Why St. Paul City Attorney John Choi is a danger to public safety

Online version with pictures here: http://rnc08report.org/archive/808.shtml

One of the most disturbing aspects of the aftermath of the 2008 Republican National Convention has been the ongoing process of justification by local city and police officials of their actions before and during the Convention.

Anyone who still values the inalienable rights guaranteed to us by this country's founding document, the United States Constitution, and who recognizes that if we stand by while they are undermined for others, we are increasingly likely to personally experience a denial of our own rights, should be very concerned.

The point of human and civil rights is that government should never be allowed to decide what its citizens can think, say or do, as long—obviously—as long they are not harming others by their speech or actions. When this breaks down, we find ourselves in a state that can no longer be described as "democratic".

In 2001, when I lived in Lowertown, St Paul, the Ku Klux Klan held a rally not so far away, outside the State Capitol building. In common with most people in this country, I hate everything the Ku Klux Klan stands for, and note their history of violence and hate crimes against ethnic minorities.

Yet, as long as they were not planning to carry out such acts or threaten anyone during their rally, free speech can only be said to exist as a right if I respect the right of even those whom I despise, to say what I despise. Otherwise, we are left in a situation where the government gets to decide what points of view are acceptable and not acceptable, which history tells us is a very, very bad precedent to set.

One could make the case that the RNC Welcoming Committee, one of whose stated goals as long as a year before the Convention was to "Crash the Convention", was a violation of the free speech rights of the Republicans attempting to have a political convention. In fact, that was my initial reaction upon reading the literature on Day One of the Convention: http://nigelparry.com/photos/r-n-c-diary.shtml

Regardless of how morally bankrupt the Republican Administration has been over the last eight years, they have the right to gather to speak.

Or do they?

Historically in America, meaningful change, such as the end of slavery and recognizing that African Americans must have their civil rights guaranteed came via both civil war and via direct action. This is clearly not a good thing, because people died in both struggles, but enough of the population of this country felt that these acts were necessary, so great the violation of decency and human and civil rights was.

Would anyone, for example, argue that Rosa Parks "violated the rights" of the other passengers in the bus to freedom of movement?

Long before the Bush Administration came into power, the government has been waging war against people in the Middle East and Central America.

From the Nicaraguan villagers who were tortured by having their skin flayed off, killed and hung on trees as warnings by the Contra forces we funded, to the 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed during our carpet bombing of Baghdad during our first war against Iraq, to the Gazan civilians hiding in a United Nations school that were quite literally cooked with American-made M825A1 white phosphorus munitions supplied as military aid, we have actively and disgustingly committed what are internationally recognized to be crimes of war and serious violations of international humanitarian law: http://nigelparry.com/writing/postcards-of-hangings-gaza.shtml

Did any of these civilians we killed vote for the administrations that unleashed the terror and death on them? Did they have any democratic opportunity to stop what was done to them?

Of course not, and this is why people felt the need to actively stop the Republican National Convention, not that any of the RNC Welcoming Committee realistically thought that would happen. It was more about speaking up for the voiceless that we were slaughtering and the political statement of appearing to try to stop the voices of those who have literally stopped the heartbeats of millions.

According to former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, our sanctions in the years before we went to war with Iraq in 2003 killed one-and-a-half million people. In case you slept through that decade, medical supplies, food, and even toilet paper and children's toys were on our sanctions list.

We starved, denied medical aid to, and took all joy from Iraqis for ten years. And there was not one single day during that period in which American planes did not lock sights on a target in Iraq. They didn't tell us that there was a war for 10 years. And we call this a "democracy", and Americans ask "why do they hate us?", or wonder why a couple of kids break windows?

Could we be more stupid in this country? At this point, I hate us.

On September 1st, around 200 people broke off from a march of 10,000 and went through St. Paul, around 50 of whom dragged free newspaper dispensers and trash cans into the street. Of these 50 people, perhaps 4 or 5 either smashed store or cop car windows, or slashed tires.

I personally don't see the point of that kind of direct action because I recognize that in the media climate within which we exist, after the windows were broken, the local television news--which statistically represents the primary source of news for the majority of Americans--would broadcast nothing else.

