Minneapolis/St. Paul police arresting civilians, journalists, lawyers

[rax]

Maybe I shouldn't be surprised by this, but I am; maybe I shouldn't be angry about this, but I am. I was pointed to this thanks to fjm , but have done a bunch more research, and am assembling it with my analysis for your convenience. The sound bite is that St. Paul police, working in concert with county police and the FBI, raided a number of homes and at least one rented meeting site yesterday looking for specific individuals they believed were conspiring to riot. The first report I saw was this one, on salon.com, by Gleen Greenwald, who has written books critical of the Bush administration. There are two interesting video interviews there, as well as a pretty good (though arguably biased, I guess) summary of events. He links to this blog post by a member of I-Witness news, a group who videotapes police actions to help demonstrate when protesters are arrested on false grounds by police officers lying under oath. (More common than you'd think.) A house full of journalists was put under house arrest for a number of hours, according to the various blog sources, without a warrant.

While most mainstream media coverage is hardly exciting (the Chicago Tribune glossed like whoah, CNN elides a lot of details but does take a decently positive view of activists, the NYT doesn't seem to cover it at all: EDIT: eredien  found the coverage here), the Minneapolis Star-Tribune presents this article, including a St. Paul city councilman being pissed off and a wonderful photo of a laywer who was arrested outside one of the houses handcuffed on the steps. The Wired blog has a list of all of the searched-for-and-seized items, which does suggest to me that at least one of the groups was actually planning violent or semi-violent resistance. This makes the issue not cut and dry, and I address that in a couple of paragraphs, but I do encourage you to take a look at the list and see how many of those items you don't have in your home. (For me, the answer is either four or five, and that's not counting the downstairs apartment, though I doubt they are stockpiling urine.)

The National Lawyers Guild is one of the groups seeking action against the police, though how successful they will be is dubious, especially since the largest planned protest is tomorrow, and there are unlikely to be any courts in session before then. Even if they are successful, though,  it looks like this sort of thing may become more common: there's apparently a new FBI plan in the works to make warrants unnecessary for investigation of American citizens. Internet sources I don't trust enough to link to say they may already be doing this; normally I dismiss that sort of thing as paranoid speculation but, uh, the FBI was involved in these raids and pretty clearly did not have warrants at all the houses. So now I'm less sure.

I have mixed feelings on the wisdom and usefulness of protesting things like the RNC (or DNC: that convention was not without incident); even when protesting peacably, who is being reached? I think political speech is crucial but I often fear that such efforts are just bitching to the kennel and further entrench ill will between authority figures and protesters and, by extension, people on the political fringes like me. (Hi, I'm a queer vegan bicyclist!) However, there is a huge difference between peacable protesters and authority figures: Authority figures are invested by the state with power and authority. When they use this power to achieve control of situations, there is a fundamental imbalance of power that makes political speech problematic, and in the events I've described above, I think that [ab?]use of that power has sunk to the level of making considering political speech problematic. They made me read books about why that was a bad idea in high school; they involved rats.

I expect that at least one of these raids actually culminated in seizing material that would have been used to stop buses, blockade streets, and/or aid violent resistance of police action. I personally don't find those actions to be productive forms of political speech in an environment where other forms of political speech, including but not limited to nonviolent protest, are available. I think that police action to stop those violent protest activities is justified in a vacuum, but becomes hugely problematic when it also silences non-violent protest action by violent means. In fact, one of the biggest problems I have with violent protest is that it, too, effectively silences non-violent protest by taking the lion's share of media coverage and popular attention. In this case, the violent acts by authority figures have now shaped my understanding of the situation in terms of police action, not in terms of whatever the people in question might have been protesting, and that makes me sad and angry.

If this had happened a week ago instead of yesterday, I might be on a plane to Minneapolis right now. As it stands, that's not feasible, but Minneapolis is no longer on my list of cities in which I would be willing to live. (See also their reaction to Critical Mass in August 2007; Critical Mass has its problems, but if you watch video of the event, I expect you'll find the police behavior to be at best problematic.) I've had interactions with police in the past and while I don't feel like I was necessarily treated with the respect I deserved, I don't really have that much to complain about. No one has ever broken into my house with a submachine gun trained on me. I have absolutely no idea how I would handle that; I don't think it's an experience anyone should ever have to have. I especially think it's important not to allow those we grant authority as part of a social contract to use their power to control political discourse.

I encourage you to disseminate this information, as I've written it or otherwise; if anyone has any ideas for how to contribute productively to making this not happen in the future, I'd love to add those ideas here. Thank you for reading.

Comments

[q10.livejournal.com]

i'm always suspicious of these kinds of raids, but i'm still seeing radically divergent accounts (http://volokh.com/posts/1220218012.shtml) of what was going on, so although i'm unnerved by the behavior of the police i'm a little hesitant to pass judgment until the dust settles and some actual facts emerge.

i'm also not sure what the list of searched and seized items shows. there are plenty of non-incriminating, legal, useful items that the police are still with in their rights to search for and seize (with a warrant, at least) if there's probable cause to think that the people or premises being searched are involved in putting those items to illegal uses. (to pick a simple example, in most places in the U.S. i'm permitted, subject to certain regulations, to keep a firearm in my residence, but, assuming i have a completely legal firearm, if i'm a suspect in a shooting then the state is pretty clearly within its rights to search for and seize said firearm to do some basic forensic stuff with it.)

that said, this does appear pretty creepy.

[rax.livejournal.com]

It looks to me from reports like one of the houses (likely the rented-out building that was initially a theater) was where the actual violent protest preparations were happening. Whether the other four houses of people were planning to participate in that violent protest or not is not entirely clear; I've seen video of people saying they weren't but that's not necessarily something to take at face value.

It's certainly true that legitimate objects can be used in illegitimate ways, from guns to nailguns to nails. My point about that list is that I live in a house full of twentysomethings and own most of the things on the list and am the sort of person who might have been planning to go to a nonviolent protest. I don't actually know this know this, because I'm not there, but I doubt the I-Witness people were involved with the caltrops people. It's hard to figure out what's going on because reports don't tend to keep the five raids as distinct occurrences for the most part.

One of the things that disturbs me the most, even assuming that all of the people in the houses were planning violent protest, is the way journalists and lawyers were allegedly treated. Admittedly, one of the interviewed lawyers was a little out there, but still... it makes me very nervous.

Thanks for the alternate account, though. It's interesting what details different people leave out when they tell the story.

[q10.livejournal.com]

my point on the objects thing was that ‘list of items to be seized’ isn't at all the same as ‘list of items to be taken as sufficient evidence of wrongdoing’ - this somewhat reduces the relevance of the fact that you and i both have a lot of those items in our residences.

as for the other bit, lawyers and journalists can engage in illegal conspiracies as well as anybody else, and if they are in fact at the location of conspiratorial activities it is at least understandable that they might spend a few hours swept up in a general raid. of course, this is based on the police claims that all the locations were (or were reasonably believed to be) involved in the relevant evil schemes, and those claims should be regarded with extreme suspicion, but being a journalist or a lawyer by itself shouldn't be some magic exemption (especially not if one isn't held for much longer than it would take to double-check the veracity of one's claims to be there for legitimate journalist or lawyer reasons).