by Rosa Brooks
In the next alley, we found a young woman sitting curled on the ground, her head in her hands. At first she was unresponsive, ignoring us completely when we asked if she was all right, but after a while, she looked up. “He cursed at me. I can’t believe it. All I said was that I was getting tired, and then he started yelling at me and—” Her left cheek was swollen.
“Did he hit you?” I asked.
Just then a man appeared. “Come on, baby, I’m fucking sorry, let’s just fucking leave, okay?”
“Hold it, asshole,” Maloney told him. “Come over here. We need to talk to you.”
I crouched down next to the young woman, who now had a frozen expression on her face. “Listen. Did he give you that bruise on your cheek?” I asked quietly.
She blinked and looked away. “No. It’s fine. I just had too much to drink. I walked into a door. I’m fine.”
“Ma’am, if he hit you, it’s not okay. We can help you, get you to a safe place.”
She scrambled up. “I’m fine! It’s fine. Nothing happened. We just argued. I’m just tired. I just want to go home.”
Reluctantly, we let them go off together, the man holding her arm too tightly as they walked away.
“Nothing we can do,” Maloney said. “Can’t force her to tell us what happened. We arrest him, it’ll get thrown out tomorrow if she denies it and won’t testify. She wants to stay with that shithead, there is abso-fucking-lutely nothing we can do.”
American Carnage
On January 20, 2017, the District of Columbia will host the 58th Presidential Inauguration. The designated uniform of the day for the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) for this historic event is as follows:
- Members the rank of Sergeant and below: Class “B” Service Uniform, Eight point hat or “Trooper-Style” winter hat, light blue uniform shirt, tie, uniform slacks and the MPD issued Class “B” Jacket or Leather Jacket.
- Ear Covering/Ear Muffs—Members may wear ear coverings or ear muffs as long as they are black or navy blue in color.
- No Bullet resistant vests shall be worn as an outer garment. Bullet resistant vest shall be worn under the uniform shirt.
- No skull caps, beanies, or knit hats shall be worn by any members on this detail.
—MPD Teletype: “2017 Presidential Inauguration Uniform Requirements”
There was abso-fucking-lutely nothing I could do about quite a lot of things.
On January 20, 2017, I found myself nominally—and temporarily—in charge of forty shivering police officers from Cincinnati. Together with several thousand other officers from around the country, our job was to safeguard the parade route down which the newly inaugurated President Trump and his motorcade would soon drive, followed by dozens of marching bands.
The inaugural festivities had gotten off to an inauspicious start for the DC Metropolitan Police: one of our own reserve corps officers, Mark Kirwan, was run over by Vice President Elect Mike Pence’s motorcade. Officer Kirwan was hospitalized only briefly with minor injuries, but dark rumors immediately started spreading through the force: Pence’s motorcade hadn’t even stopped! The vice president elect had left our officer lying prostrate in the street! He might have been dead, for all Pence knew!
Whether this account of the accident was true, I don’t know, but it was all anyone could talk about. “That car was driven by anyone else, we’d charge ’em with hit-and-run and arrest their asses,” one of my colleagues said grimly.
Most of the time, policing in the nation’s capital is probably no different than in any other American city, but at moments like this, everything changed. I had never seen anything like the controlled chaos of the inauguration planning process. Imagine the most complicated event you ever organized—your wedding, maybe, or a major conference. Think of all the complexities of the planning process: Who will be invited? Where will guests park? Will there be a vegetarian option for lunch? How many microphones should you set up? What if it rains? What time will the dancing begin? Multiply those complexities by about a million, then throw in mass protests and potential terrorist threats. That will give you some idea of what goes into preparing for a presidential inauguration.
Washington’s small size often surprises out-of-town visitors, who expect something on the scale of New York, Hong Kong, or London. But at under seven hundred thousand, the population of the nation’s capital is smaller than that of Jacksonville, Florida; El Paso, Texas; Indianapolis; Columbus, Ohio; or Memphis, Tennessee. No one knew how many people would flow into the city to attend President Trump’s inauguration, but an estimated 1.8 million spectators showed up for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration, and city planners had to assume the numbers could be similar for Trump.
The expected crowds would place enormous strain on everything from the Metro system to the police department. The parade route had to be cordoned off, with streets closed off for dozens of square blocks to ensure a safe buffer zone around the presidential route. Hundreds of tour buses needed places to park, and hundreds of thousands of people would need hotel rooms, food, and toilets. Some would need directions; others would need medical assistance; some would pick up souvenir T-shirts; others would have their pockets picked by enterprising local criminals. And some people would come to DC not to admire the Washington Monument or cheer on the new president, but to join protest rallies and marches. Most of those would be peaceful, but some would not. Antifa activists were assumed to be planning violent disruption, and militant pro-Trump groups would likely square off against them. The day after the inauguration, the planned Women’s March was expected to pull in hundreds of thousands more protesters and counterprotesters.
