The Respectable Rioter

Richard L. Barkley is as straight as they come. An Annapolis graduate who retired as a Navy commander after 15 years of service, Barkley, 56, is president of a small manufacturing company, an active Republican, and has lived in Palo Alto, Calif., for the past 30 years. Unlikely as it seems, Barkley last week was arrested for rioting at a Palo Alto rock festival.

It all began when he accepted a newspaper invitation placed by local merchants to attend the festival at Palo Alto's Lytton Plaza. The week before, a similar event at the plaza had erupted into a store-window-smashing binge. The merchants now advertised for respectable citizens to come "observe what really happens" and to see just how insufferable the city's plague of "street people" could be.

Barkley showed up late in the evening. "I walked through the plaza," he recalled, "and talked to some of the kids. They were all wiggling with the music and hollering about Ho Chi Minh, and generally acting like perfect asses." Then he overheard an older man giving instructions to a young audience about how to disrupt the proceedings. Citizen Barkley promptly trotted over and told the police, who thanked him warmly.

Raised Truncheon. As he headed for his car to go home, Barkley noticed a crowd beginning to stampede, followed by a surging blue line of helmeted, jump-suited riot police. He tried to leave, but a young cop raised his truncheon to strike him. "Son, if you touch me with that," Barkley warned him, "you've touched the wrongest man in Palo Alto."

The club was lowered, but Barkley was nonetheless barred from departing and pushed back into the crowd. He was about to find out more about "what really happens" than he expected.

Apparently without audible warning, the police blocked all four streets around the plaza and corralled Barkley and 362 others--including at least a dozen other over-30 straights who had also accepted the merchants' invitation--into a compact mass. For four hours they were kept standing there, and then, at 3:30 a.m., the entire crowd was bused off to jail.

There followed a dozen hours of official indifference and indignity--including an apparent slowdown by deputies in booking the detainees, who were kept 80 to a cell. It was not until late in the afternoon that the wrongest man in Palo Alto was finally mugshot, fingerprinted and given a summons to appear in court this week on a charge of "rioting." Barkley and a number of fellow straight defendants say they may sue for false arrest. Among them are Namon J. Nichols, a 31-year-old electrical engineer, and Stanford University Professor William R. Kincheloe, 44. They joined Barkley in refusing to appear in heroes' roles at a radicals' press conference, despite being irked at their treatment by police. "I was 100% behind the police," said Nichols. "Now I'm about 80% and trying to analyze what happened to me."

Like many Americans, Barkley is still emphatically on the side of law and order. But, he says, "this is the kind of harassment that the police are obviously stupid in doing. It isn't enough to scare, just enough to make you mad and antagonistic that it happens to the kids."

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