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."

Oblig.

FUCK THE POLICE!

Re:Oblig.

If only it were the police; it looks like the FBI may be involved as well http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/31/raids/index.html [salon.com]

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

Re:Oblig.

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.

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.

also

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:also

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.

Get a tiny bit of perspective - things have been like this before the Conventions since the '68 DNC Riots. Or did you not notice the guy who was arrested in Denver for checking into a hotel just before the DNC with a couple rifles? No reason to believe he was doing anything wrong, other than having a rifle near a Democrat, but that's the way it goes.

Admittedly, the Secret Service types have to be especially sensitive to the possibility of someone trying to do in Obama. I don't think it'll happen, but that opinion changes from day to day....

Re:Oblig.

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

This is not how you stop riots...

... 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.

Re:This is not how you stop riots...

Well a couple of brain dead anarchists breaking windows and throwing bottles does not create a riot. Cops over reacting to those couple of people and treating the entire crowd as IF they are those couple of people and then driving them all into a residential neighborhood of people who have nothing to do with any of it DOES create a riot.

Re:This is not how you stop riots...

Whelan says his roommate, Erin Stalmaker, went out to talk to talk to the police. She asked the officers why they were there. The officers asked why people were running away from them. Erin reportedly told the officers that their drawn automatic weapons probably had something to do with it. She was detained after asking to see a warrant.

http://firedoglake.com/2008/08/30/inside-an-rnc-raid/ [firedoglake.com]

If this is true (being arrested after asking to see a warrant; no warrant being produced), this is insane. Heads must roll for this; our country absolutely depends on it.

In Soviet Russia.

In Soviet Russia, you didn't have the right to peaceful assembly or to travel without showing your papers.

I wish there was a joke I could make here.

Re:In Soviet Russia.

Actually, you COULD travel inside the USSR without showing papers. Train and airplane tickets were anonymous and you did not need to show ID to board a train or an airplane.

Re:In Soviet Russia.

No, it was more complicated. You could stay for about 3 months without needing any permits. In fact a lot of students used to travel during summer to all parts of the USSR without any problems.

However, you needed a stay permit (it was called 'propiska') to permanently move to another city. Getting this permit was a quite different story.

PS: I'm not saying that USSR was a very nice place overall. But there were good parts which I miss...

Anarchists?

Isn't that what they blamed stuff on pre-WW I? What kill the kaiser think? God help us if Ferdinand is shot!

Re:Anarchists?

Ferdinand was a classmate of John McCain, you insensitive clod!

sad day

Stuff like this really makes me sad. Just 20 or 30 years ago, demonstrations could get out of hand, but I think that is part of free speech. Now, any speech off script by either party is squashed as if it was soviet russia. Maybe mrs mccain should rethink the trip to georgia she just took. Maybe instead of taking democracy around the world, we could start by re-invigorating freedom here at home. I'm afraid to predict the next 20 or 30 years. I'm sure it will include many cameras, microphones, drone planes and fear.

Repeat of the NY Republican Convention

This happened in NY City in 2004 [usatoday.com] during the Republican Convention although the police waited until the convention had started. My brother was one of the thousands swept up in the sweeps the police did to clear protesters from the street. His lawsuit is still pending, most likely he will wind up with a nice settlement, but the goal was to get these "troublemakers" off the street and that was accomplished. The same marching orders are likely in effect for the Republican Convention this year, and by the time the lawsuits are settled in four years the next election will be on the horizon. Kind of depressing that the police can get away with this bs.

And you guys want to bring democracy to others?

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:Disruption != peaceably assembling

Were they planning on doing something illegal? I doubt it.

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs.

I don't call this freedom.

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

From: http://www.nornc.org/ [nornc.org]

This isn't a peaceful assembly if you ask me:

"How we get there (the strategy):
1. Start Strong - Throw all of our energy into the first day. We'll kick this off right and stretch the militarized police state out so far that it can no longer contain and suppress our voices and desires.

2. Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."

This is the group that the Star article describes as having been arrested.

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

Transportation Troubles - This includes blockades downtown (at key intersections), on bridges (10 bridges over the Mississippi River in the metro area), and other sporadic and strategic targets (busses, hotel and airport shuttles etc)."

Nothing like annoying thousands of people who are late getting to work to convince them that your cause is just.....

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

This is how we do it in a civilised country [bbc.co.uk]

Note the quote from the police - Police said despite the massive traffic disruption on the motorway, the man had the right to protest peacefully.

Bob

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

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.

Re:Disruption != peaceably assembling

It obviously doesn't.

But consider this : in order for Those In Power to keep their power, they have to do a number of things;

1) Subvert the Constitution - because it gets in the way of their plans.
2) Create an atmosphere of Fear - this is accomplished in a number of ways;
        a) Create more criminals - this is done by adding lots of laws.
        b) Engineer situations where you can create enough world tension that eventually you can say you
              are in a permanent state of "war".
3) Dumb the people down - again, this can be accomplished in a number of ways;
        a) Culturally - dumb down the Press, TV
        b) Educationally - dumb down the system.

What you have seen is the use of point 2)(a) in that basically They Can Get You For Anything if you do something
to disrupt their plans.

Welcome, America, to your Police State.

Re:Unconventional weaponry

They took along *anything* and *everything* that might be related to possible riots. When they raided a home that wasn't actually the correct home, they still detained people for over and hour while they obtained the correct warrant. When I read that I posted that I was concerned that when I arrived at home that I too would find cops on my doorstep [twitter.com] because after all, that was the point of all of this horseshit.

When you finally hear from the other side you learn that the "buckets of urine" was actually gray water used to flush the toilet [blogspot.com] (my father developed a tank system in the 1980s that used shower/tub water to flush the toilet which saved us so much money that the water company came out 3 or 4 different times to replace the meter because they thought it was defective).

I have been ashamed to be an American for a long ass time but between the Ramsey County Sheriff's response to this event, the confiscation of camera equipment in the name of Homeland Security for the RNC [twincities.com], and using Blackwater mercenaries in New Orleans in preparation for Gustav [wired.com] I am not quite sure I am actually living in the United States of America anymore.

I am disgusted to be a Minnesota and United States resident. This is fucking shameful and horrifying. There is absolutely no excuse for this type of free speech violation. This is a stupid political rally, not a fucking war on our soil. Personally I'd love to join the protests but I seriously fear for my freedom and my life. I am not against the RNC but I am definitely against the manner in which protesting is being handled.

FUCK YOU AMERICA.

For live footage of raids and other First Amendment violations, check out The UpTake [qik.com] on Qik.com.