If you look at analyses of how television news has changed over the last two decades, one of the trends is a greatly increased focus on violent crime, even during periods when crime rates decreased. We like our violence. It's exciting, attracts viewers, and keeps advertisers happy.

Similarly the focus on a few dozen trash throwers, and a literal handful of window breakers, was out of proportion. Watching the TV news, one was given the impression that this was all that was going on. Despite 3,500 cops already available to keep the peace, we felt the need to additionally deploy 1,000 National Guard members in camouflage onto streets where there was not even a tree.

Minnesota ditched nice and became "The Ugly American" in front of the entire world. As Fox 29 put it, "Media Coverage of Twin Cities During RNC Equal to 122 Super Bowl Ads".

This was in addition to the personnel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Coast Guard, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and tens of other agencies that the public has no idea even exists.

The response was excessive and entirely out of proportion to any actual threat. If we're going to have the NSA and CIA in town, could they please keep a look out for terrorist attacks, as opposed to a few dozen 20-year-old kids doing to Macy's what drunks returning home do to the store windows on a weekly basis? Are we not aware of how much alcohol-related violence, damage to property, and vandalism takes place in the Twin Cities on a weekly basis? We must keep things in proportion.

On Day Two of the RNC, I walked a couple of blocks away from the Tilsner Artists' Cooperative, where I had lived for five years, to Mears Park. The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, begun by Martin Luther King, was holding a rally and march that I felt was as important to attend as the anti-war rally on Day One.

If you want something to get hot and bothered about, please consider the fact that official U.S. government statistics admit that 12% of our population goes to bed hungry every night. We should be deeply, deeply, ashamed of ourselves.

During the first two hours of the Poor People's Rally Mears Park, there were 200-300 people there, 100 of whom were journalists, legal observers and street medics. The Poor People's Campaign is a local organization that has held peaceful protests in the Twin Cities for over a decade.

On the State's side of that tiny, peaceful rally, I could see 2 helicopters, 40 riot police, 20 bike police, 6 horse police, the National Guard, Secret Service, SWAT, and no doubt numerous undercover police officers. Some of the police were armed with M-16 or M-4 assault rifles. Machine guns, in plain English. There was blatantly no public order imperative for any of this.

At one point during the rally, where Food Not Bombs was handing out free food and families with children picnicked, in a jovial atmosphere identical to that of the Music at Mears summer concert series, a line of 20 riot police were deployed to stand in the middle of the park on a ridge, looming over people. It was sickening.

This kind of overkill characterized security deployment during the RNC week, and created a tangible atmosphere of intimidation that discouraged attendance at rallies and other public events, which chilled much of the expected protest around the Convention, and undermined free speech at an event where the free speech of the Convention attendees from the Republican Party was guarded jealously, with cages keeping those who disagreed far away and—as it clearly wasn't the American public's—a private army securing the streets outside.

After seeing all this, I left the rally when it became a march, and went home. I didn't want to get arrested for attending a demonstration. What a sad day for St. Paul, for America, and for the First Amendment.

The Heffelfinger-Luger review of RNC policing, carried out by a committee of ex-mayors, former and current police/security agency officers, and by one man who makes his living selling software to the St. Paul Police Department, found all of this to be "appropriate", as did the mayors of both cities.

Amnesty International had a different take on it:

...some of the police actions appear to have breached United Nations (UN) standards on the use of force by Law Enforcement Officials. These stipulate, among other things, that force should be used only as a last resort, in proportion to the threat posed, and should be designed to minimize damage or injury. Some of the treatment also appears to have contravened US laws and guidelines on the use of force. The UN standards also stress that everyone is allowed to participate in lawful and peaceful assemblies, in accordance with the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Source: http://rnc08report.org/archive/2.shtml

Before the Convention even started, raids on protest organizers, journalists, and cop watch groups took place across both cities. Eight protest organizers were charged with "Conspiracy to Riot in Furtherance of Terrorism" under Minnesota's version of the PATRIOT Act, essentially for planning nonviolent direct action. They work as teachers, childcare service providers, and run community projects for the poor. They can only be considered to be "terrorists" if we are to call Rosa Parks a "terrorist".

