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Lawyer Briefly Detained in Snowball Incident Waxes Philosophical on Rule of Law

By Debra Cassens Weiss

December 23, 2009, 2:44 pm CST

A lawyer who analyzes environmental policies achieved his 15 minutes of fame last weekend when he was briefly detained by a detective in what is being dubbed The Great Snowball Incident of 2009.

It all began when lawyer Daniel Schramm responded to a text message inviting him to join hundreds of people for a snowball fight at a busy intersection during a record snowstorm in Washington, D.C., he writes for the Washington Post. At one point, the crowd threw snowballs at a Hummer that turned out to be owned by a D.C. police detective. The officer got out of his vehicle, displayed his gun, and began threatening arrests. Someone called 911, and more officers arrived, who took their colleague’s side and tried to control the revelers, as the snowballs continued to fly.

Schramm decided it was time to slip away. “But right at that moment, the detective apparently got hit by another snowball, and he decided I was the one who threw it (I wasn’t),” Shramm writes. “Videos of what followed are widely available on the Internet. That guy in the drab, olive coat and fuzzy wool cap being dragged through the crowd by the detective, shouting, ‘I didn’t throw that snowball’? Yeah, that’s me. At my finest.”

Schramm goes on to reflect on the incident and the rule of law. Schramm says the police called to the scene handled the incident as well as they could have. “Nonetheless, the tone of the crowd quickly shifted from anger at the gun-wielder to generalized anti-authority rhetoric,” he says.

The rule of law means respecting the power of the police to break up a snowball fight at a busy intersection, he writes. “But it also means disciplinary consequences for those who abuse the sacred trust bestowed on them, as the detective clearly had, though I hope his career isn’t upended for this overreaction.”