In MN, Massive Police Raids On Suspected Protestors

X0563511 alerts us to events in Minneapolis and St. Paul in advance of the Republican convention (which has been put on hold because of Hurricane Gustav). Local police backed by the FBI raided a number of homes and public buildings and confiscated computers and other material. From Salon.com: "Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than 'fire code violations,' and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying. Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning — one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided." Here is local reporting from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "Aided by informants planted in protest groups, authorities raided at least six buildings across St. Paul and Minneapolis to stop an 'anarchist' plan to disrupt this week's Republican National Convention. From Friday night through Saturday afternoon, officers surrounded houses, broke down doors, handcuffed scores of people and confiscated suspected tools of civil disobedience ... A St. Paul City Council member described it as excessive, while activists, many of whom were detained and then released without charges, called it intimidation designed to quash free speech."

Comments

Oblig.

[Anonymous Coward]

FUCK THE POLICE!

Re:Oblig.

[Shakrai]

For the sake of the country, the people responsible for these raids must be fired (and very possibly sent to prison) for this

If you think that will actually happen, can I have some of what you are smoking?

Re:Oblig.

[24-bit Voxel]

We've almost hit rock bottom. It feels like the last 8 years were just a litmus test to see how much corruption we as a nation would turn our heads to. The answer appears to be all of it.

Re:Oblig.

[techsoldaten]

No joke. When did South Central police tactics become apros po for college kids and uppity hippies pushing 60? Easy must be having a laugh right now.

Something important to remember here is that the some of the groups being raided are the same ones who, in 2006, helped overturn over 400 bogus arrests where video directly conradicted sworn police testimony.

It's the cameras, and the citizen journalists, and the people on the Internet who the police are afraid of. I don't presume to judge every John Law out there but this is really bad what they are doing in MN.

Of course the networks pay it no heed :)

M

Re:Oblig.

[liquidsin]

this is scarier because of your reaction. if there had been any physical altercation, we'd be hearing about police brutality and terrorism, and we'd be hearing it a lot. but because people (like yourself) are willing to let it get swept under the rug when it's "dirty hippies" getting their voices silenced, the fascists will just continue to erode your rights. not oppression indeed...

Re:Oblig.

[Jafafa Hots]

It's interesting... in an earlier post of yours you talk about how it's perfectly legal for people to take photos in a public place where there's no expectation of privacy.

And now you post this. Do you realize that some of the people attacked (yes, attacked) by the authorities were NOT people planning protests, but rather people (and legal reps) planning merely to OBSERVE protests and videotape them to insure that people's rights are not violated? To make sure that the authorities don't commit crimes?

But no, you applaud this, because you're an authoritarian fuckwit hypocrite who is happy to see the law violated and rights trammeled upon, as long as the victims are people you don't like.

Actions like the police have done are eroding our civil rights - your civil rights. But you still have some. Stop now and think of those rights you still have. Now stop and realize, if you're capable of it, that the reason you HAVE those rights is because the people you detest - the liberals, the ACLU, the civil rights activists - fought for them. Fought for them in the streets and in the courts, against the attacks on them coming from people who think like you. People who are like you.

The people you detest fight for your rights against the attacks of people like you.

This is not how you stop riots...

[Foofoobar]

... this is how you START them. This coming from someone from Seattle who lived on Capitol Hill during the WTO riots and had police overreact and create a situation when none existed.

also

[globaljustin]

FUCK THE POLICE!

And the sheriff's office, and the FBI, and DHS, and ICE, and the mainstream media, and us...

Yep, us too. Every US citizen bears some responsibility. We should demand media coverage of these obvious civil rights violations, these people aren't violent anarchists, they are citizens protesting the government. We should demand a police force that upholds the law instead of subverting it. We should elect the leaders who will do the most to protect our civil rights.

We've been tolerating this kind of behavior since 9/11 out of fear. It's time to admit to ourselves that we overreacted to the events of 9/11 and allowed our government to trash our civil rights in the name of protecting us.

We let fascists take our country from us in the name of making a 'war on terror.'

Vote. Email or write your local, state and federal representatives. Email local and national news. Protest.

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

[BitterOldGUy]

Let's say they did have a warrant. Why did they refuse?

The police have a higher standard to hold to because they're the professionals. If they can't follow the law then they have no business enforcing it.

And you guys want to bring democracy to others?

[Britz]

I mean I don't want to barge ahead. We only read the accounts of one side, but if it is even remotly true the US of A is far from being a free country. Why would the police even want to intimidate people that way? Only if there was a political reason. Semi-random police brutality is one thing, but the report looks like those were fairly large scale orchestrated moves by the police to influence politics. When the police stops working as law enforcment and starts working for a political party how far is that from a banana republic?

And then the W guy comes up and talks about spreading democracy in the middle east? How about spreading it in Minneapolis?

Re:And you guys want to bring democracy to others?

[shma]

And then the W guy comes up and talks about spreading democracy in the middle east? How about spreading it in Minneapolis?

I want to quote something directly from one of Greenwald's updates to the piece here, which directly addresses this point:

During the Olympics just weeks ago, there was endless hand-wringing over the efforts by the Chinese Government to squelch dissent and incarcerate protesters. On August 21, The Washington Post fretted:

Six Americans detained by police this week could be held for 10 days, according to Chinese authorities, who appear to be intensifying their efforts to shut down any public demonstrations during the final days of the Olympic Games. . . . Chinese Olympic officials announced last month that Beijing would set up zones where people could protest during the Games, as long as they had received permission. None of the 77 applications submitted was approved, however, and several other would-be protesters were stopped from even applying.

