Police overreaction continues at Republican gathering

August 31, 9:17 AMCivil Liberties ExaminerJ.D. Tuccille

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Last week, after violent arrests and mass corralling of protesters at the Democratic convention, I wrote, "We'll have to watch events at the Republican convention to see if this is a trend."

Well, it appears to be a trend.

In the Twin Cities, police haven't even waited for protests -- they've moved in to raid building where political activists are gathering in anticipation of the Republican gathering. Says the Pioneer Press:

Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, said he doesn't know whether the people arrested are RNC Welcoming Committee members, but he criticized the searches and arrests.

"To go in and arrest people on conspiracy charges without any solid evidence is to start to criminalize protected political activity and speech," Nestor said.

People planning to protest at the convention and St. Paul City Council Member Dave Thune called the actions a pre-emptive strike before the RNC. The convention is slated to start Monday.

"This is all about free speech," Thune said. "It's what my father fought in the war for."

Protesters have pointed to other examples of what they view as police interference in the run-up to the convention. Three videographers who document police activities were detained and their cameras confiscated in Minneapolis, and an activist said he was "viciously attacked" by police while he was observing officers outside a homeless shelter.

The police claim they found caltrops to puncture tires and buckets of urine to splash on delegates -- justification, they say, for pre-emptive raids in the absence of any criminal activity. They may well have found some such items, but eyewitness accounts of peaceful protesters rousted by paramilitary raiders don't really square with official accounts of impending revolution in the streets. Writing from the scene of one raided house, Salon's Glenn Greenwald reports:

In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.

Video interviews of the subjects of one of the raids can be seen here:

This is going to be an interesting week.

But more than that. This is a sign that First Amendment rights -- speech, assembly and petition -- have been converted into privileges to be allowed only if their practitioners don't annoy the political class.