"They use these exceptions to deny anything," Morris told D.C. Councilmembers at a hearing this week on open government and transparency at the Wilson Building . “I don’t want to pick on the attorney general," Morris added. To which, Ward 3 Councilmember Mary Cheh quickly replied, greeted by laughter in Room 412, "Why not?"

Cheh's proposed Open Government Act of 2010 may cause major headaches not just for D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles (who cites "insurmountable challenges" in FOIA compliance) but also, as Loose Lips Daily alluded to yesterday morning, Mayor Adrian Fenty. As a mayoral candidate in 2006, Fenty did plenty to profess a new golden age of transparency and openness in how the District conducts its business. Instead, figures from Cheh's office show, the average number of FOIA requests denied by the city has only increased–quadrupling, in fact–during Fenty's tenure.

"Councilmember Cheh has been on a mission to reform government, so you can't assume her sunlight initiative was launched with politics in mind," local political consultant Chuck Thies tells City Desk. "That said, at this point in the campaign, Fenty can't be pleased to see his poor record on open government and transparency scrutinized,” adds Thies, who is supporting (but not working for) Fenty's opponent, Council Chairman Vincent Gray, in the upcoming mayoral race . “His practice as mayor contradicts what he preached on the 2006 campaign trail."

Kristopher Baumann of the Fraternal Order of Police’s police labor committee praised Cheh for her courage to push her legislation in what’s becoming a highly charged campaign season. "This is long overdue," said Baumann, whose union has regularly butted heads with the Metropolitan Police Department over public information access. "I realize you’re going to face pushback from the executive."

On Monday, witness after witness, from Carl Messineo of the Partnership for Civil Justice to Washington Post lawyer James McLaughlin to Jenny Reed of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute, pointed to structural and procedural problems with FOIA compliance in the District and offered measured praise for Cheh’s open government reform efforts, which also include new rules for lobbying disclosure and calls for the creation of an Open Government Office to enforce FOIA compliance.

Others had harsh words for Nickles, who in a June 10 memo to Chairman Gray, wrote that "in the context of significant FOIA request volumes, increased complexity of the FOIA requests made, and reduced agency resources, the absence in our FOIA statute of a time-frame 'safety valve' similar to that in the federal FOIA is creating insurmountable challenges for the District. These challenges are felt first at the administrative level but are increasingly resulting in litigation outcomes highly unfavorable to the District, despite the documented best efforts of agency employees and officials to meet their obligations."

Some witnesses testified that the District wouldn’t face so much FOIA litigation in the first place if government agencies were simply more forthcoming with public information, or just comply with the current law. While the number of FOIA requests has remained mainly steady in recent years, the number of outright information request denials has increased during Fenty’s tenure as mayor.

"Some of these cases go back five years. They have been unable–no, unwilling–to comply with FOIA," Baumann said during the hearing.

Nickles, meanwhile, wants councilmembers to amend the FOIA law to extend the amount of time the District must respond to public information requests.

Cheh tells City Desk that the proposed Open Government Act shouldn’t be viewed through a political lens. “Fixing our freedom of information laws shouldn’t be controversial," she says. "We’ve been talking about reforming FOIA for a very long time. This reform is one that everyone should embrace.”

Mayoral communications director Mafara Hobson said Fenty's office is “thoroughly reviewing the legislation.” Spokespersons for the Fenty and Gray campaigns didn’t respond to calls for comment.

In this morning's hearing in U.S. District Court, Judge Emmet Sullivan edged ever closer to referring the Pershing Park case to the Department of Justice—signaling he's close to handing the matter over to Attorney General Eric Holder.

But first, Sullivan wants to order up one more investigative tool at his disposal: some serious tech support.

Following up on the recommendations in the Sporkin Report, Sullivan ordered that he would hire a forensic examiner to investigate the missing and/or destroyed evidence in the case. He added that the examiner would be selected based on recommendations from both parties and would be paid for by the District.

It was unclear whether the forensic examiner would study both the missing running resume issue and the gaps in the radio tapes from the mass arrests in Pershing Park on Sept. 27, 2002.

"I think it should be someone appointed at the discretion of the court," Sullivan stated. "And the city is going to pay for it."

