As President Donald Trump took office Friday, police in the nation’s capital walloped protesters, reporters and legal observers with batons and doused them with skin-burning pepper spray as projectiles sporadically flew in the other direction.

A police force recently known as protest-permissive sprayed a stoop-backed older woman and a man on crutches before repeatedly striking a journalist who identified himself and sought to pass through a once-permeable advancing police line.

“You are all going to jail!” an officer declared after giving a penned-in group a fresh coat of pepper spray, as those who evaded encirclement chanted from a distance, "Let them go!"

The hard-handed approach was familiar to local civil rights attorneys, who point out that Peter Newsham, the city’s interim police chief, ordered another contentious mass arrest as an assistant chief in 2002. Those arrests, in Pershing Park following anti-World Bank disturbances including some acts of vandalism, resulted in millions of dollars in payouts to about 400 protesters, journalists and bystanders.

As in 2002, the police response on Friday followed acts of vandalism as protesters headed toward inaugural checkpoints. Two hundred and thirty five people were arrested at one intersection, including 230 adults charged with felony rioting.

Though vandalism seemed to be on a greater scale than in 2002, those arrested Friday were only a subset of the larger march and it’s unclear if the people actually responsible for smashing windows and throwing projectiles were among the detained.

"Some members of the group were seen fleeing and were able to escape the cordoned-off area," charging documents acknowledge. Brick-throwing and a limo fire later in the day suggests some of the most aggressive black-clad activists got away.

"The fact that the police appear to be admitting a substantial number of those who did commit acts of violence managed to escape their grasp is very problematic," says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard of the Partnership for Civil Justice, who spearheaded lawsuits that won large settlements and expanded protest rights in the nation's capital.

"If there are people who are breaking the law, the police have the obligation to identify those persons and deal with them," she says. "They cannot turn to everyone else engaged in political activity in proximity and act against those people."

Some journalists, including two from a local NBC station, one independent journalist and one from U.S. News, were allowed ultimately to leave the corralled group. The NBC journalists were told their names had been provided to a lieutenant’s superior after their boss called.

Peter Newsham became interim D.C. police chief in September, amid concern about his past treatment of protesters. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But other journalists -- including Vocativ producer Evan Engel, RT journalist Alex Rubinstein and reporter Aaron Cantu, who has written for VICE, The Intercept, Al Jazeera America and other outlets -- were taken to jail and charged with felony rioting, which carries a maximum 10 years in prison and a large fine.

Rubinstein, who reported he had been struck in the face by one of many flash grenades, referred questions to RT, which did not immediately respond to an inquiry. A Vocativ spokesman said in a Monday afternoon statement that "the arrest, detainment and rioting charge against journalist Evan Engel, who was covering the protests for Vocativ, are an affront to the First Amendment and journalistic freedom. Vocativ will vigorously contest this unfounded and outrageous charge." Cantu did not immediately respond to an email.

An RT article says Rubinstein showed officers his press credentials and a Vocativ spokesman said Engel also identified himself to police.

Several independent journalists also were taken and charged, including a journalist who uses the handle StopMotionsolo, who covered the arrests live on Ustream, and photojournalist Shay Horse, who covers social movements across the Americas.

“I only took photos,” Horse says.

Alexei Wood, who live-streamed his detention to Facebook, was also arrested. Wood tells U.S. News he did nothing wrong.

Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, which is prosecuting the cases, said in a statement regarding the journalist arrests: “As in all of our cases, we are always willing to consider additional information that people bring forward. We have no comment on specific individuals.”

Legal observers, clearly distinguished by green hats, also were taken to jail. The first civil lawsuit over the arrests was filed Friday on behalf of Colorado attorney Benjamin Christopher Carraway, one of an unknown number of observers arrested.

Curiously, the charging papers for the mass-arrested group state a property damage estimate in excess of $100,000 and describe a big-ticket limo fire that occurred Friday afternoon in a different location and after the mass arrests took place.

All of those arrested were released as of Saturday night, but cell phones and cameras were taken as evidence. Police did not respond to a request for comment on whether they have warrants to search the electronics.

"Everybody who was arrested had their phone taken and across the board police have not been returning any of the cellphones or cameras," says attorney Jeffrey Light, who filed the first lawsuit. Light seeks to represent the entire class of arrestees who claim to have had their rights violated and to have not engaged in criminal behavior.

