Click through to view the set at Flickr, with captions. Also see these photos by Jake Cunningham, some of which more closely show demonstrators being pushed into the police car by police.

The sun is hitting DC hard this morning. It’s going to be another hot one.

Another day of protests against the World Bank and IMF is planned. I hear that last night some activists took to the streets of Georgetown in the wee hours of the morning.

I’ve got a lot of questions about the choices made by some to use certain tactics and the posturing of some of these activists — but analysis and judgement of that seems irrelevant to what I witnessed Saturday morning. I went out as an independent photographer, a role I have played for years here in DC.

I saw it get ugly in Foggy Bottom.

Whatever relevance you thought the demonstrations had to the issues they were ostensibly protesting, I don’t think it was their fault that it got ugly.

Captain Herold, of the DC MPD, who appeared to be the officer in command, and who is known to activists as being in charge of the political unit — police intelligence on activists — is attributed in the Washington Post for most of their description of what took place. Herold says “the police were put in danger when they were surrounded as the crowd turned” — this is not true. If the police were put in danger or were surrounded, it is only after they surged into the crowd after an awkward and sudden attempt to stop a crowd that was, in fact, mostly surrounded by police.

If it wasn’t for a key moment where one officer came to the fore, the morning easily could have been forgettable.

I know a PNC bank branch had its windows smashed-out earlier — but that was a different time, a different neighborhood, possibly by entirely different people. I saw no behavior of that sort down around the bank.

The street protests against the Washington Consensus have died down in DC over the years and the tactics haven’t changed much. When something dramatic happens on the part of some activists, it usually is clearly an edge case.

When some of these anti-capitalists took to the streets Saturday morning, it was a toss-up as to whether it’d be worth seeing. But there’s something to be said for documenting, for posterity, that yes, there are some out there in the streets representing the rejection of top-down undemocratic global economic policy. Still, the demos seemed like the same-ol’-same ol’.

It was tedious chasing the roving factions about town. We observers checked their Twitter posts and dashed about, following the sirens to the next intersection that was allegedly locked down, only to find it had been cleared and that the cops were playing catch and release with the black clad rebels.

Seemed kind of, dare I say it: Stupid. On all sides.

But some were having fun and were even approachable — perhaps they were getting across to the few pedestrians they encountered on the nearly empty streets. Some shunned the black-clad uniform and put on their sweats. They stretched and flexed and rocked out to some cheesy music and overtly declared they intended to cooperate with the cops. Their biggest crime? Running a couple red lights on streets already blockaded by cops seemingly parking police cars perpendicular to traffic while in donut comas.

The different factions eventually gravitated towards each other and merged into a “superbloc” and paced about Foggy Bottom some more. The police that had been chasing them turned into a de facto escort. There seemed to be a rapport between the two sides.

Things were pretty mellow, even if you didn’t “get it” or think it was worth it.

But then there was this moment, and from the point of view of this writer, it was when an order was acted out or maybe a cop got impatient, but somewhere in the chain of command a fuse blew and the ugly State these kids keep talking about crept out from beneath the bed and showed itself in broad daylight.

The march had been parading about the neighborhood, and while maybe it looked ugly and nonsensical to Ma and Pa from Minnesota, things were pretty chill. It was coming down Pennsylvania Avenue, heading Southeast on the diagonal street towards the bank when, at 20th Street and Penn NW, it decided to turn — and to turn again — with several feet, tens of feet even, between it and the barricades. Not a threat and it was ultimately heading back the way it came — and away from the Bank.

A couple of police vehicles where behind the march and so now they were in front of it — and they were spread out, and given how the march had navigated the sparse traffic of the neighborhood earlier in the morning, one would think they’d walk right through.

This would be a mildly positive development from the cops point of view, one might think. I thought so.

But this one MPD officer on a bike seemed to think enough was enough. Maybe he wanted to get home and watch the NFL draft. Maybe he had someone talking in his ear — a superior officer or God, who knows.

This officer dismounted his bike and tried to use it as a blockade. He yelled something that I heard as “Let’s go! Right here. Let’s bottle this up!” and a few more euphemisms for stopping the march – but it was just him and this was a sudden move and the crowd had momentum, so they kept going, they could go around him after all; the march had flowed through narrower spaces with implicit police support previously that morning. It was an odd-looking effort on the part of the officer, considering the police had a perimeter of sorts established on 2 or three sides of the space the demonstrators occupied and the march were moving away from what they were protecting.

But then a few more officers moved in and grabbed hold of the anarchist bamboo-framed banners that were the physical vanguard of the march. Now the head of the march is pinned against the adjacent police car. People told me they felt trapped from pressure from those coming up behind them. At the same time, as I’ve moved to photograph this police movement, I hear from behind me some officers saying “pull back!”, “back off!”, “form a line!” But this first wave of cops was not immediately responsive to these calls.

