The People's Police

by Norman Spinrad

  Luke had never seen anything like it before in the flesh, though who hadn’t on television, but the long cloud of dust, the tang of ozone, the gas and diesel fumes, the deafening growl and grumble and buzz of all those engines, the smell and gut-rumbling vibration of the real deal, were surprisingly overwhelming.

  And as the parade drew closer, he saw that these were indeed army troops in combat gear, not civilian police puffed up on steroids, or at least that’s what these despised peckerwood weekend warriors looked like, wearing camo fatigues, body armor, and helmets, carrying assault rifles, Plexiglas shields and taser-billies, and what were maybe even machine guns.

  Hathaway led his troops right past Luke, and around the full oval of the racetrack, which seemed like an outrageous deliberate insult that set Luke’s blood to boiling, until he came full circle round, and Luke realized that what the colonel was doing was using the racetrack as a convenience to deploy his full force behind him before calling for a halt when his vehicle had come around again to where where Luke was standing.

  Hundreds of military vehicles came to a halt behind him, their engines rumbling and growling in neutral like so many threatening lions.

  Colonel Hathaway descended, marched up to Luke, and stopped, looking as if he couldn’t decide whether to salute him or not. So Luke saluted him with a sarcastic click of his heels.

  Hathaway was not amused.

  “This is not an invading army, son, despite current appearances,” Hathaway told him frostily. “I am martialing my men in good order at our base camp. When on off-duty shifts, my men will return to bivouacs here.”

  Hathaway then surprised Luke by offering his hand and seeming to take his bullshit official position quite seriously. “I’m Colonel Terrence Hathaway, United States Army Retired, with a long career experience commanding Army Military Police, so it’s not as if I’m entirely new to carrying out policing orders.”

  And then he shrugged. “But I must freely admit that I have no experience quelling urban riots and restoring order in an American city, nor ever thought I would have to. So I intend to obey the governor’s rules of engagement to the letter. Which are that you will not directly command any National Guard unit or choose what unit to deploy where. But you may request deployments from me and suggest what I do with them. And frankly, given my lack of tactical experience in these matters, I will regard those requests and suggestions as orders unless I believe they are crazy.”

  Luke didn’t know whether to be flattered or appalled, not knowing jack shit about this sort of thing either. But he did have his own orders, to ride Hathaway around the city, stick to him, and somehow use this show to calm the waters he had turned into a class-five human hurricane when Baron Samedi had been riding him.

  “Well, Captain Martin?” Colonel Hathaway demanded.

  Well …

  Well, what?

  Well, about the only experience he had ever had corralling and more or less taming Swamp Alligator gangbangers was as the unofficial honcho of a little squad of cops that came to be known as the Alligator Swamp Police, so it seemed like he should think gang logic as he had back in the day. If for no other reason than he didn’t have another idea in his head, and no one, not even this army colonel seemed to have anything else to offer.

  “Well, I guess we have to start by showing the colors, Colonel.”

  “Showing the colors, Captain Martin?”

  “Gangbanger for what you’d probably call showing the flag,” Luke told him. “It’s been my experience as a police officer, Colonel Hathaway, that the first thing you’ve gotta do when dealing with gangs is show them who rules, that you got the power, and if they give you any shit, you will use it.”

  “A show of superior force…?”

  “Never had to do it with full-scale riots before,” Luke said. He nodded toward the thousands of troops neatly lined up and effectively at his command, if Hathaway really was taking him seriously. “But then again, never had this much force to show.”

  26

  Is this kid some kind of military genius in the raw? Colonel Hathaway found himself wondering. They certainly didn’t teach these tactics at West Point.

  The first thing Captain Martin ordered up was a formation of a thousand infantry in trucks and APCs, and in combat gear, not riot gear; body armor, assault rifles, no shields, no taser-billies. He and Martin led this force down Esplanade Avenue, a broad residential boulevard, from the back of an open Hummer, which would have seemed excessively dangerous in Hathaway’s opinion were it not flanked front, rear, and both sides by People’s Police squad cars, sirens blaring, as if it were the president’s armored limousine.

