I arrived at Civic Center Park the way I always do — not as a tourist, not as a neutral observer, but as someone who'd been shot at by Denver police before. Twice. By two different cops. I knew their names. I carried their names in my pocket — literally — by the end of the day. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This was the second annual "No Party for the Pigs" — the counter-protest to Denver's Police Appreciation Day, an event where bootlickers gather to thank the armed men who terrorize their neighbors. The year before, in 2020, things went sideways fast. Civic Center Park was open. The amphitheater was accessible. Protesters could walk right up to the event, talk to attendees, confront them directly. It got hot. It got real. And it ended with the killing of Lee Keltner, shot dead in the park during a confrontation that spilled over from the rally into something no one planned for. That memory hung over everything this year like tear gas that never fully clears.

The Denver Police Department wasn't about to let that happen again.

Anti-fascist protesters face off against Denver riot pigs

The Zoo

As I walked toward the park, I could already see it — the setup, the architecture of control. The entire event space was fenced off. Crowd-control fencing ringing the celebration like a cage at the zoo — which, frankly, was appropriate. Inside the fence, a line of riot cops stood in small lines, facing outward, their backs to the people they were protecting. Blue shirts. Helmets. Batons. The whole paramilitary cosplay kit.

Outside the fence, Denver's activist community had already gathered. A crew was at the entry point, agitating the attendees as they tried to walk in — shouting, confronting, refusing to let the bootlickers waltz into their little appreciation party without hearing exactly what they were celebrating. Cops shoot people. Cops kill people. This is what you're clapping for.

Within minutes, a squad of riot cops materialized and wedged themselves between the activists and the entry point. The separation had begun. This was the plan — keep the two groups apart at all costs. No interaction. No contact. No repeat of last year.

The fencing strategy worked, mostly. The pro-police crowd had their fenced-in safe space [the irony], complete with armed guards. The rest of us had the streets. For several hours, that's exactly how it played out — two worlds separated by chain-link and a thin blue line of armor. Taunting. Screaming. Megaphones. Signs. The activists pressed against the fence, hurling every truth they had at the cops and the right-wingers who'd drift over from the event to join the police line, grimacing through the chain-link like animals at a petting zoo they weren't smart enough to avoid.

A larger toy pig being used to make jokes by local activist on live stream.

The Piggies

This is where it gets beautiful. Some of the more prominent activists in the Denver scene had brought a payload — tiny toy pigs. Squeeze toys. You squeeze them and they squeal. But these weren't just any pigs. Each one had a name written on it. The names of Denver police officers known for committing violence against activists. Officers who'd shot protesters. Officers who'd beaten people in the street. Officers whose names were whispered in group chats and shouted at press conferences but rarely printed in the Denver Post.

I was handed two.

Mendez.

Nelsen.

The names were intentional. Two officers who had both shot me with large rubber projectiles at previous protests I was covering. Large. Not the little pepper balls. The ones that leave bruises the size of grapefruits. I looked down at these tiny squealing pigs with their names scrawled on the side and I felt something between laughter and rage — the particular emotional cocktail that comes from being handed a child's toy with the name of someone who tried to hurt you.

There's a moment I will carry for the rest of my life. A young woman was taunting a cop through the fence, squeezing her pig, making it squeal, screaming the officer's name back at him through the chain-link. And then she dropped it. The pig hit the grass on the other side of the fence — in no man's land, between the protesters, the fence and the line of riot cops. She looked at it. The cop looked at it.

And then she convinced him — through the fence, through the screaming, through the sheer audacity of the request — to walk over and pick up her toy pig. This armed, armored agent of the state, standing there in riot gear to protect a celebration of himself, bent down and retrieved a squeeze toy and handed it back through the fence to the girl who was calling him a killer.

If that's not the entire American experiment in microcosm, I don't know what is.

DPD Riot pigs rush to restore fallen section of crowd control fencing.

The Fence Comes Down

At one point, protesters knocked down a section of the fence. Just a section — enough to send a jolt through both sides. The cops rushed it immediately, swarming the breach like it was Omaha Beach, restoring the barrier within seconds. Nobody got through. But the message was delivered: this fence isn't as permanent as you think it is, and neither are you.

The Tension Rises

As the afternoon ground on, the energy shifted. Hours of taunting, hours of staring at each other through steel and mesh, hours of cops standing in a line pretending they weren't bothered by the crowd of people screaming their names at them — it takes a toll on everyone. The air got heavier. The cops got twitchier. The protesters got bolder.

I was on the front lines. I'm always on the front lines. Not behind a police barricade with a press badge, not standing at a safe distance with a telephoto lens — right there, in it, with the people. Because I was one of them. The movement knew me. I was a true journalist of the movement, yes, but that role was fluid on the ground. You're a journalist until you're not. You're a protester until you need to be a journalist again. The line doesn't exist when you're embedded — it dissolves. I was covering the standoff and I was part of it, and everyone on both sides understood that.

