The LAPD's unlikely defender

The night he was shot, he had a permit to march nonviolently. He says his group had been promised it could even cross police lines, to set an example of nonviolent behavior. So when a phalanx of police, mounted and heavily armed, started sweeping the crowd down Olympic Boulevard, Hayes, in ragged white shirt and white trousers, carrying a large American flag, marched right up to them.

And they shot him. They were firing rubber bullets, hard cylinders about an inch across and an inch and a half long. Suddenly Hayes was lying on the ground, the flag twisted under his leg, and the crowd was running the other way.

It wasn't supposed to end that way. He and his group had left Dome Village only half an hour before, after a brief rally at which he and his lieutenant, Dexter Clay, emphasized the importance of nonviolence while at the same time trying to whip up some enthusiasm. The march had originally been intended to circle the Staples Center with homeless people holding lights, but it wound up as a pilgrimage by a tiny band of no more than two dozen people.

Carrying signs and chanting, the group followed Hayes and his flag through the dark streets on the west side of the freeway to Olympic Boulevard, and then through the underpass to the convention site. At that point they met the concertgoers streaming down the center of the street, which is very wide, and something almost wonderful happened.

The concertgoers, who were euphoric, took up his cause. "All right! Support the homeless! Yay for the homeless!" They were laughing and smiling and some of them did turn around and join the march, which had been filing east down the north sidewalk while the crowd flowed west in the middle of the street.

By the time Hayes reached the police lines, there may have been a hundred or so people walking behind him. Suddenly there was gunfire. The mounted police kept coming, a solid line of black moving, pausing, firing again, moving, pausing again, firing.

Every time they stopped, the crowd stopped. A few protesters took up a chant of "Shame! Shame!" Then the police would fire again and the crowd would retreat. The whole event took no more than 30 minutes, from the time Hayes and the homeless arrived at the police line to the time the concertgoers were chased through the freeway underpass.

Hayes was taken to a hospital and his followers eventually straggled back to Dome Village. But there was no resentment or anger in evidence. No one talked about police brutality; no one even seemed to see anything unusual in the fact that their leader had been shot. They weren't panicked, they weren't dazed, they hardly seemed upset.

For protesters, though, Hayes has nothing but contempt. "Nobody cares about these homeless people," he says. "Oh, but they care about the homeless people in Colombia, in Brazil, in Pakistan. They care about the children's sweatshops in Asia -- but what about the children right here in America, under their noses?"

Thanks to his shooting-inspired notoriety, Hayes got onto the protesters' agenda on Tuesday night. But he drew an audience of precisely zero outside his own group of a few dozen. Only a few yards away, as he spoke, convention delegates ran a gamut of sarcasm and abuse from idle demonstrators who lined their route. When Hayes led his band out of the protest area, the homeless line crossed the delegate line at right angles, each filtering though the other and no one even bothering to talk.

Hayes was back out there Wednesday night, trying to convince protesters to stay peaceful and follow the orders of police.

On Thursday, the convention began winding down, as delegates and protesters got ready to go home, and the police prepared to retire to their stations. Dome Village remains, as do the homeless of Los Angeles. Ted Hayes got his minute in the national spotlight, but his issue didn't. But he'll be back out there long after the hoopla has faded.

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