Cruel Summer

On the first weekend in August, the listless late-night air in Westport finally exploded.

Movement is always the first sign of trouble, and it started around 2:30 Sunday morning when a few cops, standing around on Westport Road between Mill Street and Pennsylvania, heard a message on their radios and took off toward America's Pub to break up a shouting match involving revelers, police and private Westport security guards. One guy -- sweating, his eyes watery -- got too close to one of the Westport guards, and the burly man shoved him to the ground. Cops cuffed some of the adult partygoers and led them away. A few bystanders traded angry words with the cops, but the momentum died out and the crowd relaxed.

Still, tension begets tension. Moments later, a black woman passed under the barricades that cops use to control weekend crowds on Westport Road. Within seconds, she had either fallen or been tackled and was on the ground struggling fiercely with two cops, a woman and a man, who hauled her to her feet and pinned her arms high in the air. The yelling woman's high-heeled shoes came off as the officers carried her away.

That's all it took. Cops were agitated, and people were pissed. Somebody stepped too close to the barricade, so an officer squeezed off a blast of pepper spray; people in the crowd gasped and started running. By 2:45, Westport was chaos, the crowds dashing for cover, the trigger-happy officers shooting pepper spray until clouds of the stuff hung in the air. One officer simply walked down the barricade line with his pepper spray, in a black cannister the size of a small fire extinguisher, hitting everyone he saw.

A girl sat on the ground crying as friends poured water over her face to try to ease the sting.

The crowd surged with uncertainty. Two couples, the women wearing lavender bridesmaid dresses, huddled at the corner of Westport and Mill. Others let loose a barrage of empty beer bottles at the cops, who quickly grouped with their riot helmets in the parking lot next to Buzzard Beach.

On other Saturday nights, this would have been about the time that officers started pushing the mostly black crowd down Mill Street and out of Westport. On August 3 they thought better of it and stood by motionless in the lot. More bottles rained down on them, hitting one cop in the elbow. Another bottle crashed near a throng of people, but no one was hurt.

The police helicopter, usually an irritating but distant presence in the weekend sky over Westport, flew low and loud, its searchlight angrily staring down departing revelers.

"They just started macing us 'cause they were mad at us," said one man, who asked to be identified as Bounce. "They're just assholes. They sprayed me for no reason."

By 3:10, the crowd was gone. The cops broke their ranks in the parking lot, took off their helmets and began the business of putting away the barricades or having a smoke. At 3:15, about a dozen Kevlar-vested SWAT officers arrived and swept through the deserted streets. One was armed with a shotgun, the rest with long nightsticks. All wore grim faces.

Afterward, Major Marcus Harris of the Kansas City Police Department said he wasn't sure what caused the brawl. "Just things that happen in a big crowd. I don't really know. Nobody knows what happened."

The fracas, says Lieutenant Kevin Ewing of Westport Public Safety, was the "worst it's been this summer." Compared with last summer, crowds in Westport have been smaller for much of the season. Police and merchants say that's because in the spring, city leaders loudly announced that kids under eighteen -- who have traditionally helped clog the streets of the entertainment district after-hours -- would be ticketed if they stayed out past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays and past 11 p.m. the rest of the week. Curfew violations in Westport this summer have been negligible, says Major Jan Zimmerman, who oversees the police there.

Last summer, 46 police officers were siphoned from the hundred or so on regular Saturday-night duty throughout the city, but this summer Westport has required only 24. As many as ten armed private-security officers (the same number as last year), hired by the Westport Merchants Association and commissioned by the state, have continued to augment the police. This month, however, the total crowds have grown to about the same level as last August -- around 8,000 people Zimmerman estimates.

For most of this summer, the action in Westport has been sedate: Outside the Broadway Café, people in their twenties play chess on the sidewalk, sitting on red milk crates and smoking cigarettes. Vendors sell pizza and brats and Wundadogs. One night a bachelorette party lugged around an inflatable penis. A dwarf in a stroller lumbered by on Mill Street, past the steady crowd of quiet black teens sitting atop the concrete walls of an adjacent parking lot. On the balcony of Buzzard Beach, a woman made loud exhortations to the guys strolling in the alley below. "I'm touching my nipples in public! I'm pointing to my nipples in public!"