  Down Esplanade, which seemed untouched by the riots, right on Decatur, which ran past the French Market to the eastern end of Jackson Square, and was an unholy mess. The French Market was a long linear outdoor mall purveying produce, restaurant food, tourist gewgaws, and the like, and though it looked quite thoroughly sacked and trashed, there were still looters rummaging through the remains for what might be left.

  The sights and sounds of a thousand motorized infantry in full combat gear sent them fleeing in every direction like cockroaches in a dark kitchen when the light is turned on. Hathaway would have ordered a few squads to give chase and take prisoners but Martin said no.

  “The idea is to make no arrests at all if possible.”

  Hathaway would have detached a few squads to guard the French Market, but Martin again vetoed the deployment. “What’s the point in guarding someplace where there’s nothing left to steal?”

  Jackson Square and the streets surrounding it, on the other hand, though also thoroughly trashed and looted, were quite deserted except for St. Louis Cathedral facing the main entrance gates to the park, where a small and pacific-looking crowd was gathered on the steps. Store windows fronting on the pedestrian streets had all been smashed and the stores emptied of their fancy goods. Temporary stands, kiosks, bars, and the like lay overturned and in ruins. The park itself was a junk heap of more of the same, plus bandstands, tents, and garbage, and the whole area stank of spilled beer, piss, and stale marijuana smoke.

  “Looks like the morning after one hell of a party,” Hathaway observed.

  “Because that’s what it is,” Captain Martin told him. “So let’s get it started again.”

  Here, Martin had him dismount two hundred soldiers and deploy them surrounding the fenced park and the street entrances to the Square, assault rifles at the ready, and pointedly pointed outward.

  “I don’t get it, Captain, there’s no one and nothing left here. What are we supposed to be guarding?”

  “Folks who just wanna have fun,” Martin told him, grabbing a bullhorn and climbing up a ladder to the high bandstand in the center of the park thrown up over the statue of Andrew Jackson now hidden under garishly patriotic bunting.

  “I’m Captain Luke Martin of your People’s Police, I’m in command here, and the good old boys with the rifles are friends of ours here to help your People’s Police make goddamn sure that no sons of bitches spoil the party again! Looters will be shot! Muggers will have their skulls cracked! Anyone who don’t know how to behave at a Big Easy party will not be allowed in! So come out, come out, wherever you are! Clean up the mess so’s you can make a bigger an’ better one! Bring back the booze and the beer and the doobies! Start the music! Let the good times roll again! That is an order from the People’s Police!”

  And to Terrence Hathaway’s astonishment, it was obeyed.

  Slowly, tentatively, people descended from the Cathedral steps, past the soldiers, and into the park guarded on their behalf. The Cathedral doors opened and more people emerged and passed through the gates and into the park. Some of them carried instruments and began to play “When the Saints Go Marching In.” People started singing it. Hathaway almost found himself singing it himself. People crept tentatively down the side streets and into the Square. More bands began to play. Other songs. Raps. Gospel. A few people began to dance.
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br />   Colonel Terrence Hathaway found tears welling up in his eyes. And though he could not quite understand why, he knew that they were good Christian tears. Jesus would have wept such blessed tears Himself.

  * * *

  So far, so good, but restarting an interrupted mini Mardi Gras bash in New Orleans was not exactly military rocket science, or, as Luke had once heard a fellow officer joke in the Blue Meanie after one too many or maybe just enough, the police are not here to break up the wild party, the police are here to preserve the wild party!

  However, pacifying the French Quarter couldn’t be quite such a cakewalk. All the streets of the grid were too narrow and too thoroughly clogged with drunks thoroughly plastered on the bottomless glasses of freebies commandeered from the saloons and the even lower life preying on them for the same tactic to even be tried, let alone work.

