John_Schwada's Blog

“They’ve got the best corn beef in LA,” a beaming Bill Bratton told a handful of reporters, moments after he stepped out of Langer’s Deli next to MacArthur Park and surveyed the peaceful progress of Thursday's May Day march.

Besides the corn beef lunch, LA’s chief of police had reason to be happy: after all, Thursday's May Day march was – by mid-afternoon - beginning to shape up as an event that would, in Bratton’s words, “correct the department’s image.”

A year ago, at the 2007 May Day event, some of the LAPD’s Metro Squad officers lost their heads and swept through MacArthur Park, roughing up a few radical troublemakers but also plenty of non-combatants. It was a black eye for the LAPD, and for Bratton who - while some of his finest were striking, shoving, tear-gassing, shooting (with rubber bullets) scores of marchers – was caught napping; the chief was at a fund-raising event when the mess began….

But this time around, the chastened LAPD brass were all over the march….cellphones to their ears, many fitted with hands-free devices, looking like air-traffic controllers and probably just as wired-in. The object was to identify any problem protestors quickly – and then surgically (that was the big word of the day) remove them so, in the words of Capt. Bob Green, the “peaceful marchers could enjoy their First Amendment rights.”

I met Green, a strapping cop in wrap-around sunglasses, as he talked amiably with civil rights attorney Carol Sobel, who was sporting a florescent green “National Lawyers Guild” cap. Sobel, who represents many of those who allege their rights were violated by the cops a year ago, was singing the praises of Green and Deputy Chief Michael Hillman, telling me she just wanted to “take their DNA and plant it in the rest of the department – these guys have got it right” about how to do crowd control.

I ran into Hillman an hour later. Like the chief, he was also beaming, a bullhorn, attached to his tactical belt, slapping at his side as he joined the procession. “Looking good,” he said.

Hillman - with about four decades of cop-work under his belt - is the guy who got the job of making sure the 2007 May Day mess was not repeated.

Hillman's fix meant flooding the area with senior LAPD leadership; this time around, decisions were not going to made by anyone who didn’t have a lot of brass on their shirt collars.

Coordination and communication were also at a premium. In the MacArthur leg of the march, the lead organizer had a captain assigned to him. Whenever organizer Victor Narro, of the UCLA Downtown Labor Center, slowed down, talked to anyone, “his” minder,
Capt. Rigoberto Romero, was at his side. Like a shadow. Nothing left to chance.

There were also a few new gadgets. Last year, the LAPD’s efforts to tell the protestors to disperse were, at best, garbled….and when people did not obey, the cops on the line used too much muscle to make it happen. This year, the cops had a handful of golf-carts-on-steroids, equipped with loudspeakers and “phrase-o-laters.” These communication systems were programmed with dozens of crowd-control commands, in four languages. Punch up a phrase in Spanish, and the automated system could bark out a very audible set of directions for the crowd to follow. No more guesswork.

By early evening, the march had petered out - only the stragglers, the kids who didn't want to go home. It looked like the LAPD and the city had good reason to be very satisfied.

So, eat another corn beef sandwich, chief. It's on us.