In the days leading up to the hearing, tensions had see-sawed among the parties. Two days ago, an $8.25 million settlement was reached between the 400 or so plaintiffs in the Barham case and the Office of the Attorney General. But settlement talks in the remaining case, the Chang case, appeared to have stalled.

AG Peter Nickles submitted several filings late last night. In one, he filed a motion to halt all depositions.

Before Judge Sullivan, Nickles played up his pro-bono days when he was the one battling government corruption; he clearly hates the fact that he's now seen as the bad guy. At least twice, he stressed that his reputation is on the line.

"I'm not trying to hide anything," Nickles insisted, later telling Judge Sullivan, "I'm trying to clear the air here. You're the boss."

To which Sullivan replied: "That's exactly right. And we're clear about that."

And the Boss still wants answers to the mystery of what happened to the running resume and the radio tapes. In addition to the hiring of the forensic examiner, Sullivan made other decisions critical to this fact-finding mission.

Sullivan denied Nickles' attempt to halt depositions. At the request of the U.S. Park Police attorney, he granted that defense lawyers could depose a key witness, Det. Paul Hustler, who had testified in an affidavit that he heard Chief Charles Ramsey give the arrest order in Pershing Park.

Changing his stance from last night's filings and his recent protective order requests, Nickles suddenly warmed to the idea of more depositions. "Discovery can go on forever," he told Sullivan.

Sullivan moved up the trial to date a month–to September 2010. Chang plaintiffs attorney Jonathan Turley said he would be ready to go to trial.

Sullivan also made clear that no settlement would prevent sanctions in the case nor would it prevent him from referring the matter to criminal authorities.

Sullivan spent serious time questioning lawyers about whether he should go ahead and refer the matter to Holder. Barham plaintiffs attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard said it was time. Turley agreed and argued that the criminal investigation would not interrupt the civil proceedings in his case.

Nickles told Sullivan that he believed the forensics examiner should do their work first before any referrals were made. "I think it's better to have more knowledge," Nickles argued.

Sullivan agreed to wait to see what the forensics examiner finds.

No matter what happens, Turley is itching for a trial. He told Sullivan that despite all the publicity the case has generated, a new law from the D.C. Council and millions in settlement money, one recently deposed cop—Officer Michael Smith—testified that he thinks he did nothing wrong that day in Pershing Park and would do it all over again.

"We're going to fight vigorously to get these witnesses and this evidence before a federal jury," Turley said after the hearing.

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

*follow me on Twitter.

On September 27, 2002, D.C. Police surrounded some 400 individuals in Pershing Park. Those individuals were rounded up without warning, arrested, and transferred to the police academy where they were hogtied for hours [See our Boss Hogtie cover story on the incident].

Sally Norton, a nurse in town for a conference at the nearby Marriott, had decided to check out the activity in the park on her walk back from breakfast with a colleague.

"It all looked very peaceful," she tells City Desk today. "We had about 10 minutes before the conference started. We went to leave...by then they had formed a perimeter and they wouldn’t let us leave. We pointed out that we are right here at the Marriott;  it didn’t matter. We tried about six or seven other places. Please let us leave. They either said we couldn’t leave or they didn’t speak to us."

Norton would be arrested and detained for 12 hours. John Passacantando, 48, says on that morning he had wandered into the park to perhaps catch a speaker or listen to some music. He ended up being arrested and hogtied—cuffed right wrist to left ankle—on a gym mat for 17 hours.

"This was literally for being in the park," Passacantando recalls. "I swore to myself that when I got out of there I would find the best lawyers in the land and do everything I could to make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else.... It was my duty to fight back."

Passacantando, Norton, and hundreds of other citizens sought out the Partnership for Civil Justice, a local law firm that specializes in civil rights cases. Today, after more than seven years of  litigation, the plaintiffs announced a settlement which includes an $8.25 million District payout and a series of stipulations concerning evidence storage that the Office of Attorney General must follow.

Norton and Passcantando say they are pleased with their case's resolution.

"I think good police officers see this all over the country and say, 'yeah we get it,'" Passacantando says. "D.C. made a big mistake that day."

Even in the moments after the arrest order was given, police officers questioned whether they were lawful. In a subsequent police investigation, U.S. Park Police Captain Rick Murphy stated that he told one police official "that he would not arrest the protesters in the park as their conduct did not meet the criteria for mass arrests."

