The event felt surprisingly open at first—vendors talked to me freely and I could sit in on workshops—but by the second day, I started noticing cops whispering to each other while looking in my direction. Some came over to feel me out, asking what I thought of the term "militarization." One of them worked for the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, a Homeland Security project to coordinate intelligence from local cops and federal agencies like the FBI. As I flipped through the counterterrorism handbook at his booth, he snatched it away. "That's for law enforcement only," he said. He told me he knew who I was.
The mission of the center is to "detect, prevent, investigate and respond to criminal and terrorist activity." When another reporter, Julia Carrie Wong, visited their office during the convention,
she found them tracking tweets from the few hundred protesters gathered outside.
From inside the hall, cops watched warily as the demonstrators chanted slogans about Ferguson. "If I see someone with an upside-down flag, I'm going to punch him in the face," one said to his team. Nearby, a vendor sold shirts with slogans of his own. One bore the image of a Spartan helmet and the phrase "Destruction cometh; and they shall seek peace, and there shall be none." His most popular shirt read "This Is My Peace Sign"; it showed crosshairs centered on what I briefly took to be a person with his hands up, though it was actually an AR-15 sight.
He told me to make sure I remembered one thing: We are sheep and police are the sheepdogs. They protect us, and they kill the wolves. I pointed at the shirt and asked, "The person in the sight, is that the flock or the wolf?"
"If he's in the crosshairs, it's gonna be the wolf," he said. "It's gonna be the bad guy."
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