Wednesday, Sep 03, 2008

TTT-RNC-LIVE Inside/Outside

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Sept 3: LIVE from the Convention Center and KFAI Studios. TRUTH TO TELL witnessed indiscriminate police violence and the exercise of a well-developed siege mentality inculcated into officers over a two year period and rank with paranoia-driven counter-protest tactics. While I recorded running commentary and interviewed others in the streets, an assistant photographed the treatment of arrested protesters at the hands of fully padded, black-helmuted riot police in numbers three to four times that of any group we encountered, many of them from such jurisdictions as Cedar Rapids, IA, Springfield, MO, and Tucson, AZ, let alone most of the Metro jurisdictions and outstate towns that brought the force to over 3,500 officers. As three of TTT’s staff lunched in an outdoor café at St. Peter and 7th Place, police confronted three young men seeking to search their backpacks. The young men refused and police pressed their case, calling in St. Paul/Ramsey County SWAT Team back-ups, who piled out of a rapidly arriving police van. The men still refused to be searched (meaning that a warrant would be required to do so absent probable cause they represented some immediate danger). When set upon, the men ran through the plaza and an office caught up with and tackled the slowest, screaming at him and slamming his head into the concrete sidewalk, then dragging him back to the van. Twenty minutes later, the young man, still bleeding from his head wound, walked with his backpack through the plaza - unarrested and uncharged. GUESTS: • GENA BERGLUND, attorney, National Lawyers Guild, representing arrested citizens and coordinating legal observers and videographers. • JIM LEINFELDER, Free-lance Producer/Journalist, working for MSNBC, CNN and other networks • NANCY SARTOR, TTT Associate Producer/Correspondent Podcasts are available for all archived Truth to Tell shows.

Posted by Truth to Tell at 11:00 AM |   

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