It was an awful situation

I got to City Hall around ten minutes before 10:00 AM, which was when the public hearing on the public housing demolition projects at City Council was scheduled to begin. I walked around the corner and saw a large group of public housing activists standing around a locked gate. Bill Quigley was locked out too. Maybe there were 100 people total, though it seemed to grow to 200 people or more before too long. People were pretty upset.

I was ticked too. I rearranged my whole schedule to have the day off so that I could make sure I was down at City Hall. People were saying all around me that HUD, HANO, and Council had stacked the room with all of their staff and employees and stuff to block spaces that would have gone to public housing residents and activists. Apparently, those people started filing in at 8:30 or 9:00 AM before anyone else even had a chance.

I kept asking around for an estimate of how many public housing people actually made it inside. Some people said in the twenties, some people said in the fifties, I can't really be sure.

It seemed Council had decided to exercise the fire code to prevent more people from entering the hearing beyond the 27o-something that could be seated in chairs. I heard Mr. Quigley saying how unusual it was for council to do so much to restrict access to a public meeting. There were apparently close to 500 people allowed in for a different meeting the week before. It felt like a pretty dirty trick to me. We were all stuck standing in the rain waiting to see if those inside could negotiate to get everyone allowed inside. "Everyone" included media, housing advocates, housing residents, bloggers, and gadflies.

It wasn't going to happen. People were very tense to begin with, being excluded from the Council meeting really made protesters upset. (As if the metaphor of being locked out of the process and locked out of the projects needed to be buoyed by actually being locked out of a public Council meeting) I believe the situation was made many times more volatile both inside and outside of the building because of Council's decision to refuse entry to such a large number of advocates and residents.

The protesters outside received updates from allies on the inside. At around 10:40, it was reported that Arnie Fielkow had begun the meeting and was ejecting all of those making noise or being disruptive.

Within five minutes, I saw a WDSU reporter with a nerdy haircut jumping up and down like an excited little child, I overheard him exclaiming about the fight breaking out inside the building. New Orleans Nation has a sweet post up about the goings on inside City Hall. By 10:55 there were NOPD reinforcements allowed through the gate and a few minutes later there was a stretcher brought in as well. Protesters were talking about the use of tasers on those being ejected from the building and the arrest of rapper Sess-45.

Not long after that, the T-P's Gwen Filosa said it was around 11:15, the protesters outside began becoming increasingly agitated, presumably as word spread about the rough treatment on the inside. Several protesters began violently shaking the gate and it appeared it would soon give way. One man breached the gate and was quickly apprehended. Officers swarmed on the gate area and one got up on the fence to spray mace. Here are three silent videos I have of that incident from my dinky digital camera in chronological succession:





After this first pepper spray incident, people backed off briefly. One man was hit pretty directly in the eyes but recovered in an amazing amount of time and reclaimed his place at the front of the crowd at chained gate.

This original breach of the gate prompted police officers to handcuff the gate together.

Within minutes the crowd was back at the gate, shaking it violently. Those handcuffs proved to be useless and snapped, the gate swinging open toward the crowd. One woman was being crushed by the open gate against the police barricades along the side of the driveway entrance. Activists and witnesses lifted her out of trouble. Concurrently, the police charged again, and attempted to pull the gate shut again. They utilized pepper spray and mace to push back protesters. It all happened very quickly. One woman was hit with both spray and the stun gun and began having what appeared to be a seizure. She hit the ground and started shaking violently. I, along with a group of several carried her out of harms way into the grass where she was helped. I have some video of these events as well that I will post as soon as YouTube begins accepting them. These are shorter and are of poor quality because I started running out of battery and because I dropped my shot to assist the injured. Otherwise, I'm sure there's extended video out there somewhere, maybe even with sound. My mom said she saw me on CNN (she said I looked handsome)

Those affected by the pepper spray were on their own for too long considering the large numbers of emergency personnel on site. There were many pedestrians around with some medical knowledge that took charge. Someone ran and out to buy milk (the best antidote, apparently). Otherwise, the ambulances parked within 50 yards of the incident were empty. I don't know what happened to the girl that had the seizure, I hope she's okay. She was turning blue, it was scary.

After all that, people were extremely upset, but realized I think there was no use in rattling the fence anymore. That pepper spray is powerful stuff. I got a little bit on my right arm from helping to carry that one person and I developed a pretty nasty irritation. I mean, I got it second degree and it still took me 20 minutes of scrubbing when I got home to clean my arm off. So it shouldn't be surprising that the protesters locked out of the meeting were largely incapacitated. They chanted and sung for over an hour after that but it started raining harder and harder. After a senior citizen and public housing resident fell ill and was taken to the hospital, leaders of those protesting outside decided to adjourn the mobilization.

It was really ugly. Very upsetting. The whole event made me sick to my stomach and not because of the pepper spray fumes, though that didn't help matters. It didn't have to happen the way that it did. City Council was extremely arrogant and undemocratic in the way they handled the proceedings today.

There are other tried and true means of diffusing a situation like the one City Council was confronted with this morning. If I were in charge, I would have let all of the advocates and residents come in, I would have let them chant and yell and scream and take turns with the microphone. I'd have allowed them to do that all morning. Then you have HUD and HANO and the developers do their side and then you vote. Given the experience at the demolition hearing last week, there was no real reason to assume things were going to get out of hand. Sure people are going to shout and be rowdy. They're going to boo things they hear and don't like. They're going to stomp their feet and speak out of turn.

Big deal. Let them. At the hearing last week (see the link), public housing advocates were well behaved, they allowed representatives of HANO and HUD and the Developers to prevent their case. Sure people interrupted to boo from time to time but the meeting went forward, the vote went forward. They voted with the developers and against "the mob" but nobody went out burning condominiums, nobody pushed down police officers, nobody was violent against any of the HUD or HANO officials, and representatives of the developers, or any members of the review board. The same thing probably would have happened. Protesters would have filed in, they would have been loud and obnoxious, council would have voted in favor of the developers and protesters would have been loud and obnoxious. Big deal. They would have left in peace. Maybe someone would have broken a window in frustration or something.

People want to feel like they're listened to. They want to yell and scream. They want to be given access to the democratic process. They want to feel like their voice matters. That is why so many people showed up this morning to attend this meeting. They all already knew they had little chance of stopping council from approving the demolitions. Don't we all know that?

But when they were cut off completely from the process, barred from entering a public meeting by their own elected officials, literally locked out..... that's what really pissed people off - in a let's break down this fence and let ourselves in kind of way.

People weren't even chanting "stop the demolitions" at that point, they were chanting "let us in!" Here's a video from NOLA.com of the fence breach. You can see my red shirt in the background at the end of the video, helping to carry away that one woman.




It made me mad too. I thought everyone that wanted to do so should have been allowed to witness that meeting, witness Council's vote and Council's decision. Would that have been so hard on everybody? Really?

Instead, what everyone is witnessing, all around America, all around the world, is another scene of New Orleans being out of control. That's hard on all of us. Really.