To abuse a cliche: After I got a full night’s sleep, it seemed like a bad dream. But another YouTube clip gone up overnight from my friend and past collaborator Robin Bell corroborates the reality of it all.

Yesterday DC was hit with a snowstorm that we’re now told ranks higher than anything in 70 years, and which brought the most snowfall in December in the city ever. Grocery stores were emptied, places shut down, people were forced to stay home or into the streets (so few sidewalks were even given one attempt at being shoveled), bars were packed with snowbound locals. It had the air of a “snow day,” an extra day off because of the weather, even though it was a Saturday. The city went a little nuts.

But apparently no-one could out-do a certain Detective Baylor of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Now I don’t know all of the details, I never actually saw an announcement first-hand, but I hear that some of the same folks who’ve organized some past public group activities in good fun — a public pillow fight, the “Tweed Ride” perhaps — were also involved in organizing a snowball fight at 14th and U Streets yesterday. (Update: The Washington Post appears to have found the original organizer. Where the Post story differs significantly, I hold to what I saw or didn’t see.)

I had prepared to haul a large tripod down into Rock Creek Park and to the National Mall; my own sort of expedition, with a friend playing chauffeur and photographer’s assistant, to capture the blizzard conditions. We invited a third videographer friend along who told us of the snowball fight. After reassessing the roads and finally realizing the little 2-wheel-drive hatchback we had might not really make it out of the park, we went to see the snowball fight instead.

When we got there it was well under way. Two factions like opposing 19th Century armies were lined-up along 14th Street just north of the intersection with U. From what I could see, when the rare vehicle made it through the intersection, snowball fire died down or it was purposefully arced up over the cars and thrust to the other side of the street.

Most battle techniques seemed to involve small vanguards surging forth from one side or the other and attacking at closer range — something not palatable with the threat of a car bearing down on you.

It looked like a mess, it looked like fun, it looked like a small faction of anarchist anti-war protesters had joined-in and tried to make a point with their banner “no war but snowball war.” At one point some of the participants stopped to help a police car trying to make a u-turn.

Now with every event, there are some tone-deaf participants and maybe the people who inadvertently helped change the course of the afternoon were such: At some point a small group of people, mostly on the east side of the street, mostly on the south end of that stretch of people, decided to throw a few snowballs at a maroon Hummer stopped at the intersection.

Snarky? Yes. Constructive? Not if you’re looking for a dialogue between the driver and the crowd that would result in world peace and less carbon emissions. Stupid? It’s harder and harder for me to say it wasn’t, but I’ll stick with maybe. Dangerous? Well, in hindsight… but no. There’s no way the Hummer was being hurt by snowballs. I think whatever groupthink was behind this forked-off action also expected the driver to leave, pissed-off, and they’d have their laugh.

But that’s not what happened. The driver got out yelling, gesticulating wildly, waving a walky-talky and you had to wonder, who was he? He didn’t say. He pointed into the crowd, which shouting and laughing back at him, a couple more snowballs might’ve taken flight in his direction. He gets hit. Suddenly, he’s waving a gun. Still no one knows who he is.

What I overheard from a cop later is that someone called 911 about a man with a gun at this point, and this is why more police soon arrived. Video I’ve seen and reporting by Jason Cherkis at the Washington City Paper seems to corroborate what I’ve overheard.

At this point the mood has changed. Everyone knows there is a man with a gun and the snowball fight is now an asymmetric battle of sorts: The man with the gun weilds deadly power and the crowd knows that, whatever and whoever started the confrontation, this is wrong and they maintain resistance. They won’t be cowed.

By the time more police arrive, the gun as been reholstered, and an officer — who responded with his own gun drawn (given the context, that made a little more sense) — is directed to the big man in the big coat with a gun on his belt, it is revealed that he is Detective Baylor. The officer seemed confused and defensive, in an obligatory sort of way but tries to de-escalate things. He’s more civil and more even-toned, if a little clueless about what just happened.

But Detective Baylor isn’t satisfied, and doesn’t see cause of the indignance on the side of the snowball fight participants — even if some of them started it. He keeps yelling, he gets up in peoples faces, and he lunges into the crowd — going in many feet, through many ranks of people — to yank out someone he thinks threw a snowball at him. The man is dragged out to the hummer and people shout “he didn’t do it!” The crowd rallies and the chants become political. Somehow DC Mayor Adrian Fenty gets pegged for all of this, “Fenty killed Christmas!” shout some in unison.

It’s fuzzy what happened next, but I don’t think anyone got arrested, just detained briefly. The detective drives off to shouts of good riddance and victorious chants by some of the snowball fight participants — but the event is over, the crowd has lightened some. The word goes out that there was another snowball fight in Dupont Circle, which seems like a better venue anyway, but few seemed to go. (Eventually my fellow photographers and I headed over there to find it had died-down by that point.)

As I wandered around, trying to get my bearings on what, if anything, was still happening, I heard one uniformed officer say that whoever threw snowballs at the Hummer was stupid, but the detective was too. “He sounds like an ass,” he said.

On a radio on a uniform’s belt I heard Detective Baylor’s name, and someone say “they hit his car with snowballs and now they’re trying to blackmail him,” presumably a reference to those who angrily declared they wanted to see Baylor fired.

I’m not sure how everything ended — as of this writing, I’m not sure it really has yet.

A sort of FAQ about what I observed

These are brief responses to rhetorical questions I’m setting-up for myself based on what I’ve actually been asked and see in comments through the media that have reported this.

Were you a participant in the snowball fight?

No. I went to observe it, photograph it, on my way to other activities.

Were the participants “kids?”

Maybe some, if you mean people under twenty-one or under eighteen. But it looked like a twenty-something crowd and some people could easily have been bracketing thirty years old. These were mostly adults.

It was a bunch of white people, wasn’t it?

No, the crowd was not that homogenous. I don’t think it is as simple a black vs. white. But I do see how the general nature of this event and the relationship between most of its participants, the rest of the neighborhood, and the police is a dynamic of gentrification and all of the issues tied into that — among such issues, I’m sure, are some identity politics.

Were they throwing snowballs at random cars?

Not as far as I could tell. I did not see the beginning of the snowball fight, but from what I saw the crowd over all was pretty civil, while engaging in the fun they publicized well. Only a small group of people chose to target this particular maroon Hummer.

Were they throwing snowballs at random strangers?

Again, not that I saw.

They were having a snowball fight at a busy intersection?

The intersection of 14th and U Streets NW is typically busy and I also wonder about the choice of location. The other, unrelated, snowball fight that was happening in Dupont Circle seemed to be better placed: an accessible and central location with its own space to contain the battle. But the intersection really wasn’t all that busy given the weather conditions. It seemed its busiest after police vehicles arrived, responding to a call about a “man with a gun” (the unidentified detective).

Update: I corrected this post on 21 Dec 2009 to reflect that the source of the snowballs aimed at the Hummer came from the east, not the west, side of the street.

“The residents in the District have a right to know exactly who is operating on their streets, under what authority, and who is authorized to use force,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, a co-founder of the group.

Verheyden-Hilliard and the Partnership gave myself and a colleague at the time some initial consultations when we were considering pursuing legal action against the city (we ended-up working with ACLU-affiliated representation). The Partnership for Civil Justice seems to have fought a long-standing and principled battle for civil liberties in the District of Columbia, where Federal powers seems to trump local power, and local power seems to think it is bigger than it is — with the a frequent effect of constricting movement and speech of civilians. She, as it seems everyone at the Partnership is, is also involved in the activist group ANSWER, whose tactics and tone I’ve found myself disagreeing with (while sharing many overlapping issues of concern).

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.