  On the orders of Mayor Bradford transmitted through Superintendent Mulligan, the New Orleans police, heavily outnumbered citywide by rioters, had been broken up into disconnected squads that were spread out thin guarding so-called high-value targets—major hotels, car dealerships, major appliance and electronics stores, department stores, museums, jewelry stores, the dwellings of the rich and well-connected, police stations, firehouses, and of course City Hall itself.

  In the Quarter, where only a hundred or so cops had been deployed, they were so heavily outnumbered by the hordes of drunks and stoners, all too many of them of the belligerent variety cruising for a bruising, that they would have just made themselves targets if they made any futile attempts at controlling the chaos.

  So they had withdrawn from most of the area, and Bourbon Street in particular, primarily for their own safety, and in favor of guarding the high-end art galleries, antique stores, and boutiques of Royal Street against the forays of professional burglars and looters.

  Even the eight hundred or so combat-ready troops that Luke had remaining at his disposal would have not been able to clear the streets without firing blanks into the air at the very least, and if they did, they’d probably end up having to defend themselves with live ammunition. And even if that succeeded without the kind of bloodbath that could turn drunken rioting into enraged insurrection, there simply wouldn’t be enough troops to protect the hundreds if not thousands of bars, strip joints, music halls, restaurants, and porn emporiums afterward.

  But between Esplanade Avenue and Canal Street and between Rampart and the Mississippi levee, there were less than two dozen street exits from the French Quarter.

  “So, if we can’t chase them all out and defend the Quarter afterward,” Luke told Hathaway, “we make them afraid we won’t let them out, and when we finally do, the exits we guard get turned into gateways we control like the entrances to a theme park or a football stadium.”

  “Empty out some of the vehicles except for the drivers and three or four riflemen as guards and use them as mobile barricades…”

  “You got it, Colonel.…”

  “Send in infantry from four sides before we do, and just parade them in force inward toward the center…”

  “Then turn them around, menace the rioters with their weapons and drive them toward the exiting streets…”

  “Which by then have been been barricaded…”

  “Leaving them feeling trapped like cattle in a slaughterhouse corral…”

  “And so relieved when we show mercy and release them!”

  “Brilliant, Captain, absolutely brilliant,” Colonel Hathaway told Luke, and he actually saluted.

  * * *

  Colonel Hathaway had understood the theoretical brilliance of the tactic readily enough, but it seemed like a miracle when they actually pulled it off without a single military or civilian casualty.

  After dispatching the Humvees to guard the exits, he divided most of the remaining troops into four columns of a hundred and twenty soldiers each, four ranks wide and thirty ranks deep, each led by a sergeant with orders to keep them marching in good parade ground order, with their weapons shouldered, but raised in the air every hundred steps at a forty-five-degree angle. A quarter of the rifles were loaded with blanks, which were to be fired in the air every other time they were so brandished.

  The tactical rules of engagement were not to respond to verbal taunts, not attempt to clear drinking establishments, not make arrests, not attempt to clear the gutters unless the parades were impeded.

  Live ammunition was to be used strictly in self-defense.

  It was never needed.

  The jam-packed mobs of drunken and stoned-out rioters hastily evacuated the gutters at the sounds of marching boots and the sight of troops in full combat gear approaching them to take control sidewalk to sidewalk.

  Much empty braggadocio and foul language was then rained down on the troops from the angrily overcrowded sidewalks, but no one was drunk enough to try to impede the crisp and orderly march of formations of combat-equipped troops parading down the gutters with their weapons regularly raised in unison, and even that faded away when they started firing blanks salutes as if at a military funeral.

  When the four columns converged at the crossing of Toulouse and Bourbon, were brought to a simultaneous parade rest, and then nicely executed about-faces and reversed direction, few of the drunken hordes were so inebriated as to fail to get the message, and there was general panicked flight in all four directions up the other French Quarter streets away from them.