Now more police move in, the press are dispersed for a bit, there’s some more confusion. At this point, with people being pushed back but having no physical space to move to, physically they’re pushing back whether they intend to or not: this is physics. And people are angry and defensive: this is human nature. Whatever happened at this point, it is the genie let out of the bottle by the previous actions of the police. No doubt it was ugly. By this point was moving out of the way and didn’t see much directly for a couple of minutes.

Maybe at this point a police line was formed, maybe at this point some of what Captain Herold alleges happened. But this is all after the apparent provocation of a peaceful march.

I do know pepper spray was used — I tasted it, my eyes burned a bit. I was coughing and so were cops, other press, and bystanders around me.

When the melee subsided, some people were down on the ground. Personal effects were strewn about. I saw a girl on her side on the sidewalk near the intersection where the action happened. She couldn’t move without help. I later saw a young man with a leg splint put together by the activist medics. He was later hauled away by an ambulance and city paramedics. Others were scraped and bruised. Some tried to wash the pepper spray out of their eyes in the dingy pool of the fountain the park. Many seemed angry — personally angry. Threats were shouted at the police. (Before the only real threats I heard that morning were from police, with one in particular throwing jingoistic taunts at demonstrators on I Street a couple hours before.)

No one was blocked off at this point, the marchers in the park could have dissipated at any time and I think they eventually did without further incident — but I left before then, at around 10:35. Irritated by both what I saw and the pepper spray, and tired.

I think “citizen journalism” has become a bogus term. (The synonyms that Wikipedia currently suggests are mostly better.)

To me, one can reduce it to either you’re doing journalism or you are not. Journalism does not have to mean professionalized, dispassionate, (allegedly) neutral stuff that one hears about from the lofty offices of the broadcast networks (paid for with what, anything less than socially acceptable hush money from sponsors?). It does have to mean getting your facts straight, it does mean independent thinking, and challenging unsupported assertions before you endorse them as fact. Some of the most revered journalists in American history were often also called activists. They had credibility because they were still independent, and the facts they reported held-up.

Before the term citizen journalist was born, members of the DC Indymedia center (such as it was at the time), were accredited by the Washington Metropolitan Police Department with press credentials. I point this out only as a way to say that I think since then, “citizen journalist” has only served to make it easier for people actively trying to contribute to community media to be marginalized further than they already naturally were (by way of not having thousands or millions of dollars to back them). There is now what is seen as lesser category to cage people in, regardless of their work product, before getting to “real journalist.”

I think the term was coined with positive intent. It is part of the vernacular of an ebullient forward-looking analysis of new media and the power of the Internet to democratize. I get it, but I do think that general usage has possibly confused things for some, diluting a sense of what journalism is and giving an impression of a sort of false dichotomy within journalism (not that there aren’t any others).

This is a roundabout reaction to the news that my friend, Brian Conley, founder of Alive in Baghdad, and a ‘”citizen journalist”‘ says the press release, is being held in a Chinese jail. I wonder if this citizen journalist component will be played-up somehow (by all sides?), and I fear this could cloud fundamental issues of human rights. Extra labels do not always help. I hope for the best, we were to collaborate soon in another effort.

He appears to have coordinated with some Tibet activists to document some of their protest. Just because NBC news (to pick one) probably wouldn’t do this (they’re busy giving us objective analysis of the Olympics with their China-hired Kissinger associate) and because he chose to show an interest in the Tibet cause does not make this not journalism.

In fact, with the associations being no secret (as opposed to the false projection of untouchable so-called objectivity) and his work as verifiable as anyone else’s, it makes it even more real journalism.

The New York Times quotes a Chinese Olympic official, Qu Yingpu, in response to the protests of the Olympic torch tour as saying “This is not the right time, the right platform, for any people to voice their political views.”

His own apparent belief that he can say that with any authority is politics.

Never mind the inherent nationalism that is always present at the Olympics.

What is poorly articulated in the most well-intentioned statements of this sort is a widely shared desire for the Olympics to be a unifying experience, despite the nationalistic undertones, and generally not a polarizing sort of experience.

That’s great, but there is no getting rid of the politics.

I get the feeling that not all the statements are well-intentioned, and I don’t just mean the ones from Chinese officials this year. I think the Olympics are something of a business, and business is always political too.

That aside, it seems futile to to me to achieve an ideal by proclamation, attempting to exclude voices of the real controversies and atrocities of the world—particularly those in which the hosts, and implicitly more powerful than most other participants in the given year’s games, have a role.