Here are two different stories about Madison's Halloween celebrations (no, I wasn't there):
This one's from Madison's Wisconsin State Journal - and this one's from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (in both cases, the online editions).
It's rather astonishing how different the two reports are, in both tone and content. Reading the Wisconsin State Journal, you'd get the impression that police were forced to resort to pepper spray only after a few diehard partiers refused to leave the scene - whereas the Journal Sentinel report paints the cops as pre-emptive warriors, pepper-spraying the crowds and locking them in the bars before they even had a chance to disperse.
I've linked to copies of the articles...because it would surprise me not at all if one or both of them is extensively rewritten before too long.
5 comments:
My favorite paragraph from the Journal article
"The cops pushed the door shut," said Freed, who was among the onlookers who questioned the lawfulness of the police action. "I've never seen anything like this...This isn't Marshall Law."
Marshall Law? Do these papers have editors?
Oh, sorry - I forgot to mention that Marshall Law is a popular, locally-produced TV show presenting a comic take on a third-world dictatorship. The dictator's name is (yep) Marshall Law.
Okay, I'm kidding: the paper's copyeditors clearly had attended the revelry and were working hungover.
Great analysis. I thought the strange disparity in coverage was interesting as well. In one, the revelers are victims, in the other, it's the cops.
In my opinion, the cops did almost exactly what they should have. Yes, they were overeager, but I'm fairly certain the crowd would've degenerated into a mob quickly had they not been. It was looking like it had just before windows started to be broken the last few years...chanting, taunting, stuff being thrown, cops being harassed.
I don't blame them for jumping the gun. The reason it got so out of hand in previous years, from my observations, is that they waited too long to step in. If there's been a fire on the street for 15 minutes already before you step in, you've waited too long... People had at least a half hour's warning to clear off the street before the riot gear even appeared, much less before they started moving in.
There was some uneccessary roughness, but again, I don't blame them. Horses were being punched and cops were getting tennis balls thrown at them, not to mention the injured officers from previous years looming in their minds.
Anon.: My point is, it's unclear from the two stories what actually did happen. It's not clear whether the cops did gas the crowd before giving it a chance to disperse. But assuming the cops did do so: I suggest you place yourself, as an innocent bystander, in the midst of this crowd, and then imagine yourself being gassed, pushed, shoved into a crowd in a doorway, and trampled. Then think again whether you "don't blame them" for acting less like preservers of public order and more like instigators of public unrest.
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