Mayday! Mayday!

I've been out of town and therefore not under the direct influence of media barrages regarding the clash between protesters and police in McArthur Park on May first. But I did hear the first interview with Larry Mantle and Mayor Villaraigosa on Airtalk the other day.

The mayor cut short a trip to get back to LA and he has expressed complete confidence in Bratton. Of course there's a lot of bloviation going on but the general consensus seems to circle around the following factoids.

• 17 injuries. 10 civilians. 7 cops. Originally misreported in the LAT, and naturally caught by Patterico.
• Supervisors probably not on scene, and a rather obvious set of tactical errors made by officers.
• A female news reporter shoved.
• A small family shoved around while trying to retrieve picnic items.
• First such incident in 30 years of dealing with this particular event.

That's about all I know about the facts, and about all I have attempted to discover.

What I know is that a great deal of smoke is going to blow around this controversy and dead bodies and conspiracy theories will be exhumed for the benefit of the Coalition of the Damned and whatever coalitions coalesce around them this time around. Patterico also singled out John Mack for criticism for not attending a commemoration of officers who were to be commended in an unrelated event, but will be loud on matters of police failures here.

Since I'm not a cop, I have the liberty of pointing out the irony of celebrating May Day and complaining about police misconduct. There were no greater police states in the history of mankind than those that made May Day into national celebrations. It's one of those amazing blind spots  - you know, like the celebration of Mayan heritage in Mexican culture when we know that they practiced ritual sacrifice.

All that is to get to the political point of agitating on May Day and the resonance the intent of those agitations will carry in those who are interested more in the symbolism of LAPD screwups than the actual performance of the organization. It gets right back to what we were talking about last week with regard to institutional reform and the fire and brimstone politics that distort the actual process of reform.

So all I'll say is this. All the exclamation points coming out of official mouths points to the fact that this was an aberration. And of course I use that word purposefully. The standard and professional procedure to deal with hostiles within a crowd of protesters is for experienced commanders to direct officers towards the agitators and separate them from the innocents and thereby limit their capacity to unduly influence the crowd. This is the best practice in policing. Guess what. It's also the best practice in policing the police. Let's see if critics of the LAPD are capable of not trampling on innocents in their politics.