MOVIE-MAKING ON THE MEAN STREETS; ANGER AND PANIC AT THE RNC
My partners and I are shooting a documentary about the 2004 Summer of Love in NYC, and the Republican National Convention was the heartbeat of the whole story. We worked six straight days during the RNC, shooting everything that moved starting on Friday Aug. 27 when we went to the Critical Mass bike ride. That night started out at Union Square with 5,000 bikers sharing one collective grin and ended up at 2nd Ave. and 9th St. with around 2,000 bikes and not a smile in sight.
The ride wound its way down Broadway from Union Square and then headed back up to the Garden. My team and I worked our way down to St. Mark's Church where the ride was scheduled to end and waited. We were getting radio updates from some of the folks at the church, and we could tell the riders were catching flak all along the route. They'd been split up and diverted and were being arrested in small numbers. The main body of the ride managed to stay together and came en masse to St. Mark's.
When they arrived, they filled three full blocks. The energy was positive -- they felt like they'd gotten one over on the fuzz and they were stoked. They stood in the street, blocking the shit out of traffic and raised their bikes in the air in triumph. The cops were there in a flash, winding their way through the crowd on those ridiculous-ass scooters and it looked the party was coming to an end.
We stood in the street waiting for the inevitable order to disperse. An order which never came. I was in the in the north crosswalk when a scuffle broke out in front of me. One of the scooters had parked on some kid's foot and he couldn't move when they told him to. They grabbed him, he protested, and the next thing you know, a couple of giant cops sat on his head while another put his cuffs on so tight, you could hear him wailing as they dragged him off. The crowd was getting pissed at this point and random plastic bottles sailed toward the main body of cops in the middle of the intersection. It was time to call in back-up. They arrived in force (they'd only been a few blocks away but traffic had kept them out of the area for the first few minutes), and it was all over at that point. They cleared those streets with military precision in a matter of minutes and brought in the paddy wagons.
The cops grabbed about 200 or so people and the same amount of bicycles over the course of the night. Most of those arrested went down easy, but the crowd definitely made themselves felt, especially at first before the Main Cop had a chance to clear the streets. That was when it was the best -- when I could get right up on the action, brush up hard against the energy of an angry mob surrounding a temporarily overwhelmed police force, trying to keep it steady in the riot-helmeted face of painful arrest.
It was my first experience shooting something like that -- the screams of a pulsing crowd "LET THEM GO! LET THEM GO!"; red-faced, angry cops throwing people to the ground right in front of me; the potential for serious violence hanging heavy in the air. It was heady stuff and I fought my way to the middle of it, trying to catch every arrest I could on camera. The cops weren't fucking around but I managed to get a somewhat shaky bluff in and stay on the streets for a long time. Eventually, everybody ended up on the sidewalk, but it was good stuff for awhile.
That first night, NYPD showed a few of the tactics they would refine over the next few days -- uniformed and undercover Scooter Squadrons swooping in like Hell's Angels on Hondas every time the shit even looked like it would hit the fan; the mass arrest mania as if attrition would somehow slow the tide of anger; the "show no mercy" school of cuff and stuff in the hopes that if the kids got a good look at what was waiting for them when the cuffs went on, they'd lose heart and go home. Truth is, even though Friday was only a taste of what was to come, it was the only night save for Tuesday in the whole godforsaken week those kids even stood half a chance. If there'd been a dozen even remotely dedicated anarchists in the whole lot of them on Friday, that street would've run with blood, but it was like we knew all along -- the kids are just hippies at heart, no matter what the Post tells you.
After Friday's melee, the rest of that first weekend passed without much incident for my team. Saturday was dead and Sunday was good only because I got to watch that fucking giant green dragon burn to the ground in front of me. I was right on the corner when it went up but as luck would have it, my back was turned when the sonofabitch first caught. I managed to get around pretty quick on it once I heard the action and ended up with decent footage. The whole giant parade itself was a sight to behold, but there was very little bang-bang. There was some shit later that day in Times Square but we were too late and out of position to get anything out of it. We ended the day at Central Park with our main subject, a girl we were following throughout the week, and she was laying low for the most part. I think we were all subconsciously conserving energy, waiting for the undercard to be over and the Main Event to begin on Monday.
Monday was busy. That was the day we marched twice, the first time from Union Square to the Garden and the second time from the UN to the Garden. The first march went off pretty smoothly. Lots of yelling and chanting but nobody did shit and there was even a live band at the end of the thing. It was sanctioned by the city and it was in the middle of the day, so it wasn't very rowdy. The second one, however, was later and it wasn't sanctioned and there was no live band at the end of it. It was an altogether different experience.