After the arrests, District lawyers refused to prosecute a single case stemming from Pershing Park.

Within the next two years, the D.C. Council investigated Pershing Park and released their own scathing assessment. The Council concluded that then-Chief Charles Ramsey had lied, and police officials had engaged in a cover-up of the incident [PDF].

Eventually, the case became all about the cover up. A federal judge would slam the the Office of the Attorney General and the D.C. Police Department's general counsel for withholding thousands of pages of discovery documents. The police department's running resume, a moment-by-moment chronicling of police activity on Sept. 27, went missing. Radio dispatches turned over to plaintiffs contained mysterious gaps.

Through it all, the plaintiffs say they remained committed to seeing the case to a favorable conclusion.

“I wanted to know... that we extracted as much change as possible, that there really was going to be a price to pay for a police force to ever do this again," Passacantando says. "I feel like that’s what we accomplished.”

Norton, who is an associate professor of nursing at the University of Rochester, monitored the case online. She says the department's conduct in the case shocked her. “How do you systematically destroy all the running resumes? How do they all get lost? For them to sort of say first there was no record and then oh, we lost it, there’s no explanation for that," Norton says.

Those questions remain active and may be resolved with the one remaining Pershing Park case still active in federal court.

Looking back on the seven years since Pershing Park, Norton says the has experienced changed her.

“I have a lot less naivete about the process," Norton says. "I always gave the police the benefit of the doubt and I still do, but it’s not unquestioned anymore because of my experience in Washington, DC. It’s a sorry-ass day when you can’t walk across D.C. from a restaurant without being arrested and hogtied and detained illegally."

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

D.C. AG Peter Nickles has reached a settlement in one of the two remaining Pershing Park cases. The deal, which came together last night, includes a District payout of approximately $8.25 million to the roughly 400 plaintiffs in the Barham class action lawsuit.

The deal mirrors the recent settlement in the historic Becker case in which demonstrators had alleged false arrest and mistreatment by D.C. Police. Like the Becker case, the plaintiffs in this Pershing Park case would receive about $18,000 each.

The plaintiffs in the Pershing Park case had alleged that on Sept. 27, 2002, they were rounded up in the park, falsely arrested as well as improperly and needless detained. You can read their original compliant [PDF].

Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder and attorney with the Partnership for Civil Justice, who represented the plaintiffs in the case, believes the settlement is a clear statement against police misconduct. She tells City Desk:  "This settlement sends an unmistakable message to law enforcement agencies throughout the country: think twice before shredding and subverting core constitutional rights."

The settlement includes much more than the $8.25 million District payout. It addresses the problems that have dogged this case long after the Sept. 27 mass arrests: the missing and or/destroyed evidence and the OAG and MPD General Counsel's embarrassing delays in handing over thousands of pages of relevant documents.

We will have more on this very soon.

The settlement stipulates that D.C. Police Department and the Office of the Attorney General must take steps to insure that similar discovery abuses do not happen in the future. The District has agreed to several such steps:

*The D.C. Police Department and the Office of the Attorney General centrally log and index all materials connected in future mass demonstration cases.

*The District must fund a document management computer system that would log evidence.

*The District must safeguard and index and maintain D.C. Police Department command center documents and other essential materials such as the running resume, radio dispatches, and video evidence.

*Every six months for three years, the District must issue reports on its progress in these areas to Partnership for Civil Justice attorneys.

*The District must expunge the records for the more 1,000 people arrested in the Pershing Park and Becker cases.

There still remains one Pershing Park case—the Chang case—on the federal docket. Nickles had promised to settle that case as well.

Still one issue question remains unanswered: What happened to the missing running resume, the minute-by-minute accounting by police of their actions on Sept. 27, and the gaps in the radio dispatches turned over to plaintiffs?

For the last few years, the substance of the plaintiffs' complaint was never much in dispute. OAG lawyers and the plaintiffs attorneys filed motion after motion arguing over the missing evidence. In July, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan compared the District's lawyers in the Pershing Park cases to the prosecutors in the Ted Stevens case. Sullivan essentially shamed Nickles for the OAG's conduct.

Early this month, Ret. Judge Stanley Sporkin issued his report on the missing evidence. Sporkin suggested that the running resume may have been destroyed on purpose. He called for an outside expert to review the radio tapes.

