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multimedia blog "Police and technology", R.N.C. Diary (part 2) Nigel Parry, Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 3 September 2008
Pocket of Resistance's first show on Sunday went really well although sadly we didn't get a soundboard recording. There's another show coming up on September 11th. The new songs, Peacemakers (lyrics just added to site) and The Color of Life, went really well. Hell, it all went well. I've not been writing since part 1 largely because I've been taking the events of the week in, processing video and images, and it's been a tiring week. I'm writing this on the night of Wednesday, September 3rd. I just got back from St. Paul today, where I've been since Sunday August 31st. It's nice to be back in a non-stressful environment. Everyone in Downtown St. Paul is wired right now.
Before the Convention started, I was prepared to find out what was going to happen in the city over the coming week. Not only was I able to briefly hang out 24/7 in a neighborhood in which I'd lived for 5 years, but technology sure has changed things. For the police too. $50 million bucks of federal money was tossed at the various Minnesotan police forces before the Convention, and they were armed with the latest protective equipment, communications systems, and "less lethal" riot weapons including plastic bullets, teargas, pepper spray, percussion grenades, and batons.
Then there were the M-16s and other automatic weapons (see below for video I shot in Mears Park protest on September 2nd).
Riot police, bike police, police from Texas and even Tucson, Arizona, undercover police who've been infiltrating the protester circles for over a year, secret service, National Guards, Federal Marshals, SWAT--you name it, we've seen it this week. And these folks turn up to the most innocuous events, such as this tiny demonstration of what must have been a few hundred people. See this You Tube video of the marchers to get a sense of the relaxed vibe when the police weren't stoking the flames. The week also saw two National Guardsmen, stationed across the road, repeatedly peering into our studio window with binoculars. At least 100 creepy SUVs zoomed around town with tinted windows, sometimes a number chalked in white on the back window, but no departmental markings that identified the occupants. No accountability basically. As the Convention approached, we heard about several instances of independent journalists, organizers, and protesters having their homes raided, being detained, or having their equipment seized. The HQ of the protest chill-out space rented in downtown St. Paul was raided as the 70 or so people there, ranging from age 5 to age 85, were watching a movie and eating. While the RNC Welcoming Committee was responsible for the Convergence Space, it was essentially the intended meeting spot for all activists coming to town for the Convention, offering services like any other tourist information center and a meeting place. When it was raided, police kicked down doors, came in with guns waving, yelled at everyone to get down on their faces on the ground, scaring the crap out of everyone. Which was the point. They let protesters go if they agreed to be photographed. There were a few solidarity events in the space after that night but, let's face it, after a violent raid, the Convergence Space could never really recover to work as advertised. One RNC Welcoming Committee Member was snatched just a couple of blocks from my home in Minneapolis. Sometimes these events would go down like a movie, with plain clothes people literally snatching people off the streets into unmarked cars and driving off. And the repeated targeting of independent media organizations which exist to document police behavior, such as the I-Witness project, was inexcusable. Before anything had even happened, riot batons were being waved at film cameras. The search warrants served on the homes were listing items that together read like a terrorist bomb-making kit, but which are also very common household items. The context of the items that were actually found was also at times hysterically amusing--unless of course you were one of those at the end of the barrel of being charged with "conspiracy to commit riot in the second degree in furtherance of terrorism" under Minnesota's adaptation of the PATRIOT Act. Some of the things seized and listed as evidence of a crime included car tires, tools, and paint cans taken from the home's garage. You could have found the same things in any house along the street.
