Assessing RNC Police Tactics
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Part 1 of 2 articles
Assessing RNC police tactics: missteps, poor judgments and inappropriate
detentions
One year later, law enforcement officials continue to defend their
handling of the Republican convention, arguing it was the only way to
keep extremists from disrupting the gathering and preventing violent
incidents.
By G.W. Schulz | Tuesday, Sept. 1, 2009
Center for Investigative Reporting
The spying began late in the summer of 2007, after police in St. Paul
discovered an amateur video online. It showed youths dressed in black,
their faces covered with dark bandanas, tossing home-made fire bombs and
seeming to prepare for an assault.
The group called itself the "RNC Welcoming Committee."
For authorities in St. Paul, the whole thing seemed like serious
business. The city was deep in preparations for the Republican National
Convention, scheduled to take place in September of 2008. Security was
their paramount concern, and nothing worse than a terrorist attack could
happen during the four-day event.
In the year leading up to the convention, police would spend countless
hours working to identify those behind the video and others who might be
planning to disrupt the Republican Party's nominating bash. They would
draw on a new domestic intelligence infrastructure and take
unprecedented advantage of laws expanded after 9/11 that give police
more intrusive authorities to halt potential subversives and terrorists
before they attack.
But far from yielding major revelations, some police work prior to and
during the RNC resulted in a series of missteps, poor judgments,
heavy-handed tactics and inappropriate detentions, according to
interviews and a review of official documents obtained by the Center for
Investigative Reporting.
Critics say many of the police actions were unconstitutional and a judge
called one seizure illegal after the fact. Law enforcement officials a
year later continue to defend their handling of the convention, arguing
it was the only way to keep extremist hoodlums from disrupting the RNC
and prevent violent incidents.
Their coordinated security operations, known generally as
intelligence-led policing, have become common in cities across the
country. A growing number of law enforcement agencies are linking their
computer networks together in a national, classified data system that
enables the extraordinary mining and sharing of police intelligence,
while also adopting spy methods to gather information.
In contrast to Bush administration officials who wanted to limit how
much the federal government spent sustaining such state and local
homeland security initiatives, President Obama's proposed budget for
2010 asked that $260 million from existing antiterrorism grants be used
to pay for thousands of new intelligence analyst positions.
The results of St. Paul's campaign against political protesters raises
serious questions about whether police are properly trained to use their
new authorities for good effect.
Police deployed infiltrators to report on political groups, tapped into
information exchanges to examine data about people who were not accused
of any crimes and conducted questionable searches based on intelligence.
One document revealed that a federally funded "fusion center" in
Minnesota carried out "over 1,000 hours of support to intelligence
operations" and "disseminated approximately 17 RNC situation reports to
over 1,300 law enforcement recipients."
Elsewhere, fusion centers in Iowa, Tennessee, Oregon and South Dakota
supplied Minnesota authorities with driver's license photos and criminal
history records on people perceived as suspicious in connection with the
Republican convention.
By the convention's end, more than 800 people had been arrested,
including eight who were charged with "conspiracy to riot in the
furtherance of terrorism." But a majority of the charges, including
several treated as serious, were later dropped or downgraded after
prosecutors had a chance to review the police allegations and activity.
Actors on a video
Police in St. Paul set off on the wrong foot when they saw potential
terrorism in the online video.
The actors did look dressed for street demonstrations. In one scene, a
woman wields bolt cutters as if preparing to tear down a steel fence.
Then she is shown standing outside a small Navy recruiting station with
a bowling ball in her hands labeled "Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling
League," a reference to political activists in the 1980s who gained
modest notoriety by shattering the windows of an enlistment storefront
in response to Ronald Reagan's plans for invading Nicaragua with U.S.
troops. Someone else in the video appears to throw rocks at people
dressed as police officers attempting to control a riot.
"We're getting ready," the film says ominously. "What are you doing?"
Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher and his team would cite the video
among other things in later warrant affidavits as a basis for his probe
into the Welcoming Committee when police stormed the group's
headquarters just before the convention began as thousands of reporters
and more Republican delegates converged on St. Paul.
But court affidavits ignored something crucial. The Molotov cocktail in
the video is phony and lands in a barbecue grill lighting charcoals
ablaze as an outdoor chef smiles thankfully. The bolt cutters are passed
to another individual beyond the fence who uses them harmlessly as hedge
clippers. The bowling ball rolls past the Navy recruiting station and
into a group of pins assembled on the sidewalk. A youngster, 4 or 5
years old at most, is the only one seen throwing rocks in the video and
they strike the ground rather than the actors.
The film was a juvenile satire of popular anarchist imagery, but police
allowed their fear and enthusiasm for fighting terrorism to prevail.
Within days of the video's release on the Internet, Fletcher, alongside
other law enforcement agencies, launched what became a $300,000
investigation into the RNC Welcoming Committee and other protest groups.
Authorities later told a judge the film depicted "significant property
damage" and "violence toward law enforcement."