Plaintiffs attorneys in Barham first exposed the missing evidence and went a long way towards documenting the OAG's bungling and the missteps in the MPD's general counsel office. They found and deposed critical witnesses and thoroughly embarrassed city attorneys. Their own evidence gathering went well beyond the D.C. Council's investigation and the Pershing Park related lawsuits. It is unclear what more they could have dug up. There are limits to civil litigation.

Councilmember Mary Cheh and Police Union Chief Kristopher Baumann have called for federal law enforcement to open up an investigation.

"I think it's going to be very important that the department and the attorney general's office and the general counsel's office not be allowed to buy their way out of whatever inappropriate non-ethical actions they've taken," Baumann tells City Desk today. "I still think that it's critical that the Department of Justice conduct a criminal investigation. I don't see how we can repair our reputation with the public or the courts without such an investigation. Clearly there are attorneys and high ranking officials that have violated the law—that should lose their jobs, lose their law licenses and possibly go to jail."

The plaintiffs lawyers in the Chang case have a filed motion asking for such federal involvement.

It is now up to Judge Sullivan to make the next move.  The next hearing in the Chang case is this Thursday.

Read our interview with two plaintiffs about the settlement.

*photo by Darrow Montgomery.

They wanted the D.C. Police to cough up their operational procedures and general orders. In other words, just the rules on how the police are supposed to govern themselves, and utilize their authority with the general public. The complaint stated:

“Public disclosure of the operational policies and practices, orders and staff instructions of the police department is essential for policing in a democratic society and to establish accountability….The D.C. FOIA mandates that the MPD specifically make public and make available upon demand its policies, procedures, manuals and staff instructions….Additionally the MPD is required to publish a general index of all such records unless the materials are promptly published and copies offered for sale.”

Today, the Partnership announced that the D.C. Police Department has finally complied with the FOIA.

The Partnership had filed its lawsuit in early February. That's months of stonewalling. Anyway, now you can read the department's general orders and operational directives for yourself.

The Partnership has put the documents online. It's an invaluable resource that will help the public better understand how the police operate. And that's a good thing.

3:35 p.m. Update: City Desk reached Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, co-founder and attorney with the Partnership.

"It's finally time that they begin to come into compliance. They are not in compliance because we don't have everything yet." She adds that the D.C. Police Department should post all its regs on its own website.

On Wednesday, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan slammed the District's lawyers for how it has severely mishandled evidence in a civil case brought by plantiffs who were arrested in Pershing Park in September 2002.

Sullivan focused particularly on AG Peter Nickles. The Post writes:

"Sullivan ordered D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles to submit a sworn declaration detailing his office's shoddy work and the steps he was taking to fix the problems.

Sullivan said he would impose 'severe' monetary sanctions on the D.C. government and urged Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) to 'settle this case soon.' 'This kind of conduct is not acceptable,' Sullivan said, calling the actions of D.C. government lawyers 'abysmal' and urging the D.C. Council to investigate the attorney general's office.'"

You can read Sullivan's full statement to the court here. So what provoked the judge's anger?

Pershing Park is the scandal that just won't go away. On the morning of September 27, 2002, D.C. Police had set about to monitor anti-IMF/World Bank demonstrators. By then, the protests and the policing of the protests had become routine, almost boring. There were no major acts of violence, vandalism or unrest that day.

But then the police decided to move on people in Pershing Park. They had funneled protesters into the park. Video taken of the park shows the protesters looking bored, sitting around. There were also other non-protesters in the park including nurses in town for a convention, and lawyers on their way to work.  Without warning, police rounded them up and arrested them all.

Police then transferred the mass to its training  academy in Blue Plains; each citizen was then hogtied and left on a mat for hours. They were all arrested for "failure to obey" an officer's order.

We wrote  a cover story on the arrests. Cathy Lanier had a hand in developing the hogtie tactic.

The controversial arrests hounded then-Chief Charles Ramsey. Then-Councilmember Kathy Patterson conducted an investigation into the incident and issued a devastating report.

The report concluded that Ramsey and Co. did not have probable cause to arrest anyone in Pershing Park, failed to give any orders to the people in Pershing Park (they were arrested for "failure to obey"), and went on to question whether Ramsey lied to the council in his testimonies.