The three people being charged with possession of Molotov cocktails were both enabled and led on by paid FBI informants. Brandon Darby, a nationally known activist and former organizer of Common Ground in New Orleans, was responsible for egging on two younger Texan activists to throw molotov cocktails at police cars, yet claimed he had "done everything to stop them short of telling them that I was an FBI agent". His exchange of text messages with one of the activists, bizarrely entered as evidence in the trial that ended up with a hung jury, told a different story:

1:31am Darby: "what up, butter cup?"
1:43 McKay: "too many ants around the candy bars, not going to mom's tonight. serious concern. too hot. will update in 1 hr"
1:49 Darby: "chill, it's fine, normal feeling to have when you haven't seen family in a while"
2:13 Darby: "why do you keep half calling me. you are a mo fo."
2:26 McKay: "Yeah I'm just not feeling the vibe on the street."
2:26 Darby: "I guess I'll just have to whip you with a wet noodle when I see ya, you butthead. text me when you can"
(later) Darby: are you ok
Darby: "you be trippin. all jimmy hendrix style and shit"
Darby: "it's your call. I support you making whatever choice you are comfortable with. Be proud of yourself for your work and take a chill"...
Darby: "it's ok, don't get crazy, just communicate" ... " police and demos can be traumatic." asks to move on and talk about other things. "i'll start: how bout them yankees?"
McKay: "word. talk to you in the am for more details."
Darby: ... "hope to see you before your flight"...
Darby: it's all good, sometimes it's best to fight another day. you'll wake up and feel bad - it's ok, i'll support you.
Darby: "you asleep yet?"
Darby: i can't sleep, let's go eat at an all night diner or something.

[This is a partial transcript and includes paraphrasing if not in quotes. In total. Darby sent at least 15 text messages in this stretch; McKay only sent three.]

Similarly, paid FBI RNC Welcoming Committee informant, Andrew Darst, was responsible for both proposing and actually creating the "sector map", a key RNC Welcoming Committee tool that was used to organize out of town protest groups to blockade parts of the city. He created glossy brochures of key intersections in the cities for national distribution to protest groups: http://rnc08report.org/archive/70.shtml

In other words, the man supposedly paid to stop the riots actively organized them. Other reports have him driving some of those charged with possession of molotov cocktails to Home Depot to buy the materials.

If I haven't said it already, Mayor Chris Coleman, you are an utter coward for letting John Harrington, Bob Fletcher, Susan Gaertner, and various FBI and Federal goons do this to our beautiful city. You're supposed to be our mayor, not some collaborator with amoral political hacks who are willing to allow the Feds to use entrapment in order to further their own, clearly pathetic, political careers.

As one person ironically commented from the RNC Welcoming Committee--which was unconnected to any acts of violence or any of the three out of town molotov cases--"Anytime there's an FBI bust of a 'bomb plot', you'll usually find that the agency paid the rent for the warehouse where the devices were made".

In all three of the molotov cases, which are serious crimes that genuinely threatened public safety, it seems clear that those charged with protecting our security acted like the firemen you occasionally hear about in the news, who commit arson to ensure job security.

There were three mass arrests in the Twin Cities during the Republican National Convention: http://rnc08report.org/archive/712.shtml

The first mass arrest took place on Day 1, September 1st at the intersection of Shepard and Ontario on the riverbank in St. Paul, netting a small amount of protesters, a literal handful of whom could be said to be antagonistic towards the police, and a larger amount of concert goers heading for the “Take Back Labor Day” concert on Harriet Island featuring Mos Def, Billy Bragg, Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine, Atmosphere and a number of other international artists. Over 200 people were surrounded and arrested in a park.

The second mass arrest took place on Day 3, September 3rd, in the wake of a Rage Against The Machine concert in the Target Center in Minneapolis. After some entirely peaceful back and forth downtown, police herded concert goers, curious bystanders and journalists into a trap. 102 people were surrounded and arrested.

The third and final mass arrest took place on Day 4, the last night of the RNC, September 4th. Police instructed the remnants of an earlier demonstration to move south to the Marion Street Bridge, where over 300 people were surrounded and arrested, including interested bystanders and journalists.

At minimum, at least 600 of those arrested during the RNC--i.e. more than 75% of the total of over 800 people arrested during the Convention--were arrested in a mass arrest situation.

