Meet the Anarchists

"I think it's very clear that there's nothing in the housing ordinances that allows police to enter without a warrant and do the type of things they did," says Matt LeMieux, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Eastern Missouri. "There is some language in the housing ordinance that would allow the police to enter solely for the purposes of removing individuals who refuse to leave a condemned property, but I don't think there's anything in the ordinance that allows them to go and conduct a full search and seize property, which is exactly what happened at the Bolozone.

"I think the chief just made a mistake here," LeMieux goes on. "And I think he probably had other options that for whatever reason he didn't choose. I think even if you take the police at their word -- which is that they feared violent elements infiltrating the protests -- that could have been handled by reaching out to the peaceful protestors and working with them to make sure that their protests weren't infiltrated by violent elements."

Housing inspector John MacEnulty declines to comment about alleged misconduct by police, but he contends that the raids and searches were justified. Police, MacEnulty argues, have a duty to search condemned properties before they board them up, to ensure that no one is hiding inside. Bolozone and CAMP, he says, were cases in which "some people were occupying a condemned building, running at least one, probably two businesses out of it -- it was grossly overcrowded in any case. They're trying to spin this to make it look like they weren't doing anything wrong and they're being persecuted, when in fact they were wrong every step of the way."

Green scoffs at MacEnulty's logic and cites occupancy and construction permits issued between 2000 and 2002. How could the building have been condemned all that time, he asks, when the building division itself issued an occupancy permit?

On June 13 attorney Rory Ellinger filed a court petition demanding the return of property seized during the raids. Although some of the goods were released after the raids, among the many items yet to be restored to their rightful owners according to the document are a 100-gigabyte computer hard drive, clown makeup, a "headset with attached kazoo," climbing gear, books and DVDs.

As word of the raids spread, Chief Mokwa addressed the charges of police misconduct by calling in the police department's internal affairs division to investigate. That report was due June 20, according to Mokwa, but as of press time it had yet to be filed. Once it does get issued, Mokwa is not certain that it will be made public. "Probably not," the chief says. "It depends on what's reasonable as far as Sunshine [law] and things like that."

Mokwa says that if individual officers are found to have destroyed property, they'll be disciplined. "I think most of the activities that the officers engaged in were appropriate," the chief says, though he concedes that some officers may have been overly enthusiastic, which "may have made them more stringent than they needed to be."

Mayor Francis Slay issued only one statement the weekend of the protests and did not return several phone calls requesting comment for this story. "The vast majority of people who came to St. Louis to protest are peaceful and well-intentioned," Slay said back in May. "But there is no doubt that there is a small cadre within the group that came to St. Louis with the intention of disrupting lives and damaging property."

---

If indeed there was "no doubt" in Mayor Slay's mind about the presence of a violent faction bent on disrupting the WAF, the proof has been as elusive as Iraq's infamous weapons of mass destruction. More tellingly, the activists say, city officials were ill-informed of protesters' aims at the very least, if not openly hostile to their right to speak their minds.

"They brought people in from Seattle to tell them about these people that were living in Fox Park and Gravois Park," says CAMP resident Tom Hallaran. "There was no attempt at all to understand what these community projects were about. There was no direct engagement at all. No one ever talked to anyone who was organizing."