Best of the RNC: Outside the green zone edition

Nice work.

Your version is quite different from the version circulated by the Pioneer Press which is the “official” version of events on Thursday:

“On the last day of the Republican National Convention, police had information that people wanted to riot downtown, St. Paul's police chief said this morning.

“We knew they were going to do a sit-down,” said John Harrington. “We knew that there were going to be people … that were going to attempt to then run into the city and do damage.”

Part of the police plan was not to get “bogged down” with “passive protesters,” but to “pay more attention to … (people) describing themselves as direct-action protesters … I think another word for that would be rioters.”

Harrington also said some planned arson.

The Anti-War Committee had a permit to march until 5 p.m.

A separate group from the Anti-War Committee wanted to go downtown to “use arson to disrupt the convention, to take out parts of downtown St. Paul,” Harrington said. “And we had a mission and a plan that was going to stop them. … Nothing burned in downtown St. Paul, no one was injured in downtown St. Paul.”

Police were aware of “a plot to use Molotov cocktails to attack the” Xcel Energy Center and the public viewing area, Harrington said.

Police arrested 396 people in St. Paul on Thursday in connection with RNC activities, Harrington said. Less than 25 were for felonies or gross misdemeanors, and the rest were for unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor, he said.

The total RNC-related arrests were 818, Harrington said.

Police took a slightly different approach to controlling the crowd
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Thursday, after groups ran through the streets Monday, damaging property and assaulting officers, Harrington said.

“We learned what worked, we learned some things that didn't work very well,” he said. “We found out that the protesters, as a strategy, liked having us chase them around. We discovered that wasn't terribly effective for us. And so we said … rather than us chasing them, why don't we just put people up so they can't run around? That seemed to work much better. It allowed us to not give them access to the places they wanted to do damage to.”

Asked at this morning's press briefing whether the police strategy involved rounding people up, arresting them and sorting out the details later, Harrington said it wasn't.

“Our strategy was … to keep giving people opportunities,” he said. “'Please get up. Please leave the bridge. Please get up. You can go north from the Capitol.' “

Police tried to work with the Anti-War Committee, which had a permit for a rally and a march Thursday, to get them to march before the permit expired, Harrington said.

“They made a choice…,” he said. “They were going to have hundreds of people sit down and act in a civil disobedience. That certainly is their right.”

Mayor Chris Coleman said the city's goal from the beginning was to have a safe and successful convention.

“We clearly have done that,” he said this morning. “This is not easy. There were threats to our community, there were people that were here to disrupt our community, but they did not succeed. They did not shut down the convention, as was their stated intent.”

Coleman said St. Paul residents “know what a great community we have, we know why people love the city of St. Paul.

“But we were able to tell that story in a way that we have never been able to tell that story before. We put St. Paul on a map that it's never been on before, as a city that could host any event, as a city that could welcome people from around the globe, as a city that shines. We really shined this week.”

In a mass arrest on the Marion Street bridge over Interstate 94 on Thursday night, some journalists covering the event were swept up and arrested themselves. Harrington said about two dozen arrested and cited Thursday were journalists.

In total, 30 or more people who said they were journalists or had media credentials were arrested during the RNC, Harrington said.

“We recognize that media folks … are there doing the job,” Harrington said. But he also said police had told journalists that when officers declare that there's an unlawful assembly, “the media isn't exempt from legal order and have to move.”

Barriers blocking roads and sidewalks are going down around St. Paul.

“The guests are gone,” Coleman said. “It's time to clean up the dishes.”

http://www.twincities.com/ci_10390118

Notice how the Chief of Police says that the parade permit expired at 5:00 p.m. That's different from what's been reported here, as if that makes any difference. In the East Metro edition of the PiPress, the reported version is about how the cops were constantly maneuvering as in a military maneuver against “anarchists” who are reported to be equally militant.
After 8 years of Bush and Media disinformation, I doubt most of what the PiPress reports. It would be nice to think our local elected officials might be able to conduct an investigation that would weed out the fact from propaganda from this week.

Jonerik,

You should read accounts here of the protest from the Capitol. Almost everyone said it was peaceful. And when they were forced onto the bridge, they found that there was nowhere else to go. Even if they wanted to leave, they couldn't.

It's also interesting to see this PiPress claim again: “Police took a slightly different approach to controlling the crowd Thursday, after groups ran through the streets Monday, damaging property and assaulting officers,” Harrington said.

