Ex-Bloomington Cop Richard Greelis' Book Reveals RNC Undercover Work (PDF)

One chapter of Greelis' memoir - titled simply "Cop Book" - details his undercover work around the 2008 Republican National Convention, including attending a Northfield peace group's forum, placing a short-lived informant in the RNC Welcoming Committee, participating in Critical Mass and protests throughout the convention.

Which is funnier - the anarchists' goal of "social reform" or the "various affinity groups such as the National Lawyers Guild"?  Read it yourself and decide!  Despite his misunderstandings and obsession with poop, Greelis' book is still a valuable, interesting read to say the least.

Some excerpts:

The Welcoming Committee sponsored training through various affinity groups, such as the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Citizens Against Police Brutality.  These groups trained volunteers to be legal observers and videographers.  Police sent informants to these, and other open classes, to learn what the training amounted to.  Once trained, NLG volunteers were expected to wear the lime-green baseball caps that made them stand out in a crowd of protesters while they awaited the inevitable confrontations.  When these confrontations arose, the observers' instructions were to make notes on actions taken by police and record the names and badge numbers of officers involved.  Videographers typically left their video cameras in the "off" position during confrontations with police, while protesters surreptitiously pelted the officers with rocks, garbage, excrement, and urine squirted from Super Soakers.  When the police finally had enough, and brought out the tear gas and hickory sticks, the cameras started rolling and continued to roll until the last mope was piled into the last police transport.  The videographers then turned their cameras off and offered up their video to any of countless sympathetic media outlets covering the event.  (A movie, Terrorizing Dissent, released by Glass Bead Collective, et al., was made after the RNC using a compilation of these types of clips.)

...

About a month before the RNC, my [undercover Bloomington PD] partner Leigh and I visited an open informational meeting at the Northfield Public Library with a panel of protesters who planned on resisting the RNC.  The purpose of the meeting was to allow panel members the chance to say a little about their groups and their protest strategy.  These leaders were also passively attempting to recruit audience members into their ranks.  With two prestigious colleges, Carleton and St. Olaf, the city of Northfield was ripe for the picking of student activists.  Our purpose in attending was to learn if any of the groups, most notably the Welcoming Committee, was advocating violence.

In addition to the two spokespersons from the Welcoming Committee, the panel included representatives from Vets For Peace (VFP), The Coalition to March on the RNC, Peace Island, and a supporter of one-time Republican candidate Ron Paul, who was planning a "parallel" convention in Minneapolis during the RNC.
I arrived late, as the VFP guy was wrapping up his spiel on his group's plan for a peaceful march just prior to the RNC.  I climbed over a chair and sat beside Leigh, who was looking somewhat out of place, since the audience appeared to mostly consist of the over-seventy set mixed in with a few college kids wearing black T-shirts.  From my seat in the back row I noticed what I assumed was another undercover cop--who I was not familiar with--sitting two seating away from me, looking mostly at his feet and probably feeling as out of place as we did.

Scanning the members of the panel I came upon a face that I instantly recognized, and just as quickly realized that my status as an anonymous, everyday unaffiliated audience member could come to an abrupt end with disparaging finality if this panel member chose to out me.  She was none other than my ex-FBI office mate, Colleen [sic] Rowley, who was on the panel to talk about her group, Peace Island.  In a traditional undercover move that is both ridiculous and kind of futile in a small room such as this, I scooted down in  my chair using the skeletally thin woman seatedin front of me for concealment.  I whispered my apprehension to Leigh, who recieved it with her usual equanimity; but I decided to play it out.  I had a feeling that the panel members knew that Leigh, the gentleman two seats away, and I were police; but no one confronted us--yet.  (I later learned that the gentleman seated two seats from me hailed from the ranks of Emergency Medical Service {EMS} rather than police, but shared our purpose in attending.)

My uneasiness climaxed near the end of the meeting when an audience member asked the panel what they would do if they found a police undercover in the audience at this meeting.  Rowley fielded this question, beginning her response, "Well, I had a friend at the FBI who..." But she went on to talk about another agent who, like she backpacked his way from the FBI to Peacenikville.  I don't know how she could have missed me--a June bug behind a gnat; perhaps she'd forgotten me, or maybe still possessed some measure of loyalty to law enforcement that prevented her from humiliating me.  Either way, I was grateful and will try to send a dollar to the Peace Island picnic fund.

I was encouraged by most panel members who, like Rowley and the Vet for Peace, espoused only nonviolent demonstrations and protest.  One of the Welcoming Committee members, however, had a different agenda.  His casual delivery belied an obvious contempt for law enforcement; his arrogance was transparents beneath the polished veneer of articulate presentation.  He told the would-be protesters in the audience that they should never trust the police, that the police would be committing most of the violence and would nt be giving nonviolent protesters any kind of free pass. He cautioned them, that even though they might be peaceful protesters, they should respect other protesters who, "might be acting out, using other tactics."  He said that "we" don't want the police differentiating between protest groups, referring to some groups as good and others bad.  It was an issue of solidarity and everyone knows that solidarity is a good thing.  His comments seemed to make other panel members tacitly uncomfortable, but no one objected or offered a different opinion.

Now their allegiance to the Welcoming Committee would be tested from the dark closet of solidarity where motives and virtues hung in opposite corners, and the first group to seek a light outside the closet would be labeled a pariah.  This young man wanted to unite all the affinity groups against law enforcement, knowing that the police had no qualms with peaceful protesters.  He wanted a polarized "us-against-them" convention.  His comments were enlightening.

