demonstrators turned into town and chaos ensued. "I still believe we could have controlled what we were dealing with at that time had the march turned, " Joiner said. "It was not going to be clean. It would have been messy. But I think we would have been able to open a corridor to get delegates in and out. " In other words, the Direct Action Network protesters were expected to abandon the streets and leave downtown when they saw their reinforcements arrive. Assistant Chief Joiner's explanation is simply not credible, as the WTO ceremonies had been canceled before the parade began.

Whatever the level of chaos and unreality at the command center, it is unlikely that anyone thought a column of twenty thousand people would march downtown and then "sweep the other demonstrators into its ranks. " Whoever was going to be gassed or pepper-sprayed in Seattle, it wasn't going to be the labor leaders Several factors affected the decision to allow the AFL-CIO parade to proceed. First of all, the police were running short of tear gas and needed time to obtain new supplies and deliver them downtown. Second, they were not prepared to arrest marchers at the Seattle Center -- due to both political and logistical reasons. If the police tried and failed to prevent the march, things would clearly take a turn for the worse. Third, if the parade was canceled, the AFL-CIO would be denied any credit for the outcome of the protests.

Finally, whoever was going to be gassed or pepper-sprayed in Seattle, it wasn't going to be the labor leaders. Greta Gaard had ridden to the rally on a labor bus from Bellingham, one hundred miles to the north of Seattle. She reports in Bellingham's Every Other Weekly that the "rainbow flag" (non-union) participants at the rally decided around noon that they were going to leave the stadium and march downtown. The word of the street battles had reached the stadium only minutes after the first gas was released at 10 AM. It took an hour before the crowd was lined up in the streets, chanting "We want to march!" The walk towards downtown was oddly quiet. "There were no police, media or crowd-watchers in sight, " wrote Gaard. "Then the answer hit me: we weren't a threat. " A sheet-metal union member, Mike Ottoloino, got into a confrontation with the AFL-CIO marshals, saying, "This isn't a march, this is a parade!" As the parade arrived at 4 th and Pike, AFL-CIO marshals began blocking progress towards the convention center, saying "The route has been changed. Circle around here. " Police were massing several blocks away, but were not visible to the people arriving from the Seattle Center.

Gaard and several thousand others turned away from the march, just in time to run into the renewed police push to move people away from the convention center. The momentum of the thousands leaving the march and moving towards the Convention Center carried several blocks beyond the parade's pivot at 4 th and Pike. Gaard and her friends found themselves at 6 th and Pike, one of the most fiercely contested intersections of the battle, but temporarily an island of relative calm due to the absence of...


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