But it wasn’t just radical videographers and independent media makers who were hounded by an overwhelming, federally funded force. Impartial legal observers, too, were harassed, as the on-the-ground legal-support network to assist RNC protesters, the six-member Twin Cities–based Coldsnap Legal Collective, explains.
“These officers did their best to hamper legal-support efforts,” writes Coldsnap in a group e-mail, “as well as support efforts from street medics, groups providing free meals, and other groups.” Such tactics, the e-mail continues, included “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.”
For many observers, even independent ones, the crackdowns at the RNC went above and beyond what we’ve come to call police brutality.
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 stultification of constitutionally guaranteed rights to free assembly and speech. In a supposed effort to protect citizens, the infrastructure put in place by protesters to demonstrate safely was attacked by police. More overtly, they 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 Associated Press reporter pulled me aside before an event billed as 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?)
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. As long as that act is still in effect, it seems, even proximity to dissent against the current administration can be defined as terrorism.
On September 19, St. Paul mayor Chris Coleman announced that the city would decline to prosecute journalists detained over the course of the RNC for most minor offenses, including unlawful assembly. 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 — or to reassure the public that no journalists would face charges.
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 — an independent publication devoted to music, art, and politics that ran for 13 years — that would have devoted entire issues to covering the police torture at the conventions), we’re confronted with a situation in which we can receive stunningly little information about this unparalleled attack not just on democracy, and not just on civil rights, but on our lives. As one journalist put it, nothing about the aggressive display of force made sense — unless you viewed it as an act of war.
It’s a war that’s still being waged. As this story goes to press, residents of St. Paul are being harassed by police over alleged involvement in protests. Court dates are coming up. And groups such as I-Witness Video will continue to collect documentary evidence as to what exactly transpired.
“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 protesters,” for example, as Clancy explains, “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.
