[Parts of this story first appeared in the October 2, 2008 Boston Phoenix. —Ed.]
Since 11 a.m. on Tuesday September 2, the first (albeit rejiggered) full day of the Republican National Convention, masses of indistinguishable cops had been suiting up in riot gear pulled from the backs of open Ford Expeditions and forming a thick perimeter around the St. Paul Capitol grounds, where happy young people gathered to listen to bands, flirt, and trade colorful flyers advertising varieties of social justice. Men dressing for a specific kind of evening on the town, by 8:30 p.m., they were hot and bothered. Had they gotten all dressed up with no place to go? They’d seen plenty of action the night before, with 284 arrests, and in violent raids for several days beforehand. They’d shelled out massive federal funds for new gear, and then received a an unprecedented, multi-million dollar insurance policy to cover lawsuits in case they misused it. Now, having trailed a march for several hours to a downtown location in front of Mickey’s Diner, they were ready for more.
That’s when the rumbling begins. Not low stomach-rumbling, a literary device to convey impending danger—no, the sound of rumbling. From snowplows, dumptrucks, massive city vehicles. Every 4 year-old-boy’s fantasy come true was convening in the dark summer streets of that Midwestern town. Any four-year-olds present were pulled away fast, though. For these trucks were blockading the streets of my hometown, forming the outer barricade in a series of three impasses—the two others created by rows of riot cops—penning in politically engaged Americans. Outside the barricades, the streets empty, for in the eyes of those in power, there are no innocents here: only those near enough to be tear-gassed and those far enough away to escape.
Confused, hungry, and with a dawning awareness that conspiracy to document a riot is considered a felony under Minnesota’s USA PATRIOT Act, I head in the opposite direction for dinner. I’m hoping to meet an exhausted videographer whose two camera people are still in jail. A young girl next to me is heading to the capitol to sit on the grass to rest.
“I’m not a protester,” she tells me. She’s clearly from here: that’s exactly the kind of boring night I used to have in this town when I was her age.
I turn off toward the restaurant and gasp. Around the corner, a constantly replenishing row of fresh riot cops are marching—goose-stepping, even—up the center of Robert Avenue, in perfect formation. Perhaps two hundred go by, and I stand, open-mouthed gaping, as it dawns on me that I grew up in what is now a police state. And that that poor girl was not going to get the boring night she was looking for.
Then from downtown, I hear what sound like shots. Three of them, right in a row. I text the friends most likely to be caught up in any trouble, and it is too long before I hear back. Finally, a message from a photographer: “Getting tense by the diner,” it reads.
By the next morning, the scene he’s referring to will be known as the Battle of Mickey’s Diner. A breakout march had been swarmed upon and surrounded by hundreds of riot police near Mickey’s, a downtown prefab art deco restaurant some 70 years old, pictured in films like The Mighty Ducks and A Prairie Home Companion, now a symbol of lost innocence. Although only 56 arrests were made, they followed a lengthy standoff between aggressive officers and largely peaceful protestors, whose primary acts of dissent were voicing insults. The staggering display of force had gathered before any violence had occurred, and in a scene weirdly decorated at one point with projected images from John McCain’s war photo album onto the XCel Center. Dispersal orders were given, and the use of weapons threatened—but for hours no exits were open to marchers. One activist in a wheelchair was tear-gassed. As another protestor put it, “it was terrifying. They offered us no way out.”
The Battle of Mickey’s Diner was one of many sites in St. Paul that saw the use of Triple Chaser grenades (the popping sound I heard; described by makers Defense Technology as causing “serious damage to property” and potential “injury or death”), 40 mm Direct Impact rounds, pepper spray, tasers, smoke bombs, mace, brand-new $650 Trek mountain bikes (if you’re confused why these might be listed in a series of weapons, you haven’t seen the video footage of officers rearing up on them and ramming into victims) and tactical training costing approximately $50 million received in a grant from the Department of Justice. Another deal netted the city an insurance policy whereby the Republican Host Committee would pay out the first $10 million to litigants for civil rights violations—a number twice what other cities hosting RNCs have paid.
