George Pelecanos - Hard Revolution

Imploding glass sounded as the display windows of many stores around 14th and U were shattered. The London Custom Shop was looted, as were the surrounding shops. North of U, people began spilling out of tenement-style apartments, some in curiosity, some in anger, some with the purposeless mentality of a mob, and began to damage and rob stores.

An informal command post was set up at the Thirteenth Precinct station near 16th and V. There, Mayor Walter Washington, Police Chief John B. Layton, and Patrick Murphy developed a rough consensual plan. The Special Operations Division (SOD) of the Civil Disturbance Unit (CDU), which had extensive training in counterriot activity, was called to duty. In addition, the four-to-midnight shift of active Thirteenth Precinct street officers was ordered to perform a double and work the midnight-to-eight a.m. as well. All available units were to report to the disturbance area of Shaw.

Officer Lydell Blue of the Thirteenth was among many to arrive in this wave.

Officers from other precincts who were not otherwise engaged were encouraged to join the Thirteenth’s effort in quelling the riot.

At the Sixth Precinct station house, Officer Strange, along with Officer Morris and two other uniformed cops, volunteered for duty. They got into a squad car and headed south.

Detective Frank Vaughn drove to the house of Vernon Wilson and told his mother that her son’s murderers had been found, and that those who were not killed in the attempted robbery would spend the rest of their lives in prison. He then went to the Villa Rosa, in downtown Silver Spring, and had a couple of drinks.

STRANGE AND THE others, grouped down near U, got their orders from a sergeant out of the Thirteenth.

“Maintain order through intimidation and threat. Use your nightsticks and tear gas only if you have to. Do not draw your guns.”

“Gas?” said one of the young police officers. “We don’t even have masks.”

“We’re short on masks,” said the sergeant.

“So we can’t draw our weapons,” said the young policeman, looking around at his fellow officers for support. “They’re lootin’ this whole block. We supposed to, what, stand back and let ’em?”

“Orders from above,” said the sergeant, repeating the command. “Intimidation and threat.”

Strange looked to the south. CDU officers wearing white riot helmets, gas masks, long white billy clubs on their belts, and armed with tear gas canisters, were not far behind them. They had formed at 14th and Swann and were marching north in a streetwide wedge, using their clubs to move looters toward MPD officers accompanying them in squad cars and paddy wagons. As they marched, they passed Nick’s Grill, owned by Nick Stefanos. As of yet, its plate-glass window and the window in its door had not been touched.

Strange started up the hill on foot with two other police. He passed a used-car lot at Belmont Street, where a Chevy had been set on fire. Orange light colored his uniform and danced at his feet.

The drizzle had turned to hard rain. Strange adjusted his hat, pulling it down tightly on his forehead so that its bill would deflect the water away from his face. He could see other police on side streets, inside and outside their cars, talking nervously among themselves, trying to light damp cigarettes. He walked on.

At the top of the hill at Clifton, youths hurled rocks and bottles at buses and the last of the cars that were still using 14th. A bottle went through the window of a squad car parked sideways in the street. Strange chased one rock thrower down but lost him as he cut into an alley. The boy looked to be in his early teens. A young woman cursed at Strange from an open apartment window as he walked back to 14th. He didn’t even turn his head.

Strange walked north. He saw some police regrouping at Fairmont Street. He saw the broad back of an officer who was gesturing with his hands as he spoke to the others. He knew from the broad gestures and the way the man stood that it was Lydell Blue. Strange came upon the group and shook hands with his friend. He and Blue stepped back from the others.

“What’s goin’ on with you, brother?” said Blue. “Heard from my man Morris up in the Sixth that you thwarted a robbery today.”

“I didn’t thwart shit,” said Strange. “My partner got shot while I was duckin’ behind a car.”

“I expect it took the juice out you, man.”

“I’m good.”

“You’re on your second shift, right? You all right to be here?”

“I got to be here, Lydell.”

Their attention went north as the voices of the crowd there neared a frenzied pitch. Between the next street, Girard, and beyond to Park Road, hundreds of young people began smashing the windows of clothing, liquor, and hardware stores, and looting their contents. Uniformed police waded into the crowd, waving their clubs.

“We better get to it,” said Strange, pulling his nightstick as other officers gathered around them. Blue pulled his nightstick, too.

The officers went into the crowd with their sticks high. They apprehended some looters and chased others into alleys. These same people, mostly youths and young men, emerged from the alleys minutes later and resumed their looting. Strange took a rock to his back, felt the sting, and turned and saw the man who’d thrown it, who was smiling at him from the crowd. He chased the man with an explosion of energy fueled by adrenaline, and as he reached him swung his nightstick, clipping him on the shoulder. The man, who was Strange’s age, tripped and went down. Strange held him there until a paddy wagon, slowly collecting looters, arrived.

“Tom-ass nigger,” said the man.

Strange led him without comment to the paddy wagon and pushed him roughly into the back.

Strange’s next capture was a running boy who had bumped into him, looking over his shoulder as he tried to carry a stereo system down the street. The boy dropped the stereo to the asphalt as Strange got him in a hug. He looked into the boy’s eyes, saw himself at twelve, and let him go.

About five hundred MPD officers and CDU police had now arrived on the 14th Street corridor due to the call-ups and overlapping shifts. Fire trucks had arrived as well. Still, the police and firemen were badly outnumbered by rioters, unprepared for the frenzy that had ensued, and rendered impotent by the restraint orders they had been given.

At half past midnight, fires were set at the Central Market and the Pleasant Hill Market on opposite corners of the intersection at 14th and Fairmont. The Pleasant Hill fire spread to Steelman’s liquor store beside it and to the apartments above. Firemen tried to extinguish the blaze as they were surrounded by taunting crowds and pelted by rocks and bottles from the street and from the rooftops of the adjacent buildings. Police threw tear gas canisters into the crowd. They tossed them from on foot and out the windows of roving squad cars and paddy wagons. CDU officers used grenade launchers to shoot tear gas onto the roofs from which offenders were attacking them with projectiles.

The rain had stopped. Burglar alarms rang steadily in the night. Smoke drifted in the street through the light strobing off the cherry tops of the squad car roofs.

Strange sat on the running board of a fire truck, a wet rag in his burning, tearing eyes, his throat raw, his breathing short. A fireman had handed him the rag. The tear gas had driven back the crowd, but it had also incapacitated many of the uniformed officers, who had no masks. Strange watched two women coming down the street, laughing and holding up dresses against one another to check their fit, tears running down their faces. They were of his generation. They were his color.

He looked around the street and saw no police he knew. He could not see Lydell.