News Cut: September 5, 2008 Archive

The party's over

Posted at 5:26 AM on September 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (23 Comments)
Filed under: The political conventions

So that's it, then. Like a long-planned wedding, the Republican National Convention has come and gone and here we sit waiting for the photographs, wondering if we did the right thing.

How was it for you?

Share your stories of experiencing the convention -- or not -- in the comments section.

Comment on this post

A week in St. Paul

Posted at 12:05 PM on September 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (1 Comments)
Filed under: The political conventions

MPR's Sasha Aslanian and Jeff Harkness have put together a nifty multimedia presentation looking back at this week's activities.

You can find a larger version here.

Comment on this post

Live-blogging Midmorning: Mayor Chris Coleman

Posted at 9:19 AM on September 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (15 Comments)
Filed under: The political conventions

Mayor Chris Coleman is on Midmorning. Here are the salient points.

9:20 a.m. The city of St. Paul has been put on a map it has never been on before. Cites a cop in St. Louis who said "he can't wait to bring his family here."

9:21 a.m. Caller who says he was swept up yesterday even though he wasn't a protester. "These guys trained for a year and had all these toys and they were itching to use them."

"Fully comfortable with the methods used?" Kerri asks. Yes/No question not answered with a yes/no. Coleman recounts information the cops had about the protesters. "I want people to understand, this was not just a couple of people who were mouthing off. It was one of the most coordinated efforts in the history of the country to shut down political dialog."

Kerri asks her question again. No yes/no answer yet. The mayor says the protesters violated the 5 p.m. limit of the protest. Says cops didn't just shut it down, for four hours the police "very patiently waited for this thing to move."

Kerri presses on the caller's contention that he was heading for his car when he had a gun pointed in his face. Coleman says "it's hard for the police department to tell who is who?"

"Are you entirely comfortable with all of the methods?" Kerri asks. "We'll do a review," Coleman said.

"This morning, how do you feel?" she persists.

"This morning I feel great," the mayor said.

Is that a 'yes"?

9:27 a.m. Caller says she's proud of St. Paul. "Last night I was terribly sad and heartsick. It was a peaceful protest. The intimidation use was frustrating. How do you plan to pay for lawsuits."

Coleman says officers acted within their lawful authority. Coleman says the city isn't liable because the Host Committee purchased a lawsuit to cover liability. (Some people say that gave the police license to be tougher than they had to be.)

"People need to understand; this was not a soft threat. They were going to throw everything they had at us. That's the duty of public safety."

9:31 a.m. Business owner on Grand says not a single delegate came in. Charter buses between the X and Grand were empty.

"You have to focus in on the four days of the convention. Some businesses did not have benefit but many did. Says Meritage, Heime's and Keys had best week's (most of the articles I've seen about Meritage were so-so. What's the story here? In the last half hour of the show, Kerri is looking for businesses to call in.)

Coleman says construction crews, Host Committee were here for months ahead of time, shopping, eating and having drinks. It's a slow week for retail anyway. He repeats the story of the police officer who can't wait to come back. Coleman's message appears to be that whatever businesses didn't get this week, they got in the weeks leading up to the convention.

Laura Yuen and Brandt Williams assess this.

9:35 a.m. - Coleman on Coleman. Kerri plays Norm Coleman's remarks to the convention which seemed to suggest St. Paul was Flint, Michigan before Norm. Coleman took office.
Chris Coleman says he disagrees that "he was the engine. A lot of people had been toiling for years." Says NC was able to rely on a steady increase in state aid, and Clinton Cop money. "He made the city increasingly reliant on other sources of revenue that, in the end, dried up and went away; it became much more of a challenge," the mayor said.

"It's a consistent challenge to the Republican message that you can get something for nothing."

9:38 a.m. Coleman departs.