They said it provided reasonable suspicion that the RNC Welcoming
Committee was conspiring to destroy property, create civil disorder,
wreak havoc with bombs and engage in "unlawful assembly," all for the
purposes of undermining the Republican National Convention.
But there wasn't a consensus about the threat among officials in St.
Paul and Minneapolis, or the need to conduct an open-ended intelligence
effort. Police even quarreled over how many protesters would arrive. One
document predicted 100,000 demonstrators planned to show up. Fletcher
wrote to the St. Paul Police Department that inside the throngs there
could be as many as 3,000 "anarchist-affiliated protesters." The actual
number was close to 10,000 total demonstrators, a fraction of them thugs
intent on creating real trouble.
Expanded program
The proponents of intelligence-led policing won out despite
disagreement. In the months leading to the convention, police expanded
their program.
According to documents obtained by the Center for Investigative
Reporting from Minnesota's fusion center, police from the Twin Cities
asked their partners in the law enforcement community to collect
information on where protesters were camping or renting land, snap
photographs of their belongings and, if possible, seize supplies that
might be used for "illegal direct actions."
"One of their goals will be to attempt to create images of law
enforcement personnel engaging them so they can claim brutality and
violations of their civil rights," a memo from the Minneapolis Police
Department states about protesters. "They will likely attempt to use
such incidents as a basis for future law suits against the city of
Minneapolis." The list of logistical items these direct-action groups
might accumulate includes food that will "be as organic as possible,"
and when they arrive their preferred method of transportation could be
"older, low-value" bicycles.
Police in Minnesota downplay the reach of its fusion center. "Data
mining doesn't make any sense," said center director and career police
investigator Michael Bosacker in an interview with the Center for
Investigative Reporting. "For us to just pick a person and start looking
at him � unless it's part of a case and raises suspicion of a crime �
doesn't make any sense. We don't have the personnel to do that. We don't
have the time to do that."
Instead the Minnesota Joint Analysis Center relied on "intelligence
analysts" to disseminate memos to other law enforcement agencies
advising them on what authorities anticipated would occur during the
convention and how to respond.
Fletcher's office, meanwhile, began a surveillance campaign of the
Welcoming Committee, taking hundreds of photographs of political
organizers, many of whom were not ultimately charged with anything
illegal. Informants joined the group and fed police confidential but
unverified information that became the basis of eventual search warrants
and criminal charges.
They attended multiple protest planning meetings, including one in Lake
Geneva, Minn., where attendees allegedly used water bottles as mock
Molotov cocktails to practice throwing at vehicles and buildings.
"Numerous" informants, according to police claims, told authorities of
another meeting in Wisconsin where activists reviewed military training
manuals and discussed slamming into lines of police with shields.
Two of the informants were women who worked for Fletcher's department,
one as a narcotics officer and the other as a jail guard. A third young
man built like a high school wrestler with close-cropped hair was hired
as an informant by Fletcher and later began working as a jail guard for
the sheriff.
A fourth informant, Twin Cities resident Andrew Darst, reportedly
provided information to the FBI but threatened to derail the
government's campaign against protesters when after the RNC he was
arrested in an unrelated case. A local judge found him guilty of assault
in March after he kicked down the door of a home in pursuit of his wife
who was attending a party inside.
Efforts against planned protests grew � the FBI directed additional
informants as far away as Texas to spy on those heading to St. Paul for
the RNC. Documents show that confidential FBI sources infiltrated
anti-war meetings at a public library in Iowa City during August of
2008. The height, weight, hair color, lisps, grooming habits, online
activities, phone numbers and e-mails of attendees were documented. Also
in April of last year, according to published reports, an informant
working for Ramsey County attended activist gatherings in Iowa.
Informants at meetings
Police infiltration and surveillance did not come as a total surprise to
those involved in the Welcoming Committee's planning get-togethers. They
considered themselves essentially a logistical group but assumed
authorities would misconstrue their intentions anyway.
Activist Rob Czernik, 34, grew up as an Army brat and moved frequently
about the country before becoming politicized at age 13 by the sight of
poverty and destructive mountain-top removal in West Virginia, he said
recently. Czernick moved to the Twin Cities 11 years ago.
The Welcoming Committee's meetings were public and anyone could attend.
Two who did, Czernik sensed, were informants and he turned out to be
right. "Just the way they acted and behaved," Czernik said, "aloof and
not really making an effort to understand the politics of what we were
doing."
Among the protesters, anxiety escalated as the convention neared. Rumors
circulated that people were being stopped at the Canadian border.
Wednesday: Police take action...
G.W. Schulz is a reporter for the Center of Investigative Reporting and
covers homeland security. He can be reached at gwsc...@cironline.org
This account is based on in-depth interviews, news stories and an
extensive examination of police reports, available court records and
other public and government documents, including memos obtained from the
Minnesota Joint Analysis Center through the state's open-records laws.
It began in late 2008 as part of the Center for Investigative
Reporting's project covering homeland security in the United States,
"America's War Within." You can learn more about the project at
http://www.cironline.org.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
(Wait for the new edition: http://hplmythos.com/ )
Lord We�rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"