To cope with the anticipated extra demand, the inauguration planning team—a sprawling interagency group made up of officials from MPD and the city government plus the Secret Service, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the military, the intelligence community, the Transportation Security Administration, and dozens of other agencies—put out a call to police departments around the country, asking them to contribute officers to help out during inauguration. Under a complex cost-sharing agreement, outside agencies providing inauguration personnel would be reimbursed by the federal government. Dozens of departments from all over the United States responded, and it was MPD’s job to manage the thousands of extra law enforcement personnel.
Within MPD, the reserve corps was tasked with serving as the liaison for all these visiting police officers. This in itself involved substantial logistical challenges. The extra officers—and their weapons—needed to get to the DC area a few days early for briefings, tourism, and beer drinking. They needed hotel rooms and local transportation, so reserve corps officers were assigned to pick them up at area airports in MPD vans and buses hired for the occasion, bring them to their hotels, get them all checked in, show them around, and generally make sure they got to the right places at the right time with the right equipment, and not too much of a hangover.
The day before inauguration, we shepherded our armed, uniformed charges into the DC Armory. Built during World War II for the DC National Guard, it was one of the only structures large enough to contain the thousands of visiting law enforcement officers. Bleachers and folding chairs had been set up in the vast, echoing building, and each agency occupied several rows. There were Tennessee Highway Patrol officers in green and tan; sheriff’s deputies from Brazos County, Texas, in black and tan; and police officers from dozens of cities—Miami, Baltimore, New York, Phoenix, Minneapolis, Seattle, Los Angeles—in a hundred different shades of blue. There were national guard troops too, assigned to help with crowd control. A series of officials thanked the uniformed crowd on behalf of MPD, the Mayor, the FBI, Homeland Security, and the Secret Service, then all the out-of-town officers were sworn in en masse as deputy US Marshals, with limited, temporary jurisdiction to provide security. In the sea of uniforms, you couldn’t easily distinguish the c
ops from the soldiers. Everyone was armed and cheering, eager to leave the Armory and get in a few hours of tourism or drinking before the next day’s long tour of duty.
It was quiet and cold on Pennsylvania Avenue the next morning. By the time the sun rose over the dome of the Capitol, painting it pink in the slanting morning light, I had already been standing in front of the FBI building for several hours. At 11:47 a.m., nine blocks from where I stood, John Roberts, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, was scheduled to swear in Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States.
The temperature was mild for mid-January, but already most of my Cincinnati officers were hopping up and down to keep their toes from going numb. As a liaison officer I was free to roam around, but they were stuck at static posts, staring at nothing, trying to stay upright and awake. No one had slept more than a few hours before heading out to our posts in the small hours of the morning, and it was going to be a long, cold day.
I walked up and down the line, offering hand warmers and granola bars. “Welcome to Washington, DC, guys. A grateful nation thanks you. You need to pee, break room’s two blocks north. Having fun yet?”
It was strange to see such a familiar place, utterly transformed. No morning commuters, no tourists or hot dog stands or bicyclists weaving in and out of traffic. Everyone in sight wore a uniform of some kind. Soldiers and sailors were lined up facing the road, while my Cincinnati charges were positioned facing the opposite direction, toward the crowds of spectators we expected would soon appear.
I walked out into the middle of the empty street, just to see how it felt. No one stopped me; my uniform, badge, and temporary Secret Service credentials allowed me to be anywhere on the route. I could have done cartwheels down the center of Pennsylvania Avenue, or taken a nap on the yellow center line. I imagined how the street would look a few hours later, with spectators and protesters pressing in on both sides.
Our role was to make sure no one unauthorized entered the parade route—no overenthusiastic Trump voters hoping for autographs, no protesters eager to throw eggs at the new president, no terrorists or armed assassins. According to the detailed inauguration procedure handbook distributed by MPD, “Members assigned to [the] fixed cordon posts shall be responsible for the area ten feet to the left and ten feet to the right.” If a spectator or protester attempted to cross the fence line onto the parade route, we were directed to “take the necessary action to prevent a breach of the cordon.”
For a moment, I wondered what I would do if an assassin popped up in my small section of Pennsylvania Avenue. Was I really prepared to use lethal force, or risk my own life, to protect Donald Trump? It was a question my mother and several of my friends had posed to me. I concluded that I would have no choice—I had sworn an oath, and my colleagues were depending on me. But I didn’t feel very enthusiastic about it.
In the end, we stood there on Pennsylvania Avenue for sixteen hours straight, fingers going numb and feet swelling up. Through my radio earpiece, I heard the sounds of chaos and struggle in other parts of the city: Antifa activists were throwing bricks and MPD’s civil defense units were blasting them with tear gas. “Hold the line! Hold—the—line!” a voice shouted in my earpiece.
My brother Ben was out there somewhere, commissioned by a magazine to write a story about the inauguration protests, and every now and then he called me to ask if anything exciting was happening near the parade route. But my patch of Pennsylvania Avenue remained quiet, devoid of Antifa, assassins, and Trump fans alike. At ten-thirty a.m., the streets were almost as deserted as they’d been at sunrise.
