During the afternoon of Sunday, December 20th, a Washington, D.C. detective pulled a gun on a crowd of citizens having a snowball fight at a major intersection in that city. As told by progressive media relations consultant Sarah Massey (who was at the event) on her blog, Own the Press, several dozen local residents responded to a Facebook call for a holiday snowball fight at the central-D.C. intersection of 14th and U Streets.

The so-called D.C. Snowpocalypse 2009 was a friendly one until an errant snowball apparently hit a Hummer driven by a 25-year D.C. police department veteran so far identified to the pubic only as "Detective Baylor". That's when Baylor got out of his car, approached the crowd, and drew his gun on them, prompting participants to begin chanting, "You don't bring a gun to a snowball fight!"

According to another eyewitness participant, Lacey MacAuley, Baylor began yelling and screaming at the crowd and pushed at least one bystander, all the while brandishing his gun. MacAuley reports Baylor kept it up until a second D.C. cop arrived to calm him down. Baylor allegedly justified brandishing his gun to MacAuley by saying, "That snowball could have damaged my car."

Overreactions by local police to ad hoc mass events like this are nothing new. (For example, the negative reaction New York City's mass cycling event, Critical Mass, still gets from the NYPD.) However, a cop pulling a gun on a crowd of citizens because his car got hit by a snowball wouldn't seem to satisfy anyone's standard of reasonableness.

The Washington Post confirms the events first reported by MacAuley and Massey--and notes that Baylor is now on desk duty, pending an investigation. Surely to the embarrassment of the D.C. police, the story has gone national, too. The story earned coverage from CNN, and Massey was quoted in the New York Daily News, saying, "This is not the kind of person I want serving me and my community. He threatened and scared people and acted in a dangerous manner."

The question is, did the detective in question actually draw his gun--and if he did, were his actions justified? D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department will probably be aided in its investigation by this citizen video in which Baylor admits to pulling his gun on the crowd. You can decide for yourself if defense of Hummer was a good reason for doing so.

[Photo credit: Sarah Massey.]