Ward 6 Councilman Tommy Wells still had a #41 tag around his wrist when he convened a D.C. Council meeting Tuesday morning. It marked him as the last protester to be processed by U.S. Capitol Police after a nine-hour saga that started with 41 people — including Mayor Vince Gray and six council members — getting arrested after refusing to leave Constitution Avenue on Monday evening in protest against federal control of the city’s budget.
Wells told The Washington Examiner on Tuesday morning that the group was first held in a large garage at 67 K St., SW. They arrived there around 6:30 p.m.
According to Wells on the inside and a Washington Examiner reporter on the outside Monday night:
The arrested protesters sat in rows of folding chairs, waiting to be processed. At first Capitol Police called them up one-by-one, took their personal information and their thumbprints. But around 10:00 p.m. police determined the entire group needed to be moved to police headquarters so their fingerprints could be scanned digitally and checked against a warrant database.
A group of 10 protesters, including the mayor and D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown, were put back in handcuffs and put on a bus. They were shipped over to headquarters, only to find that the digital scanning system was running at a pace of one person every 30 minutes. Gray, Brown and others were released around 1 a.m.
Around 12:30 a.m., Wells, with the help of a mayor’s aide who also had been arrested, was able to borrow a phone from a police officer and get in touch with the mayor’s chief of staff, Paul Quander. Wells was concerned about the slow process and asked Quander to push Capitol Police to skip the digital scanning processing so they could all go home.
The next van to leave held 10 women, including Coucilwomen Muriel Bowser and Yvette Alexander.
“We tried to hold the van back as long as possible because we knew they would sit in the van outside the headquarters in cuffs with their hands behind their backs until the group in front of them had been processed,” Wells said.
The women were carted away sometime between 1:30 a.m. and 2 a.m. Another van holding Councilman Sekou Biddle left a little less than hour later (there was no clock, so time was difficult to judge). Wells was able to get a pen and Biddle wrote his wife’s phone number on Wells’ hand before leaving.
Wells called Biddle’s wife around 3:30 a.m., and learned that Biddle, Bowser and Alexander were still sitting in the vans in the headquarter’s parking lot. The mayor’s aide contacted Quander again, who informed them they were negotiating with Capitol Police to speed up the process.
A little after 4 a.m., Capitol Police waived the requirement for the digital fingerprint scans and the remaining protesters were released.
“That could have been done at any time,” Wells said. “It was bureaucratic ineptitude that had us stuck there until 4 a.m.”