  When they found all streets out of the Quarter sealed at the periphery by infantrymen atop Humvee vehicles aiming assault rifles squarely at them, panic turned to fear. As the sound of marching feet and fusillades of gunfire approached from the rear, fear turned into outright terror.

  When the engines were started and escape routes were cleared, they fled the French Quarter as fast as their wobbly legs would allow them.

  Rather than a miracle, Colonel Hathaway really knew full well, a new military tactic not presently to be found in any West Point textbook or Military Police manual. Perhaps it should be. Perhaps he should write up a report and submit it to the proper authorities.

  Or perhaps not.

  Upon second thought, Colonel Hathaway realized that perhaps he hadn’t really learned a new military tactic after all. Military personnel had carried it out, and carried it out well, but this had been a police tactic.

  A new police tactic?

  It was not quite Terrence Hathaway’s area of expertise, but he had never heard of anything like it being employed before, and certainly not to such perfect effect. And he was sure that what Captain Martin Luther Martin had done at Jackson Square could never have been done by anyone other than an officer of the New Orleans People’s Police.

  No, neither of these tactics had really worked a miracle and Terrence Hathaway doubted very much that Captain Martin would disagree.

  But was there not something rather Christian about them?

  27

  In a few short hours, the entire French Quarter had been pacified and secured, and by the time of the 5:00 P.M. news, the live coverage of Jackson Square coming alive again and the Quarter cleaning itself up and preparing to open up for business as usual behind National Guard entrance checkpoints was the top local and regional story, and even a national feature.

  Dick Mulligan was all over it like a fly on horseshit, taking full credit for his own brilliance, and Luke Martin would have been sorely pissed off if he had dreams of running for something. But since he didn’t, he really wasn’t, and it seemed a fair enough deal, keeping Mulligan from coming down on him for exceeding his nonexistent authority. And when Mulligan got on the horn to tell him he now really was in charge tactically as long as he went along with the fiction that he was only transmitting the superintendent’s own orders to Hathaway, Luke felt he was getting the better of it.

  But as the convoy emerged from the Quarter onto Canal Street and ventured a few blocks up it, Luke realized that pacifying Canal and the Central Business District was not going to be another parade-ground cakewalk.


  Canal Street ran all the way up from the French Quarter levee of the Mississippi through the width of New Orleans Proper to City Park Avenue. It was wide, it was the city’s main shopping street, high class, skuzzy, and everything in-between for much of its length, meaning overloaded with tourist attractions, hotels, bars, restaurants, department stores, shops, and all sorts of other juicy targets for mobs and looters.

  The overextended New Orleans Police were deployed all along Canal in small isolated units guarding the high-class stuff and of necessity allowing the looters and rioters their fun and games with everything else, and ditto or even more so, in the similar environs of the Central Business District downriver from it.

  And as Luke knew, as any New Orleans cop knew, as any citizen of the city knew, as any Swamp Alligator knew, this was the key to the whole situation. The French Quarter was compact, self-contained, now pacified, and the heart and soul of the tourist industry, without which New Orleans would long since have gone the way of Detroit without the auto factories or Las Vegas without legal gambling. But if the Quarter was the soul of the economy, the Central Business District was the big stomach of the Fat Cats That Be and Canal Street was the gullet that fed it.

  So protecting these business interests, like it or not, had to be the priority even for a force that now called itself the People’s Police. The Central Business District was just what the name said it was, the actual headquarters and the symbol of the Fat Cats that everyone who wasn’t one hated, and Canal Street was lined with stores, shops, and emporiums with their tantalizing show windows smashed open and inviting those formerly on the outside to come on in and help themselves.

  The hell of it, as far as Luke Martin was concerned, was that while his current self-interest and duty as a cop lay on one side of that divide, his old Swamp Alligator’s back brain was insisting that his gut loyalty lay on the other.

  “Over to you, Colonel Hathaway,” he said unhappily. “Stop the looting on Canal and clear the Central Business District and the rioting will fade away, but I’ve got no bright ideas of how to do it.…”