Rally on Highway

After the parking lot was emptied, about 2000 demonstrators rallied on a six-lane highway below. After 20 minutes had passed, hundreds of policemen arrived to clear the highway. Motorcycles lined up in the center and drove at angles to the curbs, pushing demonstrators against the concrete, driving them backwards.

Most of the highway had been cleared when three boys and one girl darted out of the crowd and sat down in the middle with their legs crossed. The crowd cheered. Then eight policemen descended on the group, swinging their clubs with hatched strokes. In a few seconds they straightened up and walked away. The four figures lay unconscious, crumpled, with blood streaming from their heads and bodies.

One man approached a policeman and said, "There's a little boy who looks hurt pretty bad lying back there. Can you come back and take a look?" The officer replied, "That's not my responsibility. I have to stay right here." "But aren't you supposed to protect people as well as beat them up?" the man shouted. The policeman replied calmly, "Look, buddy, I am protecting people; now get out of here."

Embankment Traps Demonstrators

After the police had cleared the highway, they pushed the crowd up the 35-foot embankment bordered it. The protestors climbed frantically, but many women could not make it on their own and had to be helped up. When somebody slipped, he ran into the club of a policeman.

Los Angeles Police Chief Thomas Reddin, who had left the President's dinner to watch the operation, shout- ed encouragement to his men from a loudspeaker in the middle of the street. "That's it, officers, you're doing a fine job."

One high police official said police began their sweep because of intelligence information that the crowd was about to storm the hotel. This "information" was obtained by two private investigators who had been hired by the Century City Corporation to infiltrate PAC (Peace Action Council), the group which organized the march.

The chief "paid informant" was a pretty, vavacious, 28-year-old girl who approached an executive of PAC two weeks before the march. "She told me her brother was killed in Vietnam, that her parents were dead, and that she didn't know what she'd do if her second brother were forced to go there also. She said she would do anything for the movement," the PAC official said.

The informant befriended several other members of the executive council and, as a result, was exposed to the detailed plans of the march. On the basis of the informant's greatly embellished version of PAC's plans, the Century Corporation's lawyers were able to obtain a ten-point injunction from a municipal judge on the morning of 23 June, which ordered the marchers to "restrain" from doing the ten things listed on the injunction. The injunction order was handed to Irving Sarnoff, PAC chairman, at the rally before the march began.

"We never had any plans to do any of the things on the injunction order, except for using a sound truck in the parade, which we did not do after we received the injunction," Sarnoff said.

The second point on the injunction order prohibited "Intentionally stopping the course of any parade within limits of Century City." A PAC official explained that although nobody wanted to stop the parade in front of the hotel, it did stop, and the police could not know for sure whether it had been intentional or not. This may have led police to believe their intelligence information was being proved correct and lent credibility to the informant's statement that the marchers planned to storm the hotel.

This coincidence, according to the PAC official, was the proposed justification for the brutal sweep of the police. "Her entire statement is half truths and lies," said the PAC executive.

Forty-seven of the 51 persons arrested were released on bail, which PAC raised the night of the march. Bail money totalled $25,850.

The Los Angeles City Council voted June 29 to give a "vote of confidence" to the police department. By a vote of 10-5, the Council endorsed the law officers' actions at the Friday demonstration