When about 200 police accountability activists marched onto a bridge in downtown Austin, Texas, to burn an American flag in front of startled tourists, it seemed likely to be the most exciting part of the May Day march. But that was before the police unleashed chaos, tension and pepper spray.

In the days after the death of Freddie Gray and the genesis of the Baltimore Uprising, calls for solidarity led to nationwide #BlackLivesMatter and anti-police-brutality protests. Austin joined other cities mobilizing on May Day, a holiday that, locally speaking, rarely sees the kind of action familiar to Oakland or Seattle.

For Freddie Gray and Larry Jackson, Jr

It would not be the first Austin protest centered around the death of an innocent black man. People's Task Force ATX began organizing on behalf of Larry Jackson, Jr, not long after he was killed by Austin detective Charles Kleinert in 2013 for the "crime" of trying to patronize a bank that had been robbed earlier by a white man. Kleinert pursued Jackson, who was unarmed, from the bank into the city. He even commandeered a citizen's vehicle before fatally shooting Jackson in the neck under a highway overpass. Although he was indicted under intense community pressure, Kleinert's case still remains stalled by legal maneuvering.

In addition to providing support for Jackson's family in their court battles against Kleinert and the city, the Task Force responded by taking the street in unpermitted marches, shutting down intersections, bridges, and the frontage road of Interstate 35, right in front of police headquarters. However, their marches faced internal disagreement when it came to shutting down the highway itself, an action that became common at #BlackLivesMatter protests elsewhere in the state and around the country in the aftermath of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

Though Jackson's name, and those of other Austin residents killed by police, could be found on signs at the May Day protest, this event was organized by a younger and more radical group: Red Guards Austin, a self-described "Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collective" formed in November 2014.

An Austin May Day in the Streets

Announced via Facebook and Twitter, the Freddie Gray protest gathered at Palm Park, a symbolic location that marks the last green space at the historic divide between predominantly white Austin and racially segregated East Austin. It's also just blocks from the police headquarters.

Before the protest, the Peaceful Streets Project led a small "Know Your Rights" training. Some in attendance seemed surprised when, at about 7:30 p.m., the Red Guards led the assembled group into the streets rather than beginning with the customary speak-out session. "Fists up! Fight back!" some chanted.

Austin, like most American cities, technically requires a permit before protesters can take the streets. In practice, police rarely interfere with non-permitted but nonviolent protests, preferring to shut down roads and escort the group in the hope that they'll clear out before causing too much disruption. Until the march tried to move onto the highway, the May 1 action followed these standard tactics.

At a distance, police followed the group on bicycles, motorcycles and a rather comical golf cart as the group of around 200 people left the sidewalks. Chanting with fists and placards raised, the march took the wrong way on street after street, flowing like liquid around stopped cars that honked their horns in support. Sometimes drivers rolled down a window to raise a fist in solidarity. Pedestrians filmed on their smartphones, cheered and occasionally heckled the crowd.

Bats and Burning Flags

As the sun began to set, the May Day march turned onto the Ann W. Richards Congress Avenue Bridge, which crosses over Lady Bird Lake, a dammed tributary of the Colorado River. Although motorcycle cops shut down traffic on either side of the bridge, which stands on a major thoroughfare through downtown about a mile due south of the Texas State Capitol, that wouldn't prevent the activists from having an audience.

Around a million Mexican free-tailed bats live under the Congress Avenue Bridge; it's the world's largest urban bat colony. Particularly during the warm months, hundreds of tourists gather to watch these locally beloved winged mammals take flight at sunset. On May Day, spectators got an extra treat: a flag burning, memorably captured in a tweet by the Austin Chronicle's photojournalist John Jack Anderson. That tactic turned a sightseeing event into a political statement.

After the acrid smoke had blown away, the march resumed, turning toward Austin's nightclub district, Sixth Street, as the Palestinian solidarity contingent led a chant: "From Palestine, to Baltimore, we won't take it anymore!"

From the nightclubs, it was an easy trip back to police headquarters. As activists stood atop the building's steps twirling black and red flags, an organizer thanked us for attending and announced the end of the march. We had spent over an hour criss-crossing downtown. But a young black woman had been moving through the crowd, quietly urging everyone to "follow me if you want to take the highway."

As the march continued south along the frontage road, a confrontation with a pair of hecklers briefly turned physical and slowed the group down, giving police more time to prepare at the on-ramp. Nonetheless, they still seemed to react with a violent panic as the crowd approached.

Confrontation Beneath the Highway

By the time the march reached the on-ramp, it was possible to see the twinkling lights of police cruisers on the elevated surface above. They'd already shut down traffic, even though the group never reached the highway.

Only a handful of bike cops had pedaled ahead of the group to block the onramp, leaving them outnumbered. The woman leading the march to the highway approached, and two of the bike officers shoved her roughly to the ground. As other activists rushed forward to rescue her, the pepper spray canisters came up. Soon a trio was spraying, first at the rescuers, then indiscriminately.

[This video](https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/fO1Yo8mP5es?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen) captures the moment that a local livestreamer, Christopher Didonato, got sprayed.

After that, both police and protesters regrouped. The cops formed a barricade with their bicycles while human bodies and a "Rise Up!" banner served the same purpose for the march. Activists chanted. A black woman angrily asked why there were never so many cops around when someone in her neighborhood actually needed protecting? The police crossed their arms or clutched handlebars and pepper spray canisters.