It took until September 19th, over two weeks after the Convention was over, for the City of St. Paul to announce that it would not be pressing charges against journalists who were victims of mass arrests despite carrying press credentials.

Similarly, most of the Shepard Road mass arrests were tossed out, today St. Paul City Attorney John Choi announced that over 300 people rounded up in the Marion Street Bridge mass arrest would not be charged, and it is rumored among legal sources that the Rage Against the Machine mass arrests are about to be tossed out.

Choi said today that his office would be unable "to prove the charges beyond a reasonable doubt at trial", qualifying this with the assertion that the decision does not mean police acted improperly on the street, "The professional obligations and situations that are in front of a prosecutor and a police officer are very, very different."

At the beginning of December, when Choi dropped charges against 29 protesters charged with rioting, he extended this logic even further, claiming that "in no way does a dismissal in a criminal case mean that there was not probable cause for the underlying arrest, or that the police acted inappropriately in any way."

In late January 2009, the City of St. Paul dropped charges against Poor People's Economic Campaign for Human Rights organizer Cheri Honkala for organizing a camp for poor people on Harriet Island. According to the Associated Press, Choi was reported as saying that Honkala "had spent a night in jail, and that his office feels that was the appropriate sanction".

During the same week, another case involving activists known as the "Wall 7" who had blockaded an intersection at Wall and 7th, saw all their charges dropped, after Ramsey County Judge Michael Fetsch ruled that "no reasonable jury would convict the defendants even if they believed the prosecution's evidence". Choi bizarrely responded by saying that he wished a jury would have been allowed to hear the case because, "I believe we could have gotten a conviction in this case."

Wall 7 defense counsel Jordan Kushner, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild, stated that "This was the City of St. Paul’s showcase trial — the first RNC case to go to trial and one in which the City consolidated the trials of all seven defendants. Unfortunately for the City, however, it showcased how police had no basis for the vast majority of arrests made during the RNC."

St. Paul City Attorney John Choi's remarks defending mass arrests and arrests that both judges and his own office stated could not be prosecuted, should sound bizarre in any society based on the principle that citizens should be free from arrest unless committing an actual crime. One hopes that the police have common sense to recognize that mass arrests fundamentally compromise this principle, and should not be encouraged by public servants like Choi to arrest them all and sort out the guilty and innocent later.

Cheri Honkala was not found guilty of any crime. John Choi's comment that her detention was "an appropriate sanction" should be unacceptable for anyone who believes that people should be treated as innocent until proven guilty.

“The reality is that those arrests should never have been made,” said Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild to the Minnesota Independent.

And all of this is before we even begin to discuss to the alleged police beating of minor Kevin Smith and alleged beating and torture of Elliot Hughes by over one dozen corrections officers in the Ramsey County jail, as witnessed by several inmates. This is the system we live with, that no city official has yet dared to confront. The cowards have made cowards of us all. Every time I see a cop, since the RNC, I make sure I am not even thinking any guilty thoughts. It now takes extra guts to speak your mind. Thanks so much for all of that Minnesota.

Police actions towards protesters at the 2008 Republican National Convention were excessive and have to date gone completely unchecked. The ongoing dismissals of RNC cases and hung juries underline this fact. City officials who have done nothing to put the police on notice that they must tread lightly at First Amendment events are responsible for creating a political climate where the freedom of speech of all can be said to be being seriously violated.

The danger this poses to our society and assumed freedoms is considerable. When we look back at the 2008 Republican National Convention in our cities, it should not be the handfuls of kids in black masks that we should consider any danger to public safety.

That accolade more rightly should fall on the police forces that obsessively utilized riot control weaponry in non-riot situations, conducted mass arrests like they were on special at Macy's, men who excuse these threats to democracy such as St. Paul City Attorney John Choi, and lawmakers that have redefined what Rosa Parks did as "terrorism".

-------

Bio: Nigel Parry is the editor of the RNC '08 Report -- found at http://rnc08report.org -- and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, Electronic Iraq, and Electronic Lebanon alternative news websites. He has lived in the Twin Cities for most of the last decade and like most of the population of Minnesota, is hoping that summer comes sooner rather than later.