Fun And Games In St. Paul

Longtime Kossack New Left 2004 has an eyewitness report:

I Was Tear Gassed By The St. Paul Police – Eyewitness Account

by New Left 2004
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Mon Sep 01, 2008 at 12:54:22 PM PDT

Now, to be fair, I was probably somewhere I shouldn’t have been.  I didn’t mean to get involved in this.  I live very, very close to the convention site and I took a walk to see what was going on. I saw these protesters and I kind of shadowed them because I was curious and I didn’t have anything better to do.    

First off, these were not peaceful protesters.  I followed them for what felt like about two hours and here’s what I saw.

• New Left 2004’s diary :: ::

When they first appeared, they had dumpster on wheels in tow.  They were dressed all in black and had bandanas over their faces.  They kept chanting “the streets are ours” and yelled “cover!” every time they thought the police might move on them. There appeared to be about 100 to 125 of them.  They dropped trash on the street behind them.  Once they had emptied the dumpster, they overturned it in the street to block the police cars that were following them.  

I saw them throw empty glass bottles at the police.  At one point they tossed a detour sign and several sandbags off the 94 bridge at Kellogg Avenue.  Luckily, the objects landed in the embankment and not in the roadway.

I saw them break windows on at least three police vehicles: a Bloominton Police SUV downtown, and State Patrol car on John Ireland Avenue in front of the Minnesota History Center and a St. Paul Police car on Rice Street.  I also saw them slash the tires of a limousine on Rice Street.  

They intermittently attempted to block the police from following them.  On two occasions they dragged road signs into the street in an attempt to block streets.  The second time they got hold of a dumpster they turned it over in the middle of Rice Street in front of the Capitol Mall to prevent   to police from directly following them.  This actually worked for about two minutes.  

The police eventually followed them across the Rice Street bridge into downtown.  There they protesters seemed to get a little more violent.  Two of the three acts of violence I witnessed against a police vehicle happened here.  All of the police vehicles I saw attacked were unoccupied.  This coincided with the arrival of the SWAT team.  The protesters pulled newspaper vending machines and road signs into the street.  The police finally trapped them between two blocks.  I’m not sure of the exact streets, but it was by the Gallery Exchange building.

At that point the SWAT team moved to take them down.  I was directly across a narrow street from where the protesters were cornered.  There were several loud pops.  I saw smoke.  I believe these were concussion grenades but I’m not sure.  I definitely saw the protesters fired upon with rubber bullets.  Then the SWAT team gassed them.  Everyone in the immediate area them ran for cover, including myself.  I got the gas pretty bad.  A nice woman from Legal Observers washed my eyes out and gave me a drink.

Nothing I saw indicated that the police were really overstepping their bounds.  I think the force they used was a little excessive at the end, but not completely out of line.  I’m now safely at home.  

UPDATE: Downthread poster KLS implored that we are clear that these are not “protesters” in the peaceful sense.  These were militants, plain and simple.