Around eleven, a handful of tourists in “Make America Great Again” caps materialized just beyond our cordon, looking as if they thought they might have come to the wrong city by mistake. They kept checking their maps and asking anxiously if this was really the right place for the parade. Down the block, a few hundred anti-Trump protesters appeared, but they were just waving signs and chanting, not throwing bricks or Molotov cocktails.
Finally, around noon, we heard the far-off sounds of a powerful public address system coming to life. Nine blocks away, the ceremony had begun.
One of the Cincinnati cops started live-streaming the speeches on his iPhone, the volume turned up as far as it could go. President Trump’s distant voice floated through the empty streets and echoed through the small iPhone speakers, high and tinny.
“Together, we will determine the course of America . . .”
“What’s he saying?” someone called from farther along the parade route.
“Some kinda crap,” replied one of the cops.
“A small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government. Washington flourished—” Trump’s voice intoned.
He should visit 7D, I thought.
Maybe he was reading my mind.
“But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities . . . and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives. . . . This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
“You hear that, guys?” said one of the Cincinnati sergeants. “It stops right here! Right now. No carnage. At least, not today, not on this block. Got it?”
A light, cold drizzle had begun to fall.
“I think it’s raining on his parade,” observed one of the Cincinnati cops.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer president,” I agreed.
“—America first—winning like never before—”
From the direction of the Capitol, there were scattered cheers.
“—We all bleed the red blood of patriots—”
“Blood? Fuck this shit,” said the Cincinnati officer with the iPhone. “I’m turning this shit off.”
He thumbed the volume button on his phone and Trump’s voice disappeared.
When the parade finally started and the endless speeches were replaced by familiar marching songs, my Cincinnati flock perked up a bit. The sergeant began to whistle, and some of the officers started singing loudly: “Oh be kind to your web-footed friends, for a duck may be some-body’s mo-ther . . .” Everyone was getting a little punchy.
I felt sorry for the high school bands with their scantily clad young baton twirlers, marching through the damp and empty streets. I could see the goose bumps on their bare arms and legs. They had traveled to the nation’s capital from all over the country to be part of a presidential inauguration—part of history—and there was almost no one here to see them. Most of the anti-Trump protesters had drifted off, and the soldiers and sailors lining the route weren’t much of an audience: they were required to stand there at parade rest, hands clasped behind their backs, so they couldn’t even clap. By the time the last half dozen bands marched by, each looking more miserable than the last, only soldiers, cops, and a few Make America Great Again stragglers remained. I cheered for the bands as loudly as I could, trying to make up for the lack of crowds. I didn’t want the visiting high school kids to leave with bad memories of the nation’s capital.
“Aren’t you the little cheerleader,” said the Cincinnati sergeant.
“MPD,” I said, pointing to the slogan on the patrol car parked at the corner. “We are here to help.”
Bad Things Happened
Felony Threats [Domestic Violence]: (Known Suspect) Complainant reports her boyfriend poured gasoline in her front and rear yard. The Suspect then called the Complainant and stated he would return to light the gasoline.
—MPD Joint Strategic and Tactical Analysis Command Center, Daily Report
No question about it, bad things happened in the nation’s capital. Mothers fought with daughters. Men fought with women. Gangs fought with rival gangs. People stole from each other and threatened each other. They punched, stabbed, raped, slapped, and bit one another. They hit each other with shovels and bats and bricks, or, when t
hese were unavailable, with brooms, plates, vases, bottles, shoes, and even the occasional vacuum cleaner or snapping turtle.
Washington is divided into seven police districts, and they might as well be seven different cities. In every district, the majority of calls for police service involve reports of disorderly conduct. This can mean anything: an aggressive panhandler, kids smoking weed in the park, a loud drunk staggering around in the middle of the road, someone peeing in an alley. But after the ubiquitous disorderly calls, the seven police districts diverge. In the wealthy Second District, the most common calls after disorderly conduct complaints involve burglar alarms and business alarms going off, followed by accidental property damage (usually minor fender benders) and traffic complaints. In 7D, after disorderly conduct calls, most calls for service involve “family disturbances,” assaults, and “other,” with burglar alarms coming in fifth. It’s similar in the Sixth District, also east of the Anacostia River, and in parts of the Fifth District, which encompasses some of the poorest, most crime-ridden areas west of the river.
Washington’s tonier districts—1D, 2D, and 3D—get their fair share of “glamorous” crimes, the kind that generate media buzz, conspiracy theories, and daytime TV specials. There was the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in front of the Capital Hilton in 1981; the anthrax attacks in in 2001; the DC sniper attacks in 2002. There was the murder of intern Chandra Levy, whose body was found in Rock Creek Park in 2002 and whose affair with Congressman Gary Condit lent her death a scandalous cast. There were the 2015 mansion murders, in which a wealthy DC family and their housekeeper were tortured, then killed. There was the shooting of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich, whose 2016 murder continues to fuel right-wing conspiracy theories centering around Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in the affair, and the Comet pizzeria gunman, not to mention half a dozen thefts of valuable artifacts from the city’s museums. And, of course, there were the famous political crimes—the Watergate burglary, the Iran-Contra scandal, and the special counsel investigations that have dogged presidents from Bill Clinton to Donald Trump.
