 multimedia blog "Rage against the machine", R.N.C. Diary (part 3)
The R.N.C. hit its last day on September 4th but for many people who spent the week in St. Paul, Minnesota, this isn't going to be over for a very long time. Whether we're talking about the people that live in this usually dead-assed town that are currently sitting back and thinking "WTF?" because of the mass targeting of independent journalists or because of scenes we've witnessed in the streets, things changed for a lot of people. They changed for me too. The Republican National Convention was unable to come to Minnesota without turning the Twin Cities into a police state for a week. "Excessive" and "overkill" were common phrases local residents of Lowertown used to describe the police presence and actions. Code Pink, the antiwar women's protest group that dress up in pink, turned up at the Black Dog Cafe for lunch the other day. Occupying two tables, 15 or so of them quickly set about ordering coffees and sandwiches for lunch. Within 15 minutes, 15 bike cops turned up to watch from across the road. Several Code Pink members went out to get their photos taken with them.
Twin Cities IndyMedia reported that "Fortunately for decent folk, it appears they went way too far: even Tom Lyden on Fox 9 said that it was like a police state, and after playing clips of massive, unwarranted pepper spraying, he concluded his segment by saying that they'd be looking into a blue ribbon panel to see what the hell happened. When you've lost Fox News on the final night of the RNC.... well, some things just can't be spun." Journalists targeted during the week included Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and her staff and, as well as the ton of other independent journalists. The commercial media was targeted as well. An AP photographer was arrested, a Kare 11 cameraman was arrested, WCCO's cameraman Tom Aviles was arrested, and the Pioneer Press' Ben Garvin got detained for two hours. "At least 19 journalists" were arrested on the final day alone, according to the Society of Professional Journalists.
The police tactic of quickly encircling protests and arresting everyone inside the cluster regardless of their status as observer or participant contributed to the arrests of journalists at clashes. Often there was no warning or way to comply with the police. With $50 million of federal money spent on equipping Minnesotan police before the Convention, which left us facing what many people called "Robocops" in full body armor and clearly brand new equipment, you would think they'd get some decent megaphones with which to tell people to disperse. At both the demonstrations I attended, they used shitty P.A. equipment and you couldn't hear what the police were saying if you weren't standing within 20 feet of them. Writing on e-democracy.org, Tony Webster, an independent journalist spoke of his arrest after a Rage Against the Machine concert in Minneapolis on Wednesday, September 5th: Chief Dolan admits that the crowd was "generally well-behaved," and stated that they "...were not damaging property" and "...were not assaulting anybody." He feels ample warnings were given to the crowd.
With the many preemptive raids on journalists, the IndyMedia crew that a friend had allowed to set up a reporting center in his Tilsner studio spent most of the week shit scared. They evacuated the studio on three separate occasions during the week at rumors of raids. I certainly didn't leave any equipment in the space. Cops already have $15,000+ of my computer and camera equipment.
It was a week of sometimes uncomfortable serendipity. The three independent journalists from New York City that I wrote about in part one of this diary, Vladimir, Anita and Olivia, ended up working in the "IndyMedia Lounge" as the studio became known. At the time I wrote the letter to the Mayor of Minneapolis, I didn't know there would be an IndyMedia HQ in the building I was staying, or that I'd have such an interesting bird's eye view of the independent reporting during the convention. And it was was funny to meet the three whom I'd written a letter to the mayor about a few days later, and hear the sad sad sad story from the horse's mouthes. "Sending that letter was awesome," said Olivia, giving me a high five. "Yeah," I told her, "I've never really written a letter to a mayor before but that whole thing really pissed me off". "Yeah, I didn't think you were the kind of person to write letters to mayors," she laughed.
Musicians were targeted. The Rude Mechanical Orchestra's tour bus was pulled over the day before I shared the stage with them at the St. Paul Block Party, and a couple of days after! Another band from out of town experienced the same thing, and had their protest banners confiscated by police. In another incident, a permaculture demonstration bus was cited for being "a commercial vehicle". Much of the vehicle targeting that would routinely result in a simple ticket became tow-away situations this last week. "That's what happens when anarchists come to town and break things," one police officer told a non-anarchist who was coming to town to protest. In a really creepy move, reports started coming out on Wednesday that people who had been arrested and were being released were being dropped by police at random locations in the Twin Cities instead of being released from the jail where they were being held, as release is supposed to be dealt with. I didn't really intend to report on the RNC but the repeated, obviously intentional arrests and harassment of independent journalists was too much to let pass. But mostly, we spent the week making sure the journalists were as chilled out as possible, the fridge was stocked with refreshments, and were there to explain the lie of the land, tell them where they could get food and buy film, etc. I bailed on Wednesday night for Minneapolis to just chill out, returning on the last day of the Convention to see the clashes for myself. I wasn't even up for walking the several blocks to downtown Minneapolis where police were messing with the audience at a Rage Against The Machine show. I'd seen some of the police tactics at the Mears Park Poor People's March on September 2nd, but I hadn't yet seen the kind of widespread and indiscriminate police violence that was being broadcast on TV.
Honestly, the feeling of the protests was like Palestine minus the live ammunition (although M-16s were at protests). Tear gas, pepper spray, rubber/foam/plastic projectiles (not the rubber bullets I used to write about from Palestine, those have metal in them), percussion grenades, batons and horses had been used against protesters and journalists alike. During the march pictured on this page, on the last day of the Convention, we were totally surrounded by the police near the State Capitol building and I did wonder for a few minutes whether I'd be in jail by the end of the day. The police don't give you a way out and you can suddenly find yourself trapped. We got the hell out of there just before the bad stuff went down, when they blocked both ends of a bridge and arrested 150 people, including yet more members of the media.