...

The anarchists expected law enforcement to infiltrate their ranks, and they had vouching precautions to prevent this, but the police did it anyway.  As the convention drew neared and the Welcoming Committee's recruitment continued to wane, the vouching process became lax and finally disintegrated, since they couldn't risk scaring off any potential protesters.

Rather than sending in cops--who typically look, dress, smell, act, and talk like cops--we sent in sources who were younger, better looking, and willing to work, either for dismissal of drug charges or simply for money.

One might think that all the good guys--the cops--would work together to achieve this goal, but such was the not the case.  Politics and egos tended to get in the way.  We saw this happen.  Most guilty in this endeavor was a certain law enforcement administrator who wanted to be the overall, end-all boss of the cop element of the RNC.  He wanted the credit for saving St. Paul from the sky that was, according to him, falling fast.  As Chicken Little of the law enforcement community, he took great pleasure in his (rumored) off-the-record leaks to the media about the grave state of affairs in the upcoming RNC.  (As much as it pains me to admit, some of his worries about the sky falling were substantiated.)  In addition to airing his concerns, he tended not to play well with other cop-types who did not work for him--like our intel unit.

Little had a longtime, reliable undercover in the Welcoming Committee who was getting him good intel.  When he learned that our intel unit had inserted a source into the group as well, he became adamant that we remove him; adamant enough that he followed our intel unit back to Bloomington from a surveillance in Minneapolis, and performed a traffic stop on the truck I as driving.  Though he was also in an undercover car, I recognized him and pulled my truck into a commercial parking lot just off the freeway.  When cops talk to one another in vehicles, they position their cars, driver's door to driver's door, and speak out the windows.  This positioning is the results of both years of tradition and years of performing this manuever as patrol officers.  But when I pulled around to talk to Little, he continued in a circle, guiding his car around behind me determined to execute a routine traffic stop on my vehicle.  Denying him the pleasure of chasing us around in circles until we were all dizzy, I stopped and allowed him to position his car behind mine.  After all, we were all cops here, and we were in my city.  We weren't even in his county.  He had no jurisdiction in Bloomington.  As he approached the passenger side of my truck, Leigh reluctantly lowered her window.  Expecting obsequiousness, or at least acquiescence, he was disappointed to find that Leigh and I staunchly defended our position and strategy.  Though I had a good working relationship with Little's intel commander, there had been some miscommunication between agencies, and Little overreacted like a spoiled child.

...

Since we lost our undercover within the group, we decided to answer the Welcoming Committee's website solicitation to "Adopt a Sector" in St. Paul to protest from.  ... Our intel unit made up an affinity group, gave it an appropriately provocative name, and got to work.  We followed the Welcoming Committee's directions for claiming a sector and wrote our anti-capitalist manifesto which was then published on the RNCWC's website and other local and national radical websites.  These anarchists are sharp, though!  Days after adopting our sector, the Welcoming Committee's website started lighting up, smelling a cop-rat.  The pronouns "we" and "they" had been used in such a way within the manifesto that, at times, the "we" became temporarily estranged from the "they," which constitutes a major faux-pas within a solidarity movement ...

Though shrewdly smelling our rat, they were never able to fully flesh us out.  And although our adopted sector ended up being the site of several confrontations, I lke to believe that our adoption of it caused an ulcer, or at least a gassy stomach, to the anarchist strategists.

...[undercover at Critical Mass]

We met at Loring Park, straddling bikes scrounged from the police bicycle impound garage.  Like the ugly, rheumy-eyed dog from the pound that nobody wanted, these were unclaimed bikes that would be auctioned off or given away.  They were not in terrible shape, but neither were they modern, well cared for, or tuned up.  A bike aficionado from our department lubed up the gears and checked the brakes.  He probably saved our lives.

After some encouraging words from Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan, we sat off on the streets of downtown Minneapolis with the Minneapolis Bike Cops as escorts.  The beautiful late-August day was warm and sunny.  Five hundred riders filled both lanes of traffic for about five or six city blocks.  The bike cops made sure that cars sharing the roads yielded to us.  Some of these drivers had to wait five minutes to wait for the entire group to pass.  Forcing drivers to wait for us felt rude but hurtling down the road and upshifting through red-light intersections empowered us as we took over the streets.  Maybe there was something to this Critical Mass this after all.  I leaned over to Leigh who peddled beside me and whispered, "We're getting paid for this!"

...

In the days to come we were herded like sheep at the hands of the MFF who used horses, motorcycles, bicycles, gas, smoke bombs, and flash-bangs to corral our fellow protesters and us.  Their strategy, tactics and deployments were well planned and extremely effective in controlling us without harming us.

Of course there were cries of outrage from the innocent bystanders and press people who ended up being driven like farm animals with the rest of us.  But most of the bystanders were asking for it with their presence at the protest scenes.  The press people were hopng for a confrontation so they would have something to report.  We saw them at all the protests, right there in the front lines awaiting controversy.  I think some of them secretly considered pitching a brick themselves, at times, when confrontations went too long without action or resolution.  We read their "woe is me" accounts in the Star Tribune for days after the convention left town.

http://twincities.indymedia.org/files/Greelis-CopBook-RNC.pdf