Although the St. Paul Police would seem to have been the force behind such pointless acts of aggression, in fact 3000 of the 3700 officers on duty were pulled in from outside of the city—or state. (I came across Arizona patrolmen with the greatest frequency.) And, as recent political conventions have been dubbed “National Special Security Events” by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), safekeeping generally falls, in fact, to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force —a coalition that includes FBI, DHS, the Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Secret Service, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
With backing of and funding from such agencies, the St. Paul Police purchased gear to ease the perpetration of violence with high-tech weaponry and developed a plan to absolve perpetrators from legal penalty. Without such a massive display of force, Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher reasoned, “This town would have been destroyed.”
Of course, the goal was to silence those assembling and speaking against the platforms of one party in a two-party electoral system against which dissent is constitutionally—and simply logically—guaranteed. These facts continue to appall the few who’ve heard them. Yet that most haven’t was both a central part of the RNC crackdown strategy and represents a clear continuation of the Bush Administration’s policies.
TIMELINE
Crackdowns started early. Information-gathering and surveillance of RNC and DNC protestors had been in full force for close to a year. A City Pages story revealed a plan to hire informants to infiltrate “vegan potlucks” in the Twin Cities back in May. Arrests and raids started several days before the conventions were planned to start, primarily on independent media organizations known for documenting civil rights abuses. Here’s a quick timeline of events, describing an overarching plan not to protect citizens from harm, but silence their political voice (where court cases are pending, only first names have been used):
Friday, August 29. Around 9 p.m., members of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Department and the St. Paul Police violently force their way into the RNC Welcoming Committee’s Convergence Space, throw over 50 activists of all ages—from the pee-in-their-pants-young to the health-issue old—to the floor, handcuff them, and detain them for two hours. They had been eating dinner and watching a movie. A teacher in her 60s grew concerned for her health. Officers did not respond to her requests for aid. The mother of a five-year old explains to reporters that the cuffs were necessary “for our safety and for theirs.” She glances at the formerly ziptied child in her arms and then back at the press. “Supposedly.”
Rebekah, a 15-year old from Madison, WI, had been coloring when a gun was shoved into her face and she was forced onto the ground. She spent two and a half hours there before officers noticed and released her—clearly having forgotten about her and her status as a minor. (As such, it is not legal for them to have released her except into the custody of her parents.)
Warrants were not displayed, computer equipment was improperly confiscated, and the group was ultimately charged with a fire-code violation—a trumped-up charge which, although not the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Department, did succeed in keeping the space closed for almost 24 hours. Most detainees were released immediately, but several were held—either detained for the maximum allowable time period (48 hours from the start of the next business day, Tuesday) or charged.
An employee of the SuperAmerica convenience store down the road, Gina, was driving home past the Convergence Space later that night. She was pulled over and her vehicle was searched, despite that she was clearly not an anarchist. “I was wearing my uniform,” she explains.
She also knew the law. “I told them, I’m graduating from the police academy in two weeks. So, where is your warrant for searching my vehicle? I don’t consent to this.”
Saturday, August 30. While upstanding Minnesotans were still in bed, many organizers and journalists awoke to find police inside their homes, flashing warrants (one with the wrong address). These listed such terror-inspiring materials as: “hollowed out puppets” (useful, we’re to believe, for the concealment of bombs); “urine and feces”; “notes and other documentation, including maps”; and “media in whatever form.”
One media group, I-Witness video, whose documentation of the 2004 RNC protests caused some 400 cases to be thrown out of court, is raided for only the first time.