Yet all of this is written on the confiscation list, appended to the search warrant, with not even a flickering sense of irony. Just looking at most of the things on the list, I started thinking about my own home and what lay in it. Reports of police confiscating banner-making materials such as paint were endemic over the last several days. Does that mean that one should get rid of all paper in the house prior to national political events taking place in our town, lest someone suspects us of planning to produce a leaflet? Damn, it came right down to that level of funny/not funny at all governmental wrongness on so many occasions last week. The 8 members of the RNC Welcoming Committee are all facing charges of terrorist conspiracy that could land them in prison for seven and a half years. Bear in mind that most of them were arrested before the Convention even started. The application for search warrants tells a pitiful tale of two paid informants and one undercover cop in both RNC Welcoming Committee and various regional affinity group meetings of as little as 50 people. You won't believe this one... And that application contains some bald-faced, pants on fire, nose-growing, undeniable lying about the nature of the threat. You won't believe this one. Here's the text from part of the application from the search warrant, talking about one of the films the anarchists made: On August 27, 2007, the RNCWC released a video that was posted on their website. This video depicts several persons dressed in "black bloc" attire with their faces covered to disguise their identity. It should be noted that "black bloc" is not a particular group, but a tactic that typically dresses in black with faces covered and have caused significant property damage and carried out acts of violence towards law enforcement in the past. During one scene, an individual (identified as Carrie Feldman by several sources) is seen throwing a Molotov cocktail. In another scene, this same Feldman (still dressed in black bloc attire) hands a bolt cutter to another individual similarly dressed in black bloc attire. Also, Feldman also rolls a bowling balllabled "RABL" in front of a military recruiting station. It should be noted that RABL is an acronym for an anarchist group known as the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League. The RABL was responsible for vandalizing military recruiting stations by throwing bowling balls through the windows. Finally, the video depicts an individual throwing rocks at persons dressed as riot police. The video ends with text that states "We're getting ready... What are you doing? ...RNC 2008, St. Paul... pReNC Aug. 31 -Sept. 3, 07... Learn more at: RNCWelcomingCommittee.org... starring Robyn B... Made possible by the RNC Welcoming Committee." CRI2 reviewed this video and identified the following individuals: Garrett Fitzgerald, Scott Demuth and Carrie Feldman. Additionally, information was received from CRI2 that Gus Ganley produced and edited the video.Scary shit isn't it? Now watch the actual video being described and marvel that any member of a law enforcement agency could sit down and write the above with a straight face, never mind submit it to a judge: "The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth..." The cop who wrote that warrant, his commanding officer that approved it, the police chief that oversaw this--those are the people who scare me. Not the few monkeys swinging round town dressed in black with bandannas over their faces. Bruce Nester, President of the Minneapolis chapter of the National Lawyers Guild said in an interview after one of the RNC Welcoming Committee people was arrested, the arrests "are designed to keep people off the streets and scare people from participating in protest activity." Nester has had a lot of good things to say this week. Check out this You Tube interview with Bruce Nestor. And here's the full text of the warrant application.
I was able to go to Twitter's website and sign up for reports from all the various sectors, which would arrive as text messages on my cellphone. I subscribed to the local newspaper, the St. Paul Pioneer Press's feed, a legal observer feed, the medics feed, etc. I added an MTV reporter's feed, the feed of a Republican delegate, and the feed of a waitress that works in a restaurant near the Xcel Energy Center where the Convention is held. As September 1st rolled in, it was spectacular. To begin with, everyone knew immediately that people were being targeted before the Convention even began. And on the first day, that little cellphone was the equivalent of having a fleet of helicopters in the sky. I knew what was going on for 8 blocks in every direction as it was happening. What the protesters were doing, where the police were congregating, where legal observers or medics were needed, what weapons were being deployed on protesters.
Helicopters hovered over different parts of downtown St. Paul on and off during the last few days. The days and nights would be interrupted every now and then by sudden choirs of sirens rushing from one neighborhood to another. If the people with cellphones on the ground were doing their jobs, and sometimes reports were spotty, you already knew what was going down by the time you heard the second siren join in.
It was very cool seeing this technology working at the expense of the State for the simple reason that it is always very reassuring to remember that we citizens don't need $50 million bucks to defend ourselves when the State is running amok. We just need to get organized and use the tools that are already in our hands. These cellphone feeds mobilized legal observers and videographers, who used their presence and citizen-collected evidence to get charges dropped for 400 people during the New York Republican National Convention in 2004. The police apparently don't like being the ones whose parade is being pissed on, so they arrested the journalist collective that was putting out these invaluable Twitter feeds and seized their equipment. On day two the feeds fell silent. From that point on, Coldsnap legal observers, the Twin Cities IndyMedia, and the Pioneer Press were the main Twitter shows in town.  The propaganda was fierce. We've heard much about police seizing urine and feces that demonstrators were supposedly planning to throw at delegates and police, a "fact" that was repeated a ton in the media until one assumed it was true. To my knowledge, no urine or feces has been seized anywhere in the raids, and there's really no history of that happening in previous protests at Conventions and WTO meetings. Are we really expected to believe that protesters who had gone to the trouble of renting a downtown space were sitting in it with buckets of shit lined up against the walls? You'd have to really have done some inhumane shit to the protesters in your head to be that credulous. And some really dumb shit in your own head. Guilty, anyone? The Pioneer Press put out an article suggesting that urine and pretty much everything else on the scary search warrant list was actually found at the Convergence Space, but no one I spoke to who was in the Center confirmed that anything except computers, cellphones, and leaflets was taken. Lawyer Bruce Nester denied there was any evidence of illegal behavior seized. Significantly, the Minneapolis Star Tribune didn't go there, and where it got close it certainly didn't report it breathlessly. What it looked like was that the Pioneer Press had mistakenly reprinted the warrant wish list and clumsily presented it as if it were the list of things actually seized. It looked to me like they screwed up and allowed the St. Paul Sheriff's Department to get away with some really low-level propaganda. The newspaper should have realized. The police story was way too good to be true. If there was any urine found anywhere, it'll test positive for cop piss. There's a lot more to say from the last few days but it's late, I still have a ton of video to process, and I at least want to get this much online before tomorrow. CLICK HERE FOR PART THREE OF THE RNC DIARY Related Links 
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