Police Clash with Cincinatti TABD Protestors

By Darlene D'Agostino, CityBeat (Cincinnati). Posted November 28, 2000.

For complete coverage of the TABD protests, see the Cincinnati Citybeat's web site, at www.citybeat.com/tabd/index.html.

Four pivotal moments defined N16, the protests in Cincinnati against the Transatlantic Business Dialogue (TABD) Nov. 16-18 -- four confrontations between protesters and Cincinnati Police. Each involved peaceful demonstrators and officers assigned to keep the peace.

From the outset, police set a tone of intimidation that belied Capt. Vince Demasi's promises of a kinder, gentler police division. At a briefing Nov. 15, Demasi said officers would not be in riot gear unless there was a reason.

"At this point in time, we have no plans to put officers in protective gear," he said.

Police expected nothing out of the ordinary, Demasi said -- they would cover the three days of protests just as they would a football game.

"I feel real confident that this is a big to-do about nothing," he said.

But at the beginning of the first rally at noon Nov. 16, officers were on the streets in riot gear -- complete with helmets, gas masks and sponge-bullet rifles. The SWAT team was on hand, and undercover officers were videotaping the rally.

After the rally on Fountain Square, protesters marched to Kroger corporate headquarters, 1014 Vine St. Protesters remained on sidewalks, chanting and picketing, followed by about a dozen officers in riot gear. Groups of mounted officers patrolled the block. Officers in unmarked and marked vans and cars circled the Kroger Building.

The heavy police presence continued throughout the day. While members of the TABD attended a performance of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, about 100 protesters encountered a line of officers in front of Music Hall. Forty officers in riot gear flanked the building, and mounted officers stationed themselves in Washington Park.

Police set the tone, and it was not the happy song Demasi sang. To know what happened during N16, you had to be on West Fourth Street the afternoon of Nov. 17, trapped in a tunnel by police that night, searched the next morning while entering Fountain Square and set upon by a bus full of cops the afternoon of Nov. 18 on East Eighth Street.

Direct Action Gets Satisfaction

A peaceful march set out the morning of Nov. 17 from Sawyer Point to Fountain Square. A helicopter followed the march. Officers in riot gear lined streets. Mounted officers patrolled, and the SWAT team was ready.

At about 2 p.m. Nov. 17 the black-bloc began a direct action -- a tactic by demonstrators wearing all black, bandanas masking their faces. The black bloc acted in response to the massive police presence, according to Salim McCarron, of San Francisco, a videographer for the Independent Media Center.

"Police determine the tone for any protest," McCarron said. "They set a tone from the beginning that was intimidating. They didn't need to be monitoring people at the rally (the day before) or pulling out gas masks when people are just doing a picket. Bringing out the cavalry, so to speak, at such an early stage in the game sets a tone. When you set that tone, people are going to be responding to what the police are doing."

Police had approximately 200 protesters surrounded at the intersection of Fifth and Vine streets. What happened next was a "hit and run," McCarron said -- a tactic used to lure police to one location as the crowd suddenly moves to another. This causes the police to have to reconstruct their lines.

Unified by chants of "Whose streets? Our streets!" the group headed to Fourth Street from Fountain Square in search of the TABD home base -- the Omni Netherland Plaza Hotel. For the next 40 minutes, members of the black bloc knocked over police roadblocks. That was the most "violent" the protesters got. After traveling two blocks west on Fourth Street, the march ended as police surrounded them at Elm Street.

People tried to disperse, but couldn't. Arrests were made. McCarron was pushed by an officer as he filmed two arrests. His tape shows an officer hitting a protester with a billy club after the protestor was on the ground being restrained by another officer.

A second protester lay on the ground, with two officers on top of him; he was screaming that the officers were hurting him.

On orders from Demasi, officers detained the crowd. Most protesters wanted to disperse.

"You've got a bunch of people standing on the sidewalk trying to disperse, because if they didn't want to disperse, they would follow the march," said one protester. "The cops have surrounded the sidewalk and forced people against the buildings, but they're saying, 'We're trying to make people disperse.' How the hell do you make people disperse when you're surrounding them? You got cops on this side saying, 'If you want to disperse, go that way.' You got cops over there saying, 'If you want to disperse, go that way.'

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