“There was some kind of police intervention in our ability to do work every day in St. Paul,” I-Witness member Emily Forman explains. “Beginning from the time that we had a house raid, we were having a difficult time finding a place to do work. We had to move our offices twice in St. Paul, and we had to move our housing every night.” A later raid, police contend, follows a tip that the collective has begun taking hostages.
On the spot to document the raid at exactly the same moment as the police was Fox News. It was the kind of coincidence that came to color what scant coverage of the protests there was. Later, it would be revealed that eight members of the corporate media were offered “embedded” status—allowed to ride along with officers, as long as they reported nothing of what they experienced until after the conventions had ended.
The Convergence Space reopened with a press conference. David Bickens, father of detained RNC Welcoming Committee member Marjorie Bickens—one of the group of organizers now known as the RNC 8—proclaims, “My daughter was arrested for her commitment to peace and justice.” She and the other seven activists are eventually charged with “conspiracy to incite riot in the second degree in furtherance of terrorism.”
Raids, searches, and arrests continue throughout the day. By the end of the hour-long press conference, a member of the Coldsnap Legal Collective had received notice that twelve more activists had been detained in the duration.
A group of activists on their way to the press conference, from the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), witnessed a group of young people in a white van being pulled over by undercover cops. Yanked out of the van, they were forced to walk backwards down the sidewalk and held at gunpoint.
OCA’s Alexis Baden-Mayer happened to be standing nearby, taking photographs. “Get out of the line of fire or we’ll shoot you,” the cops told her.
“I guess that’s why they’re doing this so early,” she surmises. “So these stories seep out and scare people away from the protests.”
Sunday, August 31. Republicans announce the cancellation of most RNC Day 1 activities the next day, out of concern for Hurricane Gustav’s proximity to the Gulf Coast and in direct response to accusations that the Bush Administration failed to respond to Hurricane Katrina.
Monday, September 1. Despite the cancellation of most of the day’s events, protests and marches proceed as planned. The Labor Day March on the RNC to Stop the War has close to 10,000 participants. Protestors—soon to be called “self-proclaimed anarchists” in the press—attempt to barricade the streets. Already questions of who perpetrated what violence—activists or undercovers—arise. The day ends in 284 arrests. Despite expressed Republican concern for Hurricane Gustav, and that no state of emergency has been declared, the National Guard is on hand in Minnesota to quell protestors.
Nineteen-year-old Bay Area activist Maria was arrested at 4:30, shortly after the first use of tear gas on demonstrators. Despite restrictions against keeping people in prison without charging them for no longer than 48 hours, Maria was detained for 58 hours, because of her arrest on a national holiday. Following her release Thursday night, she describes an anemic cellmate refused medication (other reports claimed periods of 21 to 26 hours during which the detained were not granted medical treatment or phone calls), an inmate who was taken away by ICE, and a third girl with a broken arm. “The police claimed that she’d gotten her arm broken breaking windows,” Maria explains over the phone. “But it broke when the police threw a tear gas canister at her.”
“The worst was the guy right in front of me [at the march] who was reaching into his backpack for a sweatshirt,” she says. “They beat him until he was covered in blood.”
Mass arrests take place at a peaceful gathering on Harriet Island at an SEIU Labor Day event. Several independent media journalists including Amy Goodman are arrested—Goodman is released quickly while the others remain in detention. At a Codepink protest, legal observers and street medics are hassled by police in a disturbing trend only to continue throughout the week. Ramsey County Sheriff Fletcher claims victory in securing the city.
“Gustav shut down the convention, and then the police, in shutting down the city, were able to claim they’d made it secure,” I-Witness collective member Forman states.
“I’m not sure that having the city shut down and totally militarized is really secure,” she adds. “Those are conflicting definitions of security, at that point.”
Tuesday, September 2. The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign holds a rally and march called the Poor People’s March for Our Lives with by some accounts 10,000 attendees, and the Ripple Effect concert is held on the steps of the Capital building. Thousands of bike and riot cops line the march route, creating at one point the hilariously telling image of masses of black-clad policemen aiming weaponry at Poor People. “Stop the War On the Poor,” one chant goes.
