Law enforcement is using more aggressive crowd-dispersal tactics, protesters and their advocates said after the arrests of demonstrators in Des Moines on Monday night.
Several demonstrators told the Register that Des Moines police officers and Iowa State Patrol troopers pepper-sprayed or pushed peaceful protesters and used kettling — a controversial tactic where dozens of officers surround demonstrators to corral them before rushing in to make arrests.
"There was no violence from the protesters. The violence was from police only," said Sally Frank of the National Lawyers Guild, a human rights defense group. "Certainly, the first or second dispersal warning was muffled, but everyone got out of the street. By the time the dispersal order was audible, everyone was on the sidewalk, but police moved in.
"Some people were dispersing and were chased, and other people weren't given the opportunity and were grabbed within seconds," she said.
A professor of law at Drake University, Frank said a legal observer with the guild was among those arrested. Legal observers are not affiliated with protest groups and are there to see whether people's First Amendment rights are being violated.
Sgt. Paul Parizek, spokesman for Des Moines police, did not directly respond to questions about police tactics.
"Our position has been clear from the beginning," Parizek said. "Peaceful protest is welcome and supported but disorderly conduct, disruption of peaceful neighborhoods, and destruction of property has an expiration date. It won’t be allowed to continue."
Officials with the American Civil Liberties Union of Iowa said many concerns have been raised about how law enforcement handled Monday's demonstrations, which ended with about 20 arrests by Des Moines and West Des Moines police and the Iowa State Patrol.
"We are in communication with eyewitnesses to the police actions last night," ACLU of Iowa Legal Director Rita Bettis Austen said in a statement. "There are credible accounts of police action in violation of the constitutional guarantee of free speech, including 'kettling' and the use of excessive force on nonviolent protesters including a child, media and a legal observer."
Kettling has been reported in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities dealing with protests and riots following the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, a Black man, while he was being detained by a white police officer in Minneapolis. A class-action lawsuit filed in St. Louis last fall alleged St. Louis police kettled more than 100 protesters in 2017.
What happened Monday
Matthew Bruce, a leader of Black Lives Matter Des Moines, led a group of 150 people on a march from East High School to the Iowa Capitol. Law enforcement officials kettled them around 11 p.m. and then chased them as they tried to disperse, Bruce and several others said.
Video uploaded to Instagram and Facebook appears to show either Des Moines police or state troopers bracketing groups of people in the shadow of the Capitol. A Register reporter covering Monday night's demonstrations reported seeing officers on both sides of a group of peaceful organizers near downtown Des Moines.
"They were literally like, 'Y'all got to get out of the street' and we said, 'Where are we supposed to go? We're surrounded.' The answer was pretty much to jail," Bruce said.
Parizek did not mention kettling specifically when told about the accusation from protesters, but said there was "always an avenue" for demonstrators to leave and avoid arrest. The Iowa State Patrol and West Des Moines police did not immediately return calls seeking comment.
"There were multiple dispersal orders given, appropriately spaced in time, to allow those who chose to comply the opportunity to do so," Parizek said. "Based on the social media videos circulating, it appears that confrontation with the police was the desired outcome for many."
Some protesters said they felt they did not have enough time, or space, to properly disperse.
Berina Smajlovic, 30, who was in Bruce's group, said members were marching peacefully when they saw "cops on all directions, blocking every intersection" as they walked near the Capitol.
"They demanded that we disperse," Smajlovic said. "We had nowhere to disperse to, because we were trapped in. It wasn’t even a full minute before they started approaching us."
She said she saw people pushed, beaten and arrested as they tried to comply with police orders.
Even though he wasn't among those detained, Bruce still spent four hours at the Polk County Jail. He said leaders with BLM Des Moines and the Des Moines Mutual Aid Bail Fund worked from 3 a.m. to about 7:30 a.m. to get bail for protesters in police custody.
On Tuesday, Bruce lamented media reports that said demonstrators "clashed" with police.
"Yesterday, (police) definitely were coming for a fight. They literally told us 'We're beyond talking.' ... They're completely trying to take control of the movement and not let people speak and act freely," Bruce said.
Questions about police tactics persist
Advocates, attorneys and protesters have been critical of how Des Moines police have dispersed crowds of unarmed protesters since demonstrations began nearly a month ago.
A Des Moines woman is suing police because she said she was pepper-sprayed although she was not being violent and no curfew was implemented that night.
