“Dear PoPville,
I’m writing to clarify the details of a very unsafe situation brought about by the federal governments escalation of force in the district.
On Friday the 29th, Coolidge High school hosted a football game. Almost immediately, an MPD helicopter began to buzz the neighborhood at low altitude. Multiple neighbors than began to investigate what was happening when agents from FBI, HSI, ATF, US Secret Service (as well as MPD) began to swarm the school. I would estimate there were about 50 to 60 of them. Rumors began to swirl that this was an immigration raid (with a large crowd now largely confined to a closed field). In reality, high school kids had begun fighting, leading to the rest of the game being cancelled.
While the Feds were there, and as misinformation was spreading, no less than 3 small stampedes occurred (about 30 – 40 kids at any given time). Additionally,
Federal agents were not forthcoming with any information about why they were there and were seen on multiple occasions yelling at teachers and threatening to arrest them (for trespassing, which they weren’t). Most clearly had no idea what they were doing there and their presence, shouting, threatening and generally not taking any lead in the situation could have unnecessarily led to real physical harm. They were not doing crowd control (as they likely have no experience in this), but were actually the agents of chaos themselves.
When most kids had left, the Feds left. However, multiple children continued to be harassed by officers to leave. What they failed to realize was that the kids were waiting for buses – buses that weren’t coming because they had blocked streets for half a mile in all directions. Rather than allowing the traffic through so people could leave, they instead turned up all sirens to max levels in order to hurt the eardrums of anyone they had then trapped.
This is exactly the situation community members have feared could quickly grow out of hand. The feds have no experience with crowd control or neighborhood policing, create unsafe environments when called in by MPD, and MPD tries to match the bravado of ICE agents by acting like crass bullies.
This was a highschool football fight – something I think local police have been dealing with in every town since the history of highschool football rivalries. Why the ATF needed to get involved while armed to the teeth and wearing tacticool plate carriers is beyond comprehension. MPD should have handled the situation alone, dispersed the game and got on with their night – not call in their friends in the Fed to create a multi hour, near riot in the neighborhood.
I hope Mayor Bowser will take some time to reflect on why ATF and HSI aren’t used to police student football games and how close we were to this being a disaster in the city.”