According to the police, only one officer was “assaulted.” And there is video of that (which I cannot find right now), and I saw it first hand. An officer had wrestled one kid to the ground. He started to beat him. Another kid came and jumped on the officer's back, forcing him to let go of the kid he was holding.

So I am a little surprised that they are now talking about “assaults,” when they said the other day there was one, if you can consider that incident an assault.

Are you talking about Thursday evening? I was actually there, and anyone who wanted to could walk off the bridge by walking away from the Riot cops, toward the capitol. Then they could turn left towards the big SEARS sign, and head up the hill to join the 50 – 100 people watching them and wondering what the hell they were trying to accomplish. I saw people walking out of the protest until 6:30 when I got bored and left.
It would have been really cool if another, smaller group of people had been ready to take advantage of the distraction that had most of the cops engaged, and rushed the convention, or carried out some other action against the thieves, liars, and war criminals of the RNC, but it seems that the whole point of the protest march was to stand around until everyone could get arrested. Why? Just getting arrested doesn't accomplish anything!
This lack of any strategy or tactical planning to win, combined with militant public statements on the web and the “journalists” whining that they are getting arrested when they blatantly interfere with the police during tense situations –plus the knowledge that police always beat, tear gas and pepper spray people at these events– is why I didn't join the marches or protests.
I consider myself an anarchist, but jeez, what a bunch of whiny babies and un-prepared, self-absorbed privileged dufus's y'all seemed like this week. I'd say the police state won this battle big time. Hope we learn from this and move on to being productive and honoring other people's ability to smell BS from a mile away, instead of being reactive and full of hot air.
Let's be honest- most of the people out there in the street just wanted to have fun, get into a dramatic confrontation and have a story to tell their friends about how they got arrested or tear gassed. Indymedia is not a news source, and people “working for” indymedia are not “reporters” – they're activists who have a website. Most of the people claiming to be reporters are just wanna-be activists with expensive camera phones- they're not trying to give an unbiased account of what happened here, or what the real issues are, they just want to be close to the drama without actually getting arrested. There's no reason for there to be five cameras for every person who is actually protesting. Put down your gear and get in the street already! Or go home and read some real news.
There were some really dangerous things going on in the past week- illegal pre-emptive raids, psy-ops campaigns trying to associate urine and feces with anarchy, apparently torture was going on in the jails. Why not focus on that instead of whining about how Amy Goodman got arrested while yelling at cops who thought they were in the middle of a riot, or whining about how there was no way to get out of a three way intersection that the cops had blocked two sides of.

I'm not entirely surprised by the PiPress coverage; it's the “Fox News” print version for the Twin Cities. The part i quoted from above was from the online version. The online version did not have the version printed in the Washington County edition entitled: “Tactics Similar as cops, protestrts dueled in streets”. The “protesters” part of the article starts this way:

“Actions: The self-styled anarchist groups planned to use a strategy of “swarm, seize and stay” to stop the republican delegates from holding their Monday-through-Thursday convention. They divided downtown into seven sectors, asking anarchist groups arriving from around the country to adopt them.

“On Monday, groups arrived en masse in an area, seemingly out of nowhere, to claim an intersection or strip of roadway, and then hold it until pushed back by police officers in riot gear.”

Thgis piece goes on to describe how well organized the “anarchists”, i..e the “protesters” were, with little sections on “roadblocks”, Offensive equipment”, “defensive equipment”, “anonymity”, “communication” (Protesters and their supporters largely organized their efforts via the Internet. Twitter, an online service for mass broadcasting in the form of short text snippets, was particularly important.”)(I'm surprised the PiPress didn;t accuse the Minnesota Independent in being complicit in this “anarchist uprising”); and, of course, “counterintelligence” (”On Tuesday at a Mears park rally, analrchists outed three people dressed like them who then drove off. . .”).

The “police section” has similar sections devoted to “numbers”, “communications”, “mobile field officers”, “Discipline” “divide and conquer”, “adaptation”, and :less lethal weapon and buffers.”

I feel that reading the PiPress and Minnesota Independent, I am reading about two different events. I'm very suspicious that the PiPress version though is very much an FBI/Secret Service/Sheriff dept./St. Paul police dispatch propaganda piece written to discredit even peaceful participation in public demonstrations. Is this media collusion in suppression of First Amendment rights?

For a good first-hand account of the herding of the protesters, read Paul Demko' piece: http://www.minnesotaindependent.com/7691/if-you...

That's funny. I Googled “RNC” and got quite a different result. Remember that Google adjusts search results based on your Google search ad web history. Maybe try Googling from a computer that wasn't so focused on riots and mayhem.