"It's hard to get in touch with everyone now because they don't have their cellphones," he says. "What happened here was excessive and unnecessary.”

Footage from within the detained group:



Light says he’s not sure why authorities chose to charge the entire group with a felony, rather than misdemeanor rioting. Hundreds of people arrested in April 2016 in conjunction with the Democracy Spring protest were charged with various misdemeanors after requesting to be arrested; they were processed and released immediately. Light speculates police wanted more leverage to extract plea deals related to Friday’s arrests.

The chase preceding the mass arrest began with the smashing of windows of corporate chains including Bank of America and Starbucks, two of the targets preceding the city’s last major involuntary mass arrest in Pershing Park in 2002. A ritzy hotel, a bus stop and a McDonald’s also lost windows before Friday's mass arrest.

After punishing payouts following mass arrests in 2000 and 2002, the city relaxed its protest policies, clarifying that permit-less marches are allowed and that audible dispersal warnings are generally required before activism arrests. Virtually any group is allowed to block traffic with an impromptu march or commit flagrant acts of violence-free illegality -- including several well-publicized recent marijuana smoke-ins.

But another recent legal precedent cut against expansion of protest rights and appears to be the hook on which D.C. police decided to pin charges.

In 2009, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit -- the same court that echoed a lower-court finding that Newsham’s 2002 justification for mass-arresting protesters on failure to obey charges was “ludicrous” -- found that if police could make arrests for the crime of rioting with greater leeway.

The court, evaluating arrests from a crowd that allegedly cheered vandalism following the 2005 inauguration, found that in cases of alleged rioting police may not need to give a dispersal order, and that they are not civilly liable if they could show that the crowd was “substantially infected with violence” and that "officers had reasonable grounds to believe that everyone arrested was part of the rioting group."

Verheyden-Hilliard says she doubts that standard can be met in the pending case. Her group is considering civil litigation on behalf of those arrested Friday, but she says hasty legal action can result in poor courtroom outcomes like the 2009 ruling. She says it’s important to meticulously document each individual’s story rather than paint a one-size-fits-all narrative, and to engage in discovery to understand the full extent of law enforcement involvement. An investigation following 2001 inauguration protests, she notes, exposed undercover police had acted as provocateurs.

Charging documents for a man arrested Saturday for allegedly throwing what appeared to be a rock Friday afternoon acknowledged undercover activists were among the protests, taking pictures.

"Dressing all in black is not illegal,” she adds, addressing charging documents’ description of the group as being “dressed similarly to one another” in mostly black clothing before marching as a “cohesive unit.”

"You can't arrest people for the acts of others simply because they arguably share a political view -- that's illegal," Verheyden-Hilliard says.

Footage from before the encirclement of activists and others:

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, who represented four student journalists swept up in the 2002 mass arrest that only last year settled their case, says rioting charges can be constitutionally problematic, and that he sees it as unlikely those charged would be convicted without evidence they personally did something wrong.

Turley’s student journalist plaintiffs will each receive $115,000, bringing the city’s total cost of Pershing Park mass-arrest lawsuits to nearly $17 million in payouts and fees, by his count. He says 15 years ago police failed to document individual criminal culpability, leading to the unraveling of the largely misdemeanor cases.

"If they cannot establish individual culpability, it's difficult to see how they could convict the individuals or avoid a later lawsuit for unlawful arrest," Turley says about the rioting charges.

"The rioting laws have long raised troubling constitutional questions," Turley says. "These laws are written in sweeping and ambiguous terms, and for that reason [police] departments have been cautious in bringing rioting cases without being able to establish an individual’s culpability.”

Light says he finds it interesting that police in the nation’s capital took such a harsh approach to activism following Newsham’s assumption of his role, which follows years of protest-related restraint. Turley and Verheyden-Hilliard, meanwhile, describe it as an unwelcome resumption of conduct that could again put the city on the hook for damages.

"I have real doubts about interim chief Newsham's capacity to follow the law as he has at no point expressed a sufficient understanding of his own wrongful conduct from 15 years ago and he was never disciplined for his conduct," Verheyden-Hilliard says.

“It was deeply problematic for many associated with the [2002] lawsuit[s] to see Peter Newsham as the acting Chief of Police,” Turley says. “Newsham was the primary party responsible for the mass arrest that ultimately costs the city tens of millions in litigation costs and damages. He showed appalling judgment during the World Bank protests and little true regret after the mass arrest was found to have violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of people.”