National organization Free Press calls for the release of journalists. Coldsnap Legal Collective announces arrestees have been banned from calling their number—a number every activist in town has written on their arm in case of arrest. Later, their Internet goes down for several hours.
The band Rage Against the Machine takes the stage at Ripple Effect in a surprise appearance. Officials order electricity shut off, arguing that the permit was to be revoked since the band wasn’t listed as performing. The band performed a capella, and then the crowd marched down the road to meet up with the Poor People’s March for Our Lives, a several-hour-long parade just nearing the capital grounds. The night ends in a pointless standoff, nearly 60 arrests, and a marked increase in weaponry used against protestors.
National women-led anti-war organization Codepink attempts a banner drop on a St. Paul bridge. Ten middle-aged women in pink T-shirts singing, chanting, and flirting, are surrounded by 170 total police for several hours.
Wednesday, September 3. Two Texas men are arrested, for alleged possession of Molotov cocktails. No evidence is offered.
The RNC 8 are charged. Bruce Nestor of the National Lawyer’s Guild tells the press, “The most outrageous allegations made by the authorities are not supported by any evidence other than the statement of the confidential informants. They’re not supported by the evidence seized.”
Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin addresses the convention. In the first of two acts of dissent that made national media, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin of Codepink waltz onto the convention floor with tickets donated by an anonymous Republican upset with his party’s warmongering. Stripping off a respectable outer layer of black clothing, Jodie and Medea revealed pink undergarments emblazoned with “Sarah Palin is not a woman’s choice.” While ejecting them from the floor, security agents cover the women’s mouths. A WCCO reporter covering the interruption predicts it will be the last the GOP suffers in St. Paul.
Thursday September 4. Much of the media had moved on to other stories in more happening regions of the country. There were to be no surprises that evening anyway: it’s not like McCain was going to either decline his party’s nomination nor say anything interesting while accepting it.
Codepink’s Elizabeth Hourican and Nancy Mancias, alongside Adam Kokesh of Iraq Veterans Against the War, meander into the convention hall with a sign reading, “McCain Votes Against Vets.” Mancias and Hourican pinkslipp McCain, who responds with a stunning speech. “Friends, my dear friends,” The GOP presidential nominee says from the podium. “Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static. I’m going to talk about it some more, but Americans want us to stop yelling at each other.”
Just a few blocks away, the police had diverted small groups of protesters to various sites around the city—one in the courtyard of a housing project. A peaceful, permited march earlier in the day had its permit revoked, and police had declared the gathering unlawful. Attempts by demonstrators to deescalate—“You’re so sexy, You’re so cute, Please take off the riot suit”—are ignored. Cops lob concussion grenades (Triple Chasers), shoot rubber bullets (Direct Impacts), and use tear gas on the protestors, even those in the courtyards of the residential facility, and some of which end up in the adjacent playground. In one brutal act of torture, one young man is ziptied, doused with pepper spray, and then released. Many already in the fetal position, are sprayed with pepper spray at point-blank range. Three hundred and ninety-six arrests are made that night, of people McCain referred to as “ground noise and static.”
Shamako Moele, a member of the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, sums up their concerns in an early press conference. “We’re not out here because we just want to complain,” he says. “We’re not out here because we just want to create chaos, or a ruckus. We’re out here because people are dying. People are dying. This is not a game. . . . They are manipulating, they are lying, they are cheating, and unfortunately, they are using the media as their pawns to do so. . . Let’s stop pretending that the people who are trying to fight, simply so we can survive, are wrong. We are just the American people trying to take our country back.”
That night, after the last speech is spoke, while drinking sickly sweet Minnesota Nices with the unused bail money of all the radical videographers still in town, survival feels like enough. “Whooo!” one cameraperson exclaims. “We shut it down!”