The national media has done a shitty job of covering the police violence and targeting of media. Inside the Xcel Center, all the media and Republicans seemed to care about was abortion, drilling in Texas, and their trophy "soccer mom", a woman who once voted against equal pay for women. With all the disinterest in the story from outside on the streets, it was important that the marches were peppered with activists and citizen reporters with cameras. It kept things from getting more out of control. People seem to forget that the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of expression in this country includes the right of a normal citizen to stand in a public place, film events, and tell people about them. This is not some special right guaranteed only to members of the media. It is a Constitutional right guaranteed to every citizen and permanent resident of the United States.
People who disrespect and disparage independent media forget that it has changed the course of history at various points. I have had my own journey along that course. During the Tienanmen Square protests in China in 1989, the only reason we knew so much about what was happening on the ground was because the student protesters utilized e-mail to let the world know what was happening. As a student union president at the time, it was chilling to see tanks set on protesters. In 1996, I worked in Ramallah with a team on the first alternative media website run from a war zone. This project and other work we did on the Birzeit University website in those days was a big deal and offered vision to many people in the country and beyond. These days, a search of Flickr or YouTube and you've got thousands of videos and images documenting what is happening in Palestine. My 1996 experience also laid the groundwork for the award-winning alternative media websites, the Electronic Intifada and Electronic Iraq, and later Electronic Lebanon. In 2003, when we launched Electronic Iraq as America went to war against Saddam Hussein's regime, we had a team of unembedded citizen journalists on the ground in Baghdad with a satellite modem during "Shock and Awe". That was hardcore. I look back and can't believe that we pulled it off. Local journalist Jeff Guntzel, who was the main person working on that site with me, and I have had a few conversations about that project in the years since. Typically, we just end up shaking our heads at the craziness of doing something like that. Of having to do something like that. We met a couple of times at the protests, once in a cafe, once running from police at a demonstration. "Hi Jeff", I said as police horses came at us. "Hey, can't stop right now," he replied with a smile. These things matter. The undeniable quality and integrity of projects like Electronic Iraq and the Electronic Intifada altered the mainstream media discourse in the United States, something that Newsday gave us a shout out for way back when. And, most significantly, I didn't need a press card to achieve any of it. I didn't need to be "employed" by a "media organization" to tell the truth about what was going on in front of my eyes and utilize the cost-effective, universally accessible Internet to disseminate it. Did you know that there's no way for independent journalists to get a general, nationally-recognized, press card in America?
Some of the footage from the last week is really hard to watch. Police pepper spraying people at point blank and even bike cops using their bikes to hit protesters. Check it out (video on the right). Video documentation organizations such as the Glass Bead Collective who were targeted before anything had happened and like IndyMedia matter because accountability matters. Not allowing the world to dehumanize protesters by swallowing transparent police propaganda that falsely claimed that "anarchists" were planning to "throw feces at police" matters. I wonder who thought that smear up, pardon the pun. Nothing was thrown all week. People did not attack police but they sure as hell started retaliating by the end of the week.
A few windows downtown got broken of the First National Bank and Macy's. Around 10 people were involved out of the tens of thousands of protesters in town. We should be able to survive a few incidents like that without turning our town into a police state. Of the protests I went to, all the people behaved themselves. No one threatened the police, no one broke anything.
The only violence directed at police all week involved an incident yesterday when police were letting loose at people in a St. Paul housing project with their full arsenal of teargas and projectile weapons. After a week of this bullshit, people threw stones at the police. It wasn't going to injure them with their Robocop getup, but by the end of the Convention, I could name a few commercial media journalists who probably would have joined in. The preemptive nature of most of the raids was also creepy, reminiscent of the concept of "thought crime" in Orwell's 1984 or "precrime squads" from Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. Even the St. Paul City Council petitioned the mayor and police chief to dial it the hell down after seeing the widespread arrests of journalists and confiscation of their property. We're nice in this state. That stuff tends to grate among a significant portion of the population.
The St. Paul Pioneer Press is reporting that authorities arrested 818 people so far--716 in St. Paul and 102 in Minneapolis, the latter mostly in the aftermath of Wednesday's Rage Against The Machine concert in the Target Center, at which the MPD stupidly believed it would be a good idea to have the exiting concert goers greeted by fully armed riot police and an ATV outfitted with a teargas cannon. Nice job, lads. Don't escalate--or create--a problem or anything.
They performed Bulls on Parade and Killing in the Name Of through a megaphone. No matter. A crowd of thousands chanting "Fuck you I won't do what you told me" probably communicated all that was needed to the police chief of the city who apparently gets to decide what bands can play at protest marches. Check out the video (right), it's pretty funny. Reports are coming out that some of those arrested had bags put over their heads and were slapped around, reminiscent of military interrogations during the war on terror. Much of the footage captured this week by independent journalists shows police behaving reprehensibly.  One story I heard, several police officers had arrested a women demonstrator, one cop with his knee on her back and arm round her throat. He did this until she lost control of her bowels and shat herself. Yes, you should be angry that we have ceded Abu Ghraib-level power to abuse people to cops on our streets. If you're not completely pissed off, something is wrong with you. So, that's all folks. I may write some more before I'm 100% done but this is a fair account of what happened to our town and community during this last week and--most significantly--to our freedom of expression. The single photo at the top of this page and on the feature cover (linked below) was worth the painful process of grabbing a camera and subjecting myself to having to watch our Lutheran Police State in action. Webmasters wishing to link to this journal series can link to the permalink with the cool feature front cover at http://nigelparry.com/republican-national-convention/ |