For the past five years, plantiffs attorneys had been asking for the most basic documentation of the Pershing Park incident. They had been requesting items that should not have surprised anyone at the Attorney General's Office or the D.C. Police Department.

The attorneys had asked for the radio runs concerning Pershing Park—the back-and-forth communications between officers and officials on the scene. And they had asked for the running resume from the command center which would have amounted to another very basic back-and-forth database documentation of what all police officials knew at the time and what orders were given. This is basic accountability stuff.

For the past five years, plantiffs attorneys could never get these items. Even worse, the radio runs they did receive appear to have been doctored.

The Running Resume

In its motion for sanctions, plantiffs attorneys write:

"The District has destroyed or lost the Joint Operations Command Center 'running resume,' which is the central repository of all acts taken and events observed and decisions made by law enforcement on September 27, 2002. While the District falsely claimed it never existed, the [plantiffs] were able to prove that there were no less than 12 hard copies of this electronically generated document provided to key command in the MPD, including then-Chief of Police Charles H. Ramsey."

The motion for sanctions goes on to state that not only were there 12 copies made of the running resume but there were also "two redundant electronic data file or data base back-ups created." These electronic versions have never been turned over to the plantiffs.

The plantiffs go on to state that the loss or destruction of the resume occurred after a police official—Sgt. Douglas Jones—turned over the data dump to his superior.

From there, the trail for the running resume goes cold. No one will say what happened to the data. There is no evidence that it was not received by the general counsel's office.

In an earlier protester lawsuit stemming from the anti-IMF/World Bank activities on April 2002, D.C. Police denied that the running resume's existence. The denials stopped after Sgt. Jones testified in deposition that he handed the resume over not once but twice to the police department's general counsel. He also was able to recover his own e-mails to the counsel's office as well as the data base. At that point, D.C. Police suddenly disclosed that its counsel had the data base all along.

In that case, Judge John D. Bates sanctioned the District for "a clear case of sanctionable discovery misconduct." He ordered the District to pay roughly $100,000 for the misconduct. The running resume showed that the FBI had interrogated the activists.

Bates ruled: "It is clear that the District not only should have known about the existence of the running resume, but individuals with the District did know about the running resume."

It's not like MPD did not know the lawsuits related to Pershing Park were coming.

Plaintiffs state that within one week of the mass arrests,  MPD Inspector James Crane stated in deposition that General Counsel Harris "called me up, and it was shortly after the protest and said he'd like to, in advance of any litigation, he wanted to get copies" of the recorded police communications.

The D.C. council had requested the running resume during its investigation. Plantiffs argue that D.C. Police tried to pass off to the council a different document as the running resume. "The Council was never given this crucial document nor told it was destroyed or withheld," the lawyers state. "The running resume is the key to all claims. It is gone, and the prejudice is massive."

The attorneys go on to state: "It is remarkable, even unbelievable, that the MPD could 'lose' all of the many hard and computer copies of the running resume."

"I think that this is an astonishing destruction of documents," plaintiffs attorney Carl Messineo tells City Desk.  "That responsibility lay at the doorstep of Peter Nickles. This indicates misconduct that permeates the entire legal representation for the District of Columbia and MPD in other protest cases."

The Radio Runs

District lawyers did hand over radio runs across multiple channels to the Pershing Park plantiffs. But there was a catch.

Key segments of the radio communications had been erased. What was erased? The critical minutes leading up to the arrests and any communications during the arrests themselves. On one channel, there was a gap of at least 45 minutes. There were gaps on the other channels as well during the period of the decision making and execution of the arrests.

"The District has not accounted for these erasures or gaps, which were uncovered after intensive discovery efforts by Plaintiffs. In response to a discovery order ordering an accounting, the District submitted a materially false sworn statement to the Court regarding the radio runs," lawyers state.

On October 30, 2007, the District was ordered by the courts to account for "any technical difficulties, questions regarding authenticity, or unaccounted for periods of time in the produced audio tapes."

Plaintiffs argued in their sanctions motion that the District never complied with the 2007 order.

Plaintiffs got a sets of tapes three to four times–each set was different and incomplete. With each set of tapes, the lawyers still noticed gaps at the most crucial times (say when the people were arrested in Pershing Park) but the gaps varied in length. In other words, each set of tapes appears to be doctored in a different way.

Denise Alexander, communications technication employeed by the D.C. Police, submitted an affadavit in which she stated that there were nothing deficient about the tapes.