Then, just as suddenly, the tension swept away. With a promise to return, the marchers continued down the frontage road, back to Palm Park, where they dispersed.

Pepper spray and the Use Of Force Continuum

After the march, I spoke with Debbie Russell, an Austin police accountability activist with years of experience. She's no stranger to arrest, either; cops scooped her up moments after the newly instituted curfew at the eviction of Occupy Austin from city hall in March 2012.

She attended the May Day protest, and got a partial view of the pepper spray incident, in addition to reviewing social media reports and activist accounts. I spoke with her about what I'd seen, and asked for more information about how police are taught to use pepper spray.

Russell explained that police are supposed to evaluate every situation on what she called the Use of Force Continuum. An officer is trained to evaluate, in a split second decision, the least amount of force applicable to bring a situation under control, starting with the use of a commanding verbal or physical presence, and leading up to physical restraint, less lethal weapons (like pepper spray and Tasers), all the way up to lethal force.

Obviously, standard police training does not suggest it is appropriate to break a man's spine if he runs away from you after making eye contact, as six Baltimore Police were responsible for doing to Freddie Gray. However, the situation is murkier when it comes to situations like the confrontation in Austin on May Day.

"Things happen quickly," said Russell, "and police love the murky part of it, of course." She stressed that events happen too quickly for police to be expected to progress through each phase of the continuum in a linear fashion. Instead, they are meant to start with the least amount of force possible.

"But the basis for that decision, however," she said, "should be the possibility of a physical threat to themselves or others."

From protests in Baltimore to riots in Greece, police are generally the ones who first escalate a situation – turning peaceful, albeit angry, protests into direct confrontations. In Austin that night, the cops were the first to act violently, tackling a lone activist. The chaos that followed gave them more plausible deniability: first the activists rushed forward to rescue their friends, only to be pepper sprayed as they pulled her to safety. By the end, communists and anarchists were hurling flags and signs at the police.

"They're going to say that she could have reached the highway and put herself and others in danger," Russell predicted. I asked about her about the indiscriminate way police had swept the pepper spray across the crowd.

"It's not what they're supposed to do, but it is very often what they do," she replied, citing the panic police might feel in such rapidly escalating situations. "They've already put themselves in that mindset, they're not using common sense, and they're jumping the gun."

"Yes we're humans, yes we're fallible," she added, and "we may not always react well at first to certain events. But they know what our tactics are and they're supposed to be trained how to handle them. If they weren't in position to stop us, that's their fault that they put themselves in a position where they reacted badly."

Pepper Spray, Iraq War-style

This use of pepper spray on protesters is a rarity in Austin, but not unique. Russell recalled a 2003 incident, now well known in the local lore of Austin activism.

In the build-up to and during George W. Bush's Iraq War, the city saw regular, well-attended peace protests. A popular anarchist bloc challenged police authority and led non-permitted marches onto the streets on a regular basis. Their marches would often split off into multiple directions in order to further confuse the cops.

"They need that!" Russell said with a laugh. "They need to know that they're not always in control and that these are our streets and we can actually take care of ourselves."

Protesters filled the streets for an entire day on March 19, 2003, when the war officially began, starting on the University of Texas at Austin campus in the morning before proceeding to the Capitol. Their numbers swelled as people got off work. "It was about seven hours of straight protesting before we got to the Congress Avenue Bridge," she recalled.

Russell and others spoke to police officials, encouraging them to let the march take the bridge and disperse on its own time. "Supposedly, the officer in charge agreed," she said. But about an hour later, something went wrong – exhaustion or impatience took their toll on police.

"They started getting aggressive, giving us contradictory orders and setting us up for failure by ordering 300 people onto a sidewalk where they wouldn't fit," Russell continued. Then police told the protesters that they weren't even allowed on the sidewalk.

"I told the cops that the sidewalk is public property, and one of them replied, 'Not tonight, it's not,'" she said.

Then suddenly, without any orders or provocation, Austin Police Cmdr. James O'Leary began indiscriminately spraying the crowd. Neither activists nor local media were spared. Among those hit were Austin Chronicle reporter Lee Nichols and a respected local environmental activist, Tim Jones.

Jones reported eye problems for years after, according to Russell. He was one of four plaintiffs who sued over O'Leary and the city on the grounds that the incident violated their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The court was not kind to their case.

"After two days of evidence, Judge Sam Sparks threw out the First Amendment claims and removed the city as a defendant, leaving just O'Leary on trial for excessive force," reported Nichols in 2006. That February, the city ruled O'Leary not guilty of the remaining charges.

"Danger O'Leary!" said Russell, recalling an activists' nickname. "He was promoted shortly thereafter, then wrecked his car at the airport and finally got fired for DUI."

"The verdict was hardly surprising," wrote Nichols a week after the case ended. "The evidence presented indicated O'Leary was probably within the bounds of city policy when he fired the spray. And that's the problem."

Courts have sometimes found fault with the use of pepper spray. For example, in "Headwaters Forest Defense vs County of Humboldt," the court found that "the use of pepper spray on non-violent demonstrators was determined to be excessive where there were less intrusive alternatives."

These cases are too rare. "The law is clear as far as reasonable force," Russell told me, "but the courts will find a way to exonerate."

She added, in light of Kleinert's indictment and the arrest of six Baltimore police officers, "At least they used to. The times are a'changing."

Kit O'Connell lives in Austin and is the Daily Staff Writer for MintPress News. Follow him @KitOConnell.

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