THE AFTERMATH
Incidents of abuse and torture, while compelling, do not tell the entire story. A vast machinery of surveillance, misinformation, infiltration, harassment, and good, old-fashioned legal ass-covering predicated the enstifling of constitutionally guaranteed rights to free assembly and speech.
Coldsnap Legal Collective, a six-person core group with several volunteers, was in the Twin Cities to manage a jail support hotline for arrestees, run a legal support office, coordinate legal observers, facilitate know your rights trainings, oversee a jail vigil, and upkeep the group’s Twitter feed (which activists relied on for accurate, up-to-the-minute information about arrests and violence). Coldsnap answered my questions collectively in a group email, and my first was about their interactions with the massive police force on display.
“These officers did their best to hamper legal support efforts, as well as support efforts from street medics, groups providing free meals, and other groups. The examples of their efforts are too numerous to list and affected many groups, not just Coldsnap. Some of the tactics meant to hamper legal support efforts were the police forming lines of horse cops and riot cops along the peaceful jail vigil outside the Ramsey County Law Enforcement Center (LEC), the cops illegally dropping arrestees off in remote locations miles from the LEC without money or phones so they couldn’t receive support from the jail vigil, and the cops arresting activists who were part of the Coldsnap street team,” the group states.
In other words, in a supposed effort to protect citizens, the infrastructure put in place by protestors to demonstrate safely was attacked by police, who targeted street medics, legal observers, and general supporters—“Startlingly disproportionate to any imaginable threat,” as Coldsnap describes it.
“Even those who were expecting to witness the brutality and repression of the police state,” the group continues, “were surprised by the level of organization and coordination demonstrated by the police in their attempts to silence dissent. Each day, they systematically partitioned off the city, corralled people into areas to create the conditions for mass arrests, and unleashed their chemicals and weapons when they would be least likely to be held accountable. On Monday, the police in St. Paul blocked access to the permitted march and pushed people on the streets south of the march south and west, ultimately attacking and arresting hundreds of people in various locations. On Tuesday, they waited until the end of a permitted march and then funneled people through a corridor on St. Peter Street that was conspicuously free of cameras monitoring the streets and then attacked the crowd from both ends of the corridor with chemical and projectile weapons. On Wednesday in Minneapolis, lines of riot cops assembled almost an hour before the end of the Rage Against the Machine concert and funneled concert goers into corridors they created, thereby creating the conditions to “justify” their brutality and mass arrests. On Thursday, they systematically blocked a group of peaceful protesters attempting to march to the “free speech viewing area” by the Xcel Energy Center so they could attack and arrest hundreds of people.”
It’s a terrifying list of offenses, particularly when layered on top of the mostly smaller incidents noted above. Coldsnap sums up the strategy: “All of their militaristic maneuvers were deliberate, well-coordinated, and executed in a frighteningly patient and calm manner.”
Perhaps most overtly, the police force in the Twin Cities targeted not only independent media makers and successfully kept them from documenting these events, but also manipulated the coverage in mainstream media. (It goes without saying that mainstream media, corporate media, is easier to control. One AP reporter pulled me aside before the Poor People’s March to ask if it was true that the anarchists intended to target anyone with a camera today, as his head office had apparently heard from an “anonymous source.” No it’s not true, I told him. It’s not even logical. Why wouldn’t anarchists want anyone to know they were being arrested, targeted, beaten, and tortured?)
And this is important as word of the RNC brutality continues to spread. “The degree of preconceived bias in the mainstream, corporate media was evident, and it altered how a lot of people we know personally and who were not involved came to perceive events as they transpired,” Coldsnap explains.
On September 19, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman announced that the city would decline to prosecute journalists detained over the course of the RNC. Asserting that “the police did their duty in protecting public safety,” he still failed to account for the several days of lost reportage on account of the detentions.