In Crane's deposition, he admitted that there was indeed issues with recordings. "I believe that there is an issue that not all the recordings are present," Crane admitted. "I do recognize there's an issue with the lack of recordings."

After the Crane deposition, the District produced a new set of audio tapes. Again, the tapes have gaps—not the same gaps—but similar critical gaps around the time of the arrests.

"This is a case that has been transformed from a case which revealed a willingness of the MPD to engage in mass civil rights violations into a scandal that reveals the willingness of the MPD and its legal representatives to destroy documents after those documents are clearly relevant in litigation," Messineo says. "It's now a case about a cover up."

Veteran city attorney Thomas Koger, who is handling the case, refused to comment for this story. “I’m not authorized to speak about any topics.  Mr. Nickles is authorized," Koger says. “Mr. Nickles would be handling any questions about that.”

Nickles did not return calls seeking comment.

The complaint states:

"Public disclosure of the operational policies and practices, orders and staff instructions of the police department is essential for policing in a democratic society and to establish accountability....The D.C. FOIA mandates that the MPD specifically make public and make available upon demand its policies, procedures, manuals and staff instructions....Additionally the MPD is required to publish a general index of all such records unless the materials are promptly published and copies offered for sale."

The complaint also argues that the D.C. Police Department must makes these basic materials available on the Internet as the statute requires. As it stands, the department does post its general orders online. However, they don't appear to post all of them.

Partnership attorney Mara Verheyden-Hilliard writes in saying: the "MPD hasn't actually complied even with putting their General Orders online. As they advise on the top of the page, they have selected just 'some' of them (which they did belatedly after our FOIA demands). So what are the General Orders in play that we don't need to know about

The Partnership writes in the complaint that they had effectively been stonewalled by the police department when it comes to getting some basics:

*copies of all staff manuals and instructions, including general orders and special orders. All Department directives and policy statements.

*An index of all police records required for public viewing.

The complaint goes on to state: "The MPD refused to respond or produce materials in reponse to the original written Freedom of Information Act request or follow-up correspondence. The PCJF even sent with its initial request a set of blank recordable DVDs onto which the requested information, which is required to be made public in electronic format, could be placed."

The Partnership filed the suit because they just want this basic information. Now the District is going to end up paying tons of money in lawyer fees over a very basic request for manuals. What a waste of money.

"They'll be out around the route," Verheyden-Hilliard says of the legal observers. "They'll be out there monitoring the police action and the Secret Service action." She couldn't say how many observers will be volunteering for the inauguration detail. The plans are still be worked out.

But she's already noticed a little something about the inauguration windup. It isn't all hope. "I think it's very distressing that the Secret Service is making Washington so inhospitable for people." By people she means us and the out-of-towners who are coming because the event means so much to them. Instead, they get road closures, and bridge closings, and fortified security zones. We get gridlock.

"At the same time, the Secret Service seems to be bending over backwards to help the corporate law firms and lobbyists that have all the office buildings that line Pennsylvania Avenue to make sure their caterers and Hors d'œuvres get in," the lawyer notes.

I asked her about the D.C. Police. The department has a bad history handling massive crowds: "It's the usual situation when they have huge numbers of police working many hours a day, that doesn't always go that well."

Verheyden-Hilliard knows what she's talking about. She also has been battling the checkpoint issue.

Anyone remember Pershing Park? Lanier had her hands in that fiasco which resulted in hundreds of people being rounded up, arrested and hogtied. It also resulted in a lot of lawsuits that cost the city tons of dough. And proved to be a huge blemish on the career of then-Chief Charles H. Ramsey.

I can't imagine anyone getting hogtied by some thumper cops. But just in case, you should know who to call if you feel your rights are being violated. You should call on the Partnership for Civil Justice. The organization's team of lawyers did brilliant, tough work on the Pershing Park cases and have taken strong positions regarding the inauguration and making sure it is as civilian friendly as possible.

The partnership has already helped free the inauguration from being overly privatized. And have put in work on the free-speech beat.The group offers a fresh antidote to a city very much enthralled with Obama and seemingly willing to give up huge chunks of downtown real estate to the rich and connected for the coming week.

Update 4:02 p.m. The AP is reporting that inaugural security is going to be the highest ever.