An officer grabbed me and shoved me — hard — for "getting too close." “MOVE IT BACK”, he screamed at me. Too close to what? The truth? The police? The fiction that journalists stand apart from the stories they tell? “DONT FUCKING TOUCH ME”+ I yelled back, with a swat of his hand. I didn't have a press badge from a known news outlet between me and that baton. I had nothing but a camera and the fact that I was standing on the wrong side of the the line by their definition. The shove was a reminder — not that I needed one — that the police don't make distinctions between reporters and protesters. They see us all as targets.

Bootlicker sprayed with silly string as he is leaving the pig party.

When the Bootlickers Left

Here's the thing about Denver Police Department's master plan for crowd control that day: they had airtight security for keeping the two events separated while the pro-police rally was happening. Fencing. Riot cops. Separation zones. The whole authoritarian infrastructure was humming along beautifully.

What they didn't have was a plan for when the rally ended.

When the bootlickers started filing out — done with their day of celebrating state violence, ready to go home to their suburbs — they walked right into the streets where the activists were waiting. And the activists didn't just stand there. Antifascist groups began tailing the more militant and aggressive fascist attendees as they dispersed through downtown Denver. Not the grandparents who'd come to clap for cops — the ones with the body armor, the patches, the snarling contempt for anyone who wasn't white and obedient.

The streets became a chase scene. Antifa groups herded the fascists through downtown, the fash trying to lose them, the antifascists refusing to let them disappear. And then they cornered them. A parking lot. The fascists were boxed in. The confrontation was immediate, loud, and escalating fast.

And then one of them threw it.

A concussion grenade. Four feet from where I was filming.

Denver police sergeant threatening protesters and myself with arrest if we do not move back from the lining they are attempting to form.

It Was a Blast

Four feet. I'm telling you — four feet. The world becomes a pressure wave and a sound that doesn't register as sound so much as it registers as a physical restructuring of your skull. Your ears ring. Your vision narrows. Every primitive survival instinct in your body says run, but the journalist says stay, and the journalist usually wins because the journalist is too stupid or too committed or too far gone to tell the difference anymore.

Several protesters rushed the fascists' position after the blast. Adrenaline and fury will do that. Concussion grenades are not non-lethal — they're less-lethal, and even that is a generous framing. They destroy hearing. They cause traumatic brain injury. They're designed to incapacitate through brute force of physics. Someone just threw one into a crowd of people in a parking lot in downtown Denver, and the police response tells you everything about whose side they're on.

The motorcycle brigade arrived fast. Cops on bikes, swarming the parking lot, pushing back the antifascist protesters — the ones who'd just been grenade'd — because in the calculus of American policing, the people who threw the explosive are not the problem. The people who were exploded upon are. The protesters were blamed for the blast they didn't throw, and the cops began aggressively clearing them from the area while the fascists who'd detonated the device melted into the escort.

That's right — an escort. Police formed a solid line separating protesters from the departing attendees and gave personal security escorts to many of the area's prominent fascists. Armed escorts. Walking them to their cars. Protecting them. From the people they'd just tried to kill/injure with a concussion grenade.

Mendez & Nelsen piggies sitting facing the rubber bullets their respective real life officers shot me with while covering protest in Denver.

What I Carried Home

I walked away from Denver that day with ringing ears, a sore shoulder from the shove [I have a lasting injury in that shoulder], two squeeze pigs named Mendez and Nelsen, and the particular exhaustion that comes from spending eight hours screaming at a chain-link fence while armed men in riot gear pretend you don't exist.

The first year of No Party for the Pigs ended in a killing. The second year ended in a grenade. The through-line is not subtle: when the state celebrates its own violence, violence follows. It's not a bug in the system. It's the system working exactly as designed.

Lee Keltner was killed at the first one. Nobody was killed at the second one — but not for lack of trying. A concussion grenade at four feet from a journalist is not a warning. It's an attempt.

Denver Police spent all day keeping two groups apart, and the moment their supporters threw explosives at the people they were supposed to be protecting them from, the switch went off instantly. They formed a line. Gave escorts. Protected the bombers. Policed the victims.

That's not policing. That's a gang. And the piggies — the real ones, the ones in uniform — proved it before sundown.

The squeeze toys were more honest than anything the Denver Police Department said that day. You squeeze them and they squeal. You name them after the cops who hurt you, and suddenly the monster has a face, and the face has a name, and the name fits in the palm of your hand.

Mendez. Nelsen.

I still have them. Displayed in my office next to the rubber bullets that struck me.

Mendez and Nelsen forced to stare endlessly at the rubber bullets they fired at a journalist.