Also underlying his announcement was a disturbing presumption that corporate media remained legitimate, while citizen journalism, advocacy journalism, or independent journalism—people not, in his words, “identified as journalists”—might still be prosecuted. And when, as I’ve documented elsewhere, economic censorship has caused many independent outlets to shut down anyway (particularly those, such as my own Punk Planet, that would have devoted entire issues to covering the police torture on offer at the conventions), we’re confronted with a situation in which we can receive no information about this unparalleled attack not just on democracy, and not just on civil rights, but on our lives.
“It’s important to keep in mind that the repression of people from all backgrounds, races, sexual orientations, etc. experienced in the streets of St. Paul and Minneapolis during the RNC are experienced by poor people and people of color every day throughout this nation,” Coldsnap explains. “Despite the lack of adequate media attention on the important issues that were brought to light by the police brutality and state repression during the RNC, many people in the Twin Cities became politically aware and radicalized that week.”
As one journalist put it, nothing about the aggressive display of force made sense—unless you viewed it as an act of war.
And it’s a war still waging. As this story goes to press, residents of St. Paul are still being harassed by police over alleged involvement in protests. Court dates are coming up. I-Witness video is collecting documentation in relation to both conventions.
“What we do is long-term investigative reporting,” Eileen Clancy of I-Witness explains. “We’re going to be doing a lot more work looking into this. We saw in both convention cities what I would call an excessive and disproportionate use of force on crowds of people who were behaving in a low-key manner.”
The legal implications take time to sort—who was given orders to disperse, when, etc.—but the concept of “disproportionate use of force “ is key.
“The emptying of pepper spray canisters into the eyes of protestors,” for example, “rose to the level of torture. And this is what was plainly visible on the street. Many of these people who had been drenched in these toxic chemicals were then denied medical treatment and were not able to wash off any of the effects. . . . These are people [police] who were using pepper spray in a way that it’s likely the manufacturers never imagined.”
“Police officers were using aggressive and violent tactics on peaceful demonstrators in the middle of the day in full daylight. Those are the kind of things that generally happen when it’s dark.” Clancy suggests such overwhelming use of force is tied directly to the small numbers of police in the city, who tend toward violence in crowd control matters when increasing numbers are not an option. “They seemed very comfortable and confident, and acted as if they had impunity [while performing acts] that to an observer, didn’t seem defensible,” she adds.
Clancy describes a scene she came across several times during her stay in the Twin Cities, but that I only viewed once—“empty streets, and police officers in Michelin-Man riot gear taking souvenir pictures of each other.” As if there were something enjoyable about the experience they might wish to remember.
Clancy addresses the case of the young single woman caught by several independent journalists (and a local Fox affiliate) singing and chanting “I love you” to a group of perhaps eight officers who surround her, drench her face with pepper spray, knock her down with a bike, and spray her directly in the eyes again.
“If they had determined that she had committed an offense,” Clancy explains, “they certainly had the authority and opportunity to arrest her. . . . but the fact that she was not arrested at that point, and they were under no threat, and she acted in a passive manner. . . they beat her. That kind of behavior wasn’t singular.” Moreover, several video cameras were on hand to capture the scene—police saw them, and asked them repeatedly to leave.
“The fact that police weren’t protecting themselves more, it’s interesting to note,” Clancy concludes.
In the end, the charges against the worst of the “self-proclaimed anarchists,” filed under Minnesota’s own USA PATRIOT Act (don’t let the clunky acronym fool you: it still stands for Uniting And Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) are flimsy at best—yet still headed to trial. Under such a system, it seems, even proximity to dissent against the current administration can be defined as terrorism.
In the face of such flagrant abuses of power, what is the “ground noise and static” to do? The just-spring-from-jail 19-year old Maria, asked why she came to St. Paul, echoes Moele’s image of the American people trying to take their country back. “This is my country,” she explains.
“This country does not belong to the Republicans.”
Tags: civil rights, independent media, police torture, RNC 2008