Smajlovic said officers insulted protesters Monday and hit them with riot shields, batons and their hands. Parizek said he could not speak to what was said by officers and did not immediately respond to a follow-up email.
Monday night was problematic, Frank said, but her group has long been watching how protesters in Des Moines are treated.
"They’re using chemical weapons that are banned in warfare against peaceful protesters,” she said of police. “Several people in the early nights were arrested blocks away from where dispersal orders were given.
"If you give an order to disperse and then they’re blocks away, it sounds like they dispersed.”
Des Moines police have used tear gas and pepper spray on multiple occasions during the near-nightly protests. They said they have used crowd-dispersal tactics when protesters are damaging property, harming officers or have gathered unlawfully after a curfew.
However, one man who spoke with the Register last week said he was charged while walking into his home. Police said the group he was a part of was seen causing a disturbance shortly before they went inside an apartment building. Another group of seemingly peaceful people was arrested outside the Blazing Saddle bar.
Many protesters Monday night said no one in their group had hurt officers or broken anything. Any neighborhood disturbances came after police followed protesters to their cars, which were parked at East High School, Smajlovic said.
Once people had cleared the street and started to walk away from downtown, officers followed and told them that as long as they were in a large gathering, they were subject to arrest, Smajlovic said.
"Protesters responded, 'We are dispersing. We’re just trying to get to our cars. Our cars are in the same location. This is why we’re walking there together in the same direction,'" she said. "And police just kept following us and pushing people and grabbing anybody that was slowing down or injured."
Frank said that many cities around the U.S. have had to settle lawsuits over arresting people without giving them an exit.
She cited a 2016 settlement stemming from a 2002 mass arrest by the Washington, D.C., Park Police that ordered them not to use chemical weapons to disperse crowds. She said they had violated that order on June 1, and that the ACLU has since filed a lawsuit on behalf of BLM DC.
Monday's events involved the first known instance of kettling during the Des Moines protests, Frank said. Smajlovic said she has been protesting nearly every day of the month, and she has not yet seen police surround demonstrators the way they did Monday.
Law enforcement experts on use of force
Without concerted effort, violence at protests can become self-perpetuating, University of Iowa sociology professor Bodi Vasi said earlier this month. A Register reporter spoke with Vasi after dozens were arrested near the Capitol building in Des Moines.
Vasi studied the role of social media in the Occupy Wall Street movement, specifically. His research in the case found that perceptions of unjustified force used against peaceful protesters would lead to more protests — and with them, more use of force.
"The vast majority of police and protesters have good intentions," Vasi said. "It only takes a small number of people with bad intentions to create instability, which is then amplified when you don't have proper communication channels."
Witnesses and protesters maintain Monday's events were not rowdy until police closed in on protesters.
The Iowa Law Enforcement Academy teaches crowd management to participating agencies, but it has not provided such training since about 2015, Director Judy Bradshaw said earlier this month, and it does not serve the Des Moines police or State Patrol.
Crowds outnumber police, who seek to avoid direct confrontation, instructor Ben Thompson said. Chemical agents should only be used if the crowd becomes violent toward officers, he said, using the example of people throwing bags of urine, Molotov cocktails and rocks, and when dispersal orders are ignored.
"The next way to do this is we need some way to deploy some kind of chemical munition to get these people to disperse without getting into some actual contact or actual physical force," he said.
Bradshaw, who is also the former chief of the Des Moines Police Department, said each demonstration can take on a life of its own.
She called the scale of demonstrations witnessed at the beginning of June unprecedented in Des Moines. She said she wouldn’t second-guess how law enforcement responded and that the public isn't aware of the information police on the ground may have about potential dangers.
“These are unprecedented times here,” she said. “We'll learn from what happened and how should we train differently as a result from this. … The commanders are trying to do the best they can to manage these crowds, and especially the agitators. It's really not the peaceful protesters at all. It's the agitators. How do we manage that? How do we predict them, how do we identify them, how do we respond to them?”
However, those on the street are adamant that the violence is coming toward the people from police, not the other way around.
"There's obviously an intent to do harm. The arrests they made, the kettling, the illegal arrests ... it is obvious they were out to punish us for speaking," Bruce said.
Register staff Maya Miller contributed to this report.
Follow the Register on Facebook and Twitter for more news. Tyler Davis can be contacted at tjdavis@dmreg.com or on Twitter @TDavisDMR.
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