Rise of the Warrior Cop (43 page)

Stamper told the man they’d just have to agree to disagree. But when the tour was over, he says he began to question his own rationale. “I finally turned the corner shortly before a speech to an ACLU gathering at the University of Washington. I told the story about the protests, about the man who had come up to me during my book tour, and I talked about how I had changed my mind. And I said the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was the worst professional mistake I had ever made. I didn’t realize it, but the same guy was in the audience that night. He came up to me afterward in tears.”

The “Battle for Seattle” is commonly considered the start of the modern antiglobalization movement. But it was also a landmark event in the way police and city officials react to protests. In spite of the fact that there were few injuries and no fatalities, the images that emerged from Seattle depicted a city that had lost control. Going forward, “control” would be the prevailing objectives for police handling protests. In the years to come, the Darth Vader look would become the standard police presence at large protests. Cities and police officials would commit mass violations of civil and constitutional rights and deal with the consequences later. There would be violent, preemptive SWAT raids, mass arrests, and sweeping use of police
powers that ensnared violent protesters, peaceful protesters, and people who had nothing to do with the protest at all.

That’s why Stamper calls his decisions in Seattle “the worst mistake” of his career. He’s seen how the police response to protest has changed since 1999. “We gassed fellow Americans engaging in civil disobedience,” Stamper says. “We set a number of precedents, most of them bad. And police departments across the country learned all the wrong lessons from us. That’s disheartening. So disheartening. I mean, you look at what happened to those Occupy protesters at UC Davis, where the cop just pepper sprays them down like he’s watering a bed of flowers, and I think that we played a part in making that sort of thing so common—so easy to do now. It’s beyond cringe-worthy. I wish to hell my career had ended on a happier note.”
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The Numbers

Number of SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1987: 36

Number of SWAT raids conducted by the Minneapolis Police Department in 1996: over 700

Number of raids carried out by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms from 1993 to 1995: 523

Percentage of these ATF raids that used dynamic entry: 49 percent

Percentage of these ATF raids that turned up weapons of any kind: 18 percent

Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in the United States in 1980: 3,000

Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in 1995: 30,000

Approximate number of paramilitary police raids in 2001: 45,000

Number of SWAT deployments in Orange County, Florida, from 1993 to 1997: 619

Percentage of those SWAT deployments undertaken to serve drug warrants: 94 percent

Number of police officers in the tactical operations branch of the Portland, Oregon, Police Department in 1989: 2

Number of Portland police officers in the tactical operations branch in 1994: 56