The News & TeleGraff

Feeling both my anarchal and police reporter roots today, I wandered deep into the secured area around the annual meetings of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund here in D.C. this weekend.

After years of disruptive protests and near riots, the World Bank/IMF weekend has become a big to-do here in D.C. It had become a running joke at the nearby GW campus that students could count on a day or two off each fall when the bankers and the protesters came to town.

This year, the situation was escalated even further because the World Bank and IMF are still technically at Orange Alert following the Bush administration's raising of the terror alert level based on three-year-old intelligence. Security officials closed several square blocks between Farragut West and Foggy Bottom this weekend, throughout the weekend, I've been passed by police motorcades escorting tour buses of delegates and bankers around the city. The city's big hotels, where the delegates are staying, have full complements of D.C.'s finest around them as well.

Walking down to the World Bank this afternoon, the preparations are indeed impressive. Blocks of jersey barriers with portable lowerable vehicle barriers keep unwanted vehicles away—and municipal dump trucks are parked behind the barriers as a back-up measure. Scores of police—Capitol, Transit, Secret Service, and DCPD—stood watch and K-9 teams sniffed around vehicles attempting to enter the secure areas.

I walked right down to the front of the World Bank, where anti-protester fences for riot police kept potential troublemakers a good distance from the building. To say, though, that the preparations—obviously hundreds of thousands of dollars in overtime, barriers, and security measures—were a little out-of-scale would be an underestimate.

Yesterday's protests were quiet and today, in front of the World Bank, I found three dozen police, a K-9 unit, one dump truck, ten squad cars, and three motorcades standing guard over a deserted plaza occupied only by myself and a family of tourists playing football in the closed off street. Walking through the entire area, I spotted a grand total of two protesters: one woman, approximately five-foot four inches tall, aged 60, carrying a "IMF: Stop Enslaving the World" sign and one woman, aged 45, carrying a sign reading pleading with the world's banker to remember the poor.

Definitely orange alert-worthy.