9:44 a.m. - Bruce Nestor of the National Lawyers Guild says the militarized presence of the city "was all out of proportion." Kerri asks if some responsibility for that falls with the people who were bent on destruction? "Whatever change in tactics was carried out regardless of what was occurring in the crowd," he said. He says they "chose to grab an independent journalist prepared to do an interview with somebody" at the Mears Park protest.

9:46 a.m. - Caller asks about "journalists" who were detained without having done anything. Specifically asks about Iglehart raid. Nestor says targeting journalists started in Minneapolis last week when the Glass Bead Collective journalists were grabbed when they got off a bus. "Iit raises serious questions about what type of intelligence was used to carry out the raids.

Kerri asks about Coleman's assistance that there were lots of announcements to disperse. "Journalists also want to be present to cover arrests and see how police behave," Nestor said. "Even if they heard a dispersal order, there was no opportunity to disperse."

9:50 a.m. Caller says people didn't respect other businesses. "There was no capability to shut down the RNC," Nestor said. "Even if it could happen, does that requiring militarizing the entire city?" He says last night was a "forceful way to suppress dissent.

9:53 a.m. "How dloes it reflect on the city of St. Paul when you're walking down the street with kids and there are officers on top of cars with guns?" a caller asks.

"In fairness to the St. Paul Police, I think a lot of this was driven by ... federal agencies, Secret Service. On a national security event like this, there's a model that's been used locally -- Seattle, Miami -- which relies on the militarized approach and the use of force. The tone was set on Friday night with the raid on the Convergence Center," Nestor said.

9:56 a.m. Asked about police infiltrators of these groups who heard plans, "They had paid confidential informants who are paid on the value of the information. The more scary, the more valuable," he said.

== End ==

Comment on this post

Embedded reporters at RNC

Posted at 5:01 PM on September 5, 2008 by Bob Collins (24 Comments)
Filed under: Media, The political conventions

I learned today -- perhaps the same way you did -- that MPR had an embedded reporter within the police ranks during the last part of the Republican National Convention: I read it on Tim Nelson's RNC convention blog. He described Thursday's confrontations:

I was variously ordered to get down and to leave immediately. I was inadvertently struck by pepper spray and by "stinger balls" from an explosive thrown at my feet. But per our agreement, I was never forced to leave the scene.

I don't know the exact count of journalists detained. I heard numbers last night as high as 18. I did see some people with credentials issued by the Republican National Convention among the handcuffed detainees. But I also saw people with handmade "media" insignia and several students claiming to be with a college paper in Iowa.

Tim was riding along Thursday with one of the mobile police units. He was one of 8 reporters in the Twin Cities media to be so accomodated at times during the week. He could share the information he acquired after the convention ended. (Update, Sat. 9:23 a.m.: The Star Tribune's perspective was printed this morning)

For the record, his deal was unknown to all but a very few news officials in his company.But now that he has written about the arrangement, it's fair game.

These sorts of agreements pose difficult questions for news organizations. We invite you to discuss it in the comments section below in the interest of being transparent about them:

If a news organization makes a deal with law enforcement for special treatment and an agreement to stay silent on certain issues for an agreed-upon period of time, does the news organization have a responsibility to tell the audience that the report being delivered is part of an agreement with the officials he/she is covering not to be chased from the scene in exchange for.... something?

It's unclear why credentialed journalists were swept up on Thursday night. Police Chief John Harrington said it was difficult to tell the "real" journalists from the phony ones. But from the advantage of his position, Nelson wrote, he could see some of the journalists being picked up had RNC credentials. The police didn't have to figure out who was who: the Secret Service had already done that when it did a background check on everyone who applied for those credentials.

On the air with MPR's Cathy Wurzer on Friday morning, Nelson clearly had some after-the-fact insight into how everything went down on the cops' side, but we made a mistake, perhaps, in not disclosing the arrangement that allowed him to acquire it. Asked about the arrests of local journalists, he said that police had clearly ordered people to move.

