Lower Manhattan – The Reverend Al Sharpton crept in and out of the designated protest area at One Police Plaza like the blob in a lava lamp.

Arriving in a huge scrum of reporters and hangers-on that dwarfed the crowd of protesters who had spent two hours waiting for him to finally turn up, Sharpton’s roiling entourage struggled to pass through the bottleneck police had created with two long lines of converging metal barriers, only to reconstitute itself once past it, amorphous and unwieldy, percolating for a bit around its well-coiffed, media-savvy queen bee before floating back upward toward the street (and rush-hour traffic) again, where the boys in blue would eventually load vans and busses destined for the pokey.

While inside this miniature Panopticon, Sharpton did not preach. He mostly milled around with a stern look — the same face he would don when being queried about Tawana Brawley during his 2004 presidential run — quietly registering his solemn approval as protesters raging against the acquittal of three officers in the 2006 shooting death of Sean Bell chanted We remember Sean Bell/NYPD go to Hell and No justice/No peace/No murdering-ass police, while carrying ubiquitous signs declaring We Are All Sean Bell. The Whole Damn System is Guilty.

“If you want to be arrested follow Reverend Sharpton,” an organizer, his profile framed against the Welcome to Police Headquarters sign, barked into a bullhorn. “If you don’t want to be arrested, don’t follow Reverend Sharpton.” Fairly simple instructions. Having been arrested a stone’s throw from the site while covering a protest during the 2004 Republican National Convention I personally planned to err on the side of distance, especially once I saw the rolls of orange netting and ungainly clumps of white plastic handcuffs protruding off police officers’ belts.

I tried to warn a couple of curious guidebook-toting, broken-English speaking, German tourists away from the upcoming melee, to no avail. I presume they figured it out for themselves; if not, incarceration with Al Sharpton makes an inimitable vacation story.

***

Last weekend I snickered at reports of Sharpton telling a congregation, “God used David to challenge Goliath. So what makes you think God can’t use Al Sharpton to challenge George Bush?” God did not prevail upon the good Reverend to seriously challenge Dick Gephardt or Dennis Kucinich in 2004, never mind an actual sitting president. If that does not sufficiently convey a failure to bestow heavenly favor, surely Sharpton’s unholy love of tracksuits does.

Even without evidence of transcendent partiality, the New York City Police Department took Sharpton’s promises of a city shutdown — by Wednesday afternoon it was being labeled a more modest city slowdown — much more seriously, greeting protesters with an daunting show of force: Officers, uniformed and plainclothes, were omnipresent in the crowd, on souped-up mopeds, alone and in gaggles, above and below, left and right.

How odd it is Sean Bell will never know the sometimes touching, frequently bizarre ruckus his tragic death has instigated and the myriad of tangential-at-best interests that have struggled to co-opt it.

Amongst the perhaps 500 gathered, for example, were people stumping for Barack Obama alongside those hawking the latest issue of The Workers’ Vanguard headlined, “Obama, Clinton: No Friend of Workers, Blacks, Or The Oppressed.” An older woman gushed over her hug from Sharpton as her homemade sign reading, “The Black Race Is the Origin of Mankind,” fluttered in the spring breeze. The Revolutionary Communist Party attempted to recruit for the vanguard destined to overthrow capitalism. Several men showed up with a banner promoting RIPPED — Rights for Imprisoned People with Psychiatric Disabilities.

The night Bell was shot down he was wrapping up a bachelor party, preparing for marriage. A year-and-a-half later people are waving dozens of the red, black, and green Pan-African/Black Liberation flags in his name, as if he were a martyred separatist. And what would Bell make of the gangly, goateed, white boy with the ponytail shouting, “I’m Sean Bell!”? It’s just so strange, I thought, as a man on the downhill side of middle-age, a Free Mumia! button on the beret working overtime to contain his wiry grey hair, insisted I hear his poem, “The Ballad of Sean Bell.”

“It’s raining in America/It’s been raining for a long time,” it began, warning as it progressed, “Give a little man a badge and a gun and they’ll give out beatings just for fun,” and barreling into the denouement: “Brothers and sisters/Now is the time/To end fascist crimes/Boom!”

He raised his fist in the universal sign of solidarity. “I read that in an all-black bar the other night,” he bragged. Asked why he felt inspired to commemorate Bell’s death he pulled out a tattered picture of the American flag with barbed wire for stars. “This is a piece of art I made the morning after Attica,” he explained without really explaining much of anything. Meanwhile, his equally grizzled companion broke into high-pitched cries of, “The pigs got away with another murder,” like a newsboy hawking the morning edition.

It was not the easiest reporting environment.

When I asked a smiling woman holding a baby why she had wanted to protest, I received neck-swaying sass worthy of Nell Carter at the pinnacle of Gimme a Break in return. “Why should I talk to you?” she asked, smile evaporating. “You’re the biggest supporter of white supremacy in the country.”

Me personally?

“You know what I mean, honey,” she shot back. “You, the media. You, the reason those police are home instead of in jail.”

***

The Reverend was arrested early on and so he sat on the bus for a long while looking out the window. A steady stream of fans made their way to the closest barrier to cheer and applaud him. Bell’s fiancé, parents, and the two other men shot by police with him the night he died were arrested also, it was later reported. The super-secret (yet easily divinable) plan had apparently been to storm the Brooklyn Bridge with commute-killing civil disobedience. Police, however, stopped the crowd at the entrance. Network cameramen whose satellite trucks either through dumb luck or cunning (kudos to you, ABC) were parked next to the arrest cordon, climbed atop their vehicles for primo feeds. Throngs of photographers squeezed in for tight shots of handcuffed hands.

The call and response of No justice/No peace blared with mind-numbing repetition. Protesters without the intestinal fortitude to be arrested intermittently shouted blustery and invariably bad legal advice. Many more went to a fortuitously parked ice cream truck for a refreshing treat. Sharpton watched it all, until the police bus rumbled into gear and pulled away.

An hour later trash cans were stuffed with “We Are All Sean Bell” signs. Because in the end, we really aren’t.

– Shawn Macomber is a contributing editor for The American Spectator.