It started out at the UN with fiery speeches -- many, many, many fiery speeches -- and by the time it actually got moving, the skys were gray and going to black. The cops didn't hassle anyone at first and even provided an escort down 2nd Ave., right past the tunnel to 23rd St. where the whole parade began moving west to 7th Ave. The cops are some sneaky motherfuckers and they let the march spread itself thin along 23rd St. before they began picking people off.
It started with a random arrest -- the cops decided to grab somebody, everybody around the arrestee started screaming to let them go, more cops showed up to chase people back, and then it was over. Then there was another arrest. And another. By the time we reached 5th Ave., the cops were picking somebody up at every intersection. The crowd was getting more spread out and more agitated with the whole situation every time it happened. The cops have a nose for this shit and it didn't take long before they brought out the World's Biggest Cop -- the one we reverentially referred to as Hellboy. He was gigantic and black as pitch and had a voice like deep, rolling thunder. He'd yell, "GET BACK!" and swing his club and you'd should've seen those skinny-ass college kids falling all over themselves to get the fuck out of his way. He was like a secret weapon -- the NFL defensive end they keep on ice until they need to seriously restore order. Once we got a look at Hellboy, we knew the day was fucked but what could we do? We were there to document, so document we did.
The march ended at the corner of 31st and 7th Ave. We were back a couple of blocks at 29th when the cops decided to split the march in two and "open traffic." Their reasoning was murky at best, since the only cars on any of the crosstown streets had flashing red and blue lights. The kids knew what was happening, could sense the heat wanted to pen everybody off separately and they were having none of it. They started screaming and yelling when the cops brought out the barricades. The cops stood around debating, waiting for a White Shirt to show up and tell them what to do. After a huddle, they relented and opened up the barricades, allowing a couple of hundred people to flow north. There was nowhere to go since the cops had every exit blocked from 31st back and it didn't take long for the crowd to stop moving. It was at this point that some crazy asshole on a scooter came tearing ass into the crowd. He knocked the shit out of some lady without so much as "Hello," and laid his bike out on the pavement. Nobody knew who the hell he was and a couple of kids jumped on him and started to beat the crap out of him.
Turns out he was undercover, Scooter Squadron police. Dumb asshole didn't bother to identify himself as an officer of the law or beep his little horn before running over people. Just yee-hawed into a crowd that had nowhere to go. What did he expect those kids to do? Just guess he was a fucking cop and levitate their asses out of there? It was dark, nighttime, nobody could see shit and all of a sudden there's women being hit with what appear to be delivery vehicles. Of course, he got stomped. The cop media would have you believe that Det. Dumbshit was out fighting for truth and justice when a gang of vicious hoodlums attacked him, but anybody that was there knows that's bullshit. Hell, watch the news footage from that night. Even the uniforms didn't know he was a cop. They pulled the kid that was doing the stomping off their brother officer and sent him back into the crowd. It was all right there on the news, but the cops spun it the way they wanted you to hear it and chances are you believed what they told you.
At this stage of the game, all bets were off. One of their own was lying in a pool of his own blood and the cops were seriously pissed. They picked up those fucking barricades and started pushing, despite the fact nobody had anywhere to go. We were falling all over ourselves trying to get the fuck out of their way but they'd blocked off all the exits. They were pushing and pushing and yelling "GET BACK!" and soon it was like a little independent media sandwich on our side of the street. Everybody with a camera where we were had somehow ended up on the northeast corner penned in between cops on the sidewalk and cops on the street. It looked like we were done for. Visions of flex-cuffs and rude downtown behavior flashed before my eyes.
I was pissed. I started screaming, "FUCKING ASSHOLE! FUCKING ASSHOLE!" at the cop directly in front of me, the same cop whose breath I could smell every time he hit me in the chest with that fucking metal barricade. Finally, just when it looked like the cops in front of us and the cops behind us might actually be able to touch hands, a White Shirt appeared out of nowhere and told everybody to cool it. He opened up an escape route and let us go. I got one last shot of the cop I'd been screaming at and it was like looking at a mannequin -- he was over the whole scene. I didn't bother to wait for an apology and booked ass with my team.
Later on that night, we met up with our girl and her boyfriend and caught up on their side of the action. They'd been held in the middle of the street for another hour or so and then the cops let everyone go. We called it a night at that point. My team and I went to tell beers and drink stories, and get ready for Tuesday. It was going to be a big day and we wanted to be straight for it. We were too tired to do much damage and headed home to rest up.