Embed | Help

Copy and paste the HTML below to embed this audio onto your web page.

Audio player code:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/js/swfobject.js"></script><div id="minnesota_general_features_2008_09_05_nelson_embed_20080905_64s_player"></div><script type="text/javascript">/*<![CDATA[*/var so = new SWFObject("http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/s_player.swf", "minnesota_general_features_2008_09_05_nelson_embed_20080905_64s_player", "319", "83", "8", "#ffffff");so.addParam("quality", "high");so.addParam("menu", "false");so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");so.addVariable("name", "minnesota/general/features/2008/09/05/nelson_embed_20080905_64");so.write("minnesota_general_features_2008_09_05_nelson_embed_20080905_64s_player");/*]]>*/</script>

sponsor:

On his blog, he answered the question of why some people were arrested and some weren't in a slightly different way:

Because last week, the St. Paul police offered the media -- or at least those who showed up to a meeting at the Western District police offices -- the opportunity to accompany the officers among St. Paul's "mobile field force" teams.

St. Paul Police Chief John Harrington told MPR News today that all local news organizations were offered the embedded positions, but the protections that Nelson suggests it afforded, did not extend to all journalists -- real journalists -- at Thursday's night's events. Listen

"News organizations took volunteers, and I guess not everybody wanted to do that. We just offered the chance to be embedded over the four days, and we had 8 slots to offer people, and all slots were filled. We made that an open opportunity," he said. Some local news organizations declined the offer. Why?

Embed | Help

Copy and paste the HTML below to embed this audio onto your web page.

Audio player code:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/js/swfobject.js"></script><div id="minnesota_classical_features_2008_09_05_harrington_news_cut_20080905_64s_player"></div><script type="text/javascript">/*<![CDATA[*/var so = new SWFObject("http://minnesota.publicradio.org/www_publicradio/tools/media_player/s_player.swf", "minnesota_classical_features_2008_09_05_harrington_news_cut_20080905_64s_player", "319", "83", "8", "#ffffff");so.addParam("quality", "high");so.addParam("menu", "false");so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");so.addVariable("name", "minnesota/classical/features/2008/09/05/harrington_news_cut_20080905_64");so.write("minnesota_classical_features_2008_09_05_harrington_news_cut_20080905_64s_player");/*]]>*/</script>

sponsor:

Late on Friday, MPR News Director Bill Wareham further clarified the arrangement between Nelson and the St. Paul police:

He signed a liability waiver.

He agreed that if he went on a ride-along for a day, he wouldn't publish/broadcast anything about it until the end of the convention.

In his words, "The agreement was that they would let me do my job if I let them do theirs and didn't disclose their methods before the end of the convention. I was not in the area when the order to disperse was given, and never there without a police escort." Also, "The sergeant told me that the safest place was behind their line and that if I got in front of them I would not be allowed to cross back into their lines. 'You're on your own out there,' I believe she said to me."

Because of the post-convention embargo, we decided that if we took advantage of the ride-along opportunity, it wouldn't be until Thursday so the information wouldn't be stale. We did take advantage of the opportunity Thursday, but all of his protest coverage earlier in the week had no arrangement with the cops attached

Meanwhile, Amnesty International joined in the chorus of criticism against police force this week:

The organization's concerns arise from media reports, video and photographic images which appear to show police officers deploying unnecessary and disproportionate use of non-lethal weapons on non-violent protesters marching through the streets or congregating outside the arena where the Convention was being held.

Police are reported to have fired rubber bullets and used batons, pepper spray, tear gas canisters and concussion grenades on peaceful demonstrators and journalists. Amnesty International has also received unconfirmed reports that some of those arrested during the demonstrations may have been ill-treated while held at Ramsey county jail.

The human rights organization is calling for an investigation. On MPR's Midmorning today, Mayor Chris Coleman said there would be "a review" of the police performance, but when pressed on how he felt about it, Coleman said "I feel great."

Comment on this post