Breach of the peace

Local activists find out there ain't no power like the power of the police
On Saturday afternoon, May 13, Kansas City, Missouri, police officers descended on Volker Park on special assignment. Officers in at least three unmarked police cars staked out the park. An unmarked van followed two subjects, videotaping. A police helicopter circled overhead. A major from Special Operations and a captain from the Metro Patrol Tactical Response Team stood by.

Subject #2 was the first to leave Volker Park at 4 p.m., followed by the unmarked cars. At 41st and Gillham, uniformed officers piled out of the cars and surrounded Subject #2. They arrested her, handcuffed her, and took her to the city jail.

Then, Subject #1 left the park. The officers got their man at 51st and Troost. He met the same fate as his accomplice.

No, it wasn't a drug bust. Subject #1 and Subject #2 didn't have criminal records. Neither Mike McCormack, 24, nor Sarah Viets, 23, had ever even seen the inside of a jail cell before. They get mostly A's at Penn Valley Community College. They recycle, and they eat vegan food to help curb world hunger.

Their crime? Charges against them range from "loitering, loafing, wandering, or standing ... in such a manner so as to obstruct a public street" to "acting in a disorderly manner with intent to provoke a breach of the peace" to "walking through an intersection against a traffic control signal" and "conducting a parade with more than three people without a permit." The charges stem from events during The People's Rally, a political rally and march that McCormack and Viets organized.

The two alleged lawbreakers sit in a café one weekday afternoon, talking about their arrests. McCormack has four charges against him, and Viets has three. Their court date is Aug. 10. They both still seem a bit shaken up. McCormack gestures passionately with slim hands and keeps drifting back to his favorite topics -- poverty, police brutality, the death penalty, prison labor. A pierced lip and a tongue stud add an edge to his sensitive yet ebullient demeanor. Viets fidgets with her coffee mug a lot. Her waifish blond braids and pointed chin are offset by the controlled fire in her voice.

"It was ridiculous," Viets says. "It was nonsense. If we did something wrong that day, then they should have stopped the whole entire march when all of us were in the street, and they should have arrested us all. But to stop two people at the end of a march ... obviously there must be another reason why they're targeting us."

But McCormack points out that negative attention is better than no attention.

"When the authorities start to take notice, when people in general start to take notice, is when you know you're doing something right." McCormack pauses earnestly. "Not to say that we're antiauthority or crazed anarchist lunatics, though, 'cause we're not."

Their lawyer, Fred Slough, a member of the National Lawyers Guild and a proponent of social justice issues, can't help but laugh when he reads one of the charges against the two: "yelling and screaming and causing a large crowd to gather."

"Those are pretty weird charges," he says.

Slough leans back in his creaky chair by an antique wooden desk. A mustachioed man in a tweed jacket, he sits under a framed ink drawing of a distorted man under a starry sky with a quote from beat writer Allen Ginsberg: Recent history is the record of a vast conspiracy to impose one level of mechanical consciousness on mankind and exterminate all manifestations of that unique part of human sentience in all man which the individual shares with his creator.

The attorney shakes his head.

"I mean, all these people came there just to do that. They came there together just to do that very thing.... The crowd was there because they wanted to be there to begin with. So those are very strange charges. It looks to me like they just charged them with everything they could think of."

McCormack and Viets saw The People's Rally as a way to increase awareness about social justice issues in an area that isn't exactly a hotbed of activism. Some locals say the last Kansas City protest that drew hundreds took place during the Vietnam War. As two of the founders of a local group called Solidarity and Unity Now (SUN), McCormack and Viets wanted to energize and educate young people and to link them up with older, more experienced activists.

Born and raised in Kansas City, McCormack moved back home four months ago after spending three years working a 9 to 5 job as a shipping manager at Crate & Barrel in San Francisco. He had moved west to be in a city where "more was going on -- musically, culturally, politically, intellectually." What he got was a lesson in the political issues of the day.

McCormack learned the statistics that spur many people to action: One in four U.S. children live in poverty after the 1996 Welfare Reform Act; the United States has the highest rates of infant mortality, malnutrition, poverty, and illiteracy of any industrialized nation; more than 2 million people in the country are incarcerated -- more than in any other country in the world; and 50 percent of the U.S. prison population is African-American.