On August 2, The Post gravely warned:

Behind the gray walls and barbed wire of the prison here, eight Chinese farmers with a grievance against the government have been consigned to Olympic limbo. Their indefinite detainment, relatives and neighbors said, is the price they are paying for stirring up trouble as China prepares to host the Beijing Games. Trouble, the Communist Party has made clear, will not be permitted.

Would The Washington Post ever use such dark and accusatory tones to describe what the U.S. Government does? Of course it wouldn't. Yet how is our own Government's behavior in Minnesota any different than what the Chinese did to its protesters during the Olympics (other than the fact that we actually have a Constitution that prohibits such behavior)? And where are all the self-righteous Freedom Crusaders in our nation's establishment organs who were so flamboyantly criticizing the actions of a Government on the other side of the globe as our own Government engages in the same tyrannical, protest-squelching conduct with exactly the same motives?

The other side?

[DoofusOfDeath]

In my experience, hearing just one side of a story almost always leaves out important facts.

Before we go apeshit, shouldn't we maybe get the government's / police's side of the story?

I'm not saying that nothing bad happened here, just that until we know (or at least give an opportunity to be voiced) both sides of the story, we're really flying blind.

Re:No protesters at the DNC?

[fermion]

There were protests at the convention. One involved a bunch of veterans pulling a publicity stunt by blocking access to the convention. One of the spokespeople said they were hoping they could incite a response and prove that democrats did not care about veterans. In the end, the ringleader was allowed in to talk to an Obama staff member. You see that is what civilized people do. Talk out their grievances. When you over react and begin to violate civil rights, you simply prove that the corruption and greed they are protesting against is real. This is why the KKK is allowed to wander around aimlessly and harmlessly on city streets. They just want to start something, and blame the other guy. The protestors, like the terrorist, have won. The republican party has proven itself a bunch of whiners, unable to cope with the real world.

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

[TheRealMindChild]

They might have refused because they didn't want the person on whom they were serving a warrant to call up their lawyer and have him hover over the officers' shoulder to make sure they didn't overstep the bounds of the warrant.

TOUGH SHIT.

Re:Rock bottom

[Firehed]

Right, so what you're saying is that because it's not as bad as a century ago, it's OK? There was also a point where not actively following the state's religion would get you killed. That doesn't make today's religious hysteria acceptable, even if it's not as bad relatively speaking (though it seems we're headed back in that direction).

Please get out of the country now, for everyone's sake.

Re:Rock bottom

[falconwolf]

I'm talking about the political and legal history of the United States since 1860. Compared to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, the crackdown on civil rights has been tame, compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics.

Two wrongs don't make a right. Just because what happened before was worse doesn't make this ok.

Falcon

Re:Republican bashing??? It's ILLEGAL!!!

[Mr. Slippery]

The story submitter could have just as easily linked to *both* stories about illegal arrests before both conventions.

Anyone who RTFA would see the author's observation that "...Denver was the site of several quite ugly incidents where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether."

So if the submitter had an agenda to conceal that abuses happened in Denver, he did a crappy job of it.

However, the Denver abuses seem to have been mostly garden-variety police thuggery; these Minnesota raids involved the FBI and included months-long espionage and infiltration. One of the groups specifically targeted is "I-Witness Video", a group that did a great job capturing exposing thuggery and perjury by police during the 2004 Republican convention.

Re:Rock bottom

[Mr. Slippery]

Compared to the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, the crackdown on civil rights has been tame

And compared to Joe Stalin, Jeffrey Dahmer was a piker at murder. Your point?

I'll also note that WWI and WWII were actual declared wars. We are not in a state of war with any nation at the moment.

compared to the dangerous faced with new asymmetrical weapons and tactics.

More people die from drowning every year than were killed on 9/11; to claim that we face a terrorist danger necessitating that we abandon our civil liberties is ridiculous.

Re:Rock bottom

[RustinHWright]

So aircraft flying into some of the tallest buildings on Earth, and one flying to the largest office building on Earth and leaving 3,000 dead is an "idea"?

No, that isn't a war. That's a CRIME. Like a bank robbery or somebody going off to kill everybody in the local school or church or post office. Like, for that matter, Timothy McVeigh and his buddies. Oh, make no mistake, it was a horrific crime. One even more effective that the Japanese subway gas attacks. I assure you that I take no pleasure in being in the World Trade Center Health Registry, like all the tens of thousands of us who still don't know how much damage those attacks did to us.
But it was not an act of war. Especially since even if we want to blame the Taliban, most of the world's governments, including our own, were loudly proclaiming that they weren't the legitimate government of Afghanistan even before 9/11.

Re:Weird....there are TWO FA's..

[JasterBobaMereel]

Gun - Legal (and quite normal) if you have the papers
Knife - Legal (in a private residence)
Bow and arrows - Legal
Flammable liquids - Legal
Paint - Legal
Slingshots - Legal
Rocks - legal
Buckets of Urine - Legal (odd, but Legal)

So they had this stuff in a private residence, all of it legal, and ....