Convention cops

Minneapolis City Council candidate Melissa Hill says she’ll likely appeal a Pittsburgh court’s ruling today that her conduct last month during a political demonstration was disorderly.

Vain Mainstream just wanted to get to work. The 23-year-old Minneapolis resident was employed by Avalon Security on the opening day of the Republican National Convention last September. His assignment: to keep watch over a parking lot in downtown St. Paul and make sure that the thousands of protesters coursing through the streets of the city didn’t do any damage. Instead, he was swept up by police and detained in jail for three days. Now he’s among 27 plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit filed against police today.

A year ago the Republican National Convention opened at the Xcel Energy Center. The St. Paul Police Department pledged that protesters and Republican delegates alike would be welcome on the city’s streets. The reality was that roughly 800 people were arrested, primarily in mass sweeps. The contentious four-day gathering continues to play out in the state’s courts through both criminal cases and civil lawsuits.

Recent murders in Washington, D.C., Kansas and Arizona by suspects with far-right ties have put the term “domestic terrorist” back into the American consciousness. But do these murders validate a much-criticized Department of Homeland Security report on “rightwing extremists”? Not according to two experts who should know — DHS head Janet Napolitano and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley.

Iran has proven the headline prescient, even if the terminology needed tweaking: “The revolution will be Twittered.” That was the title of Tom Elko’s Sept. 9, 2008, Minnesota Independent post about how Twitter messages (technically, “tweets” that were “tweeted”) came in handy during protests outside the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

The Des Moines Register obtained confidential documents last week that show a Ramsey County deputy traveled to Iowa to infiltrate groups protesting the Republican National Convention. The deputy was working for the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office as well as the FBI.

“Shaken.” That’s a word Mayor Chris Coleman used to describe St. Paul during today’s State of the City address. “A near-collapse of financial markets” has already forced to make “significant cuts,” Coleman said. But he reminded citizens that CIty Hall was built during the Great Depression and promised that even in “excrutiating times,” St. Paul would continue to “refuse to be ordinary.”

A bike tour of sites that had been raided by police in the days before the Republican National Convention (RNC) attracted the interest of…police. That’s apparent from a video of the tour, which took place on Saturday.

The St. Paul city attorney’s office is not faring too well in prosecutions stemming from the Republican National Convention in September. Of 672 initial cases turned over for potential misdemeanor prosecution, roughly 85 percent have been dropped due to insufficient evidence. And none of the few cases that have made it to court have resulted in a conviction.

Court dates arrive this week for the eight Republican National Convention protesters who were preemptively charged with terrorism felonies, according to the support group Defend the RNC8. The motion hearings — postponed due to a judge switch — find the RNC8 in a news context that recently became more favorable to their cause: most charges were dropped [...]