here
that’s Alexis Baden-Mayer of the Organic Consumers’ Grassroots Netroots Alliance taking photos while the police scream at her that they’ll shoot!
from August 30th, after we got pulled over at gun point
we left and were followed by a black suburban on and off 94 and into minneapolis where we were finally pulled over by 3 cop cars on Lake and 13th.
when we stopped the police got out of theirs and pointed at least six guns at the van we were in (2 were shot guns), they ordered us to get out with our hands up one by one. we got out, walked backwards and were each handcuffed and searched (without consent), with guns on us the whole time. they then took our ids and ran them, asked us where we were staying and if we were doing anything illegal.
i asked one of the undercover people from the black suburban if we were being detained and she said “no”, i asked if we were being arrested and she said “no”, i asked if they had a warrant and she said “no”. someone else asked why we were in handcuffs if we weren’t being detained or arrested and she didn’t say anything.
then i told her i had to pee and were we going to be let go and she said it’ll just be a few minutes”
in my mind, this proves this was an intimidation tactic being used by ramsey county sherif’s department. the police officers involved were polite, even joking around with us a little, and clearly had been called in by the undercovers in the black suburban. who were these undercovers? reports are coming in that they are not FBI or homeland security, but working for the ramsey county sheriff’s department…
we were held for 20 minutes, handcuffed the whole time. this is being detained, yet we were told we weren’t being detained. they had no legal reason to follow us, no legal reason to pull us over and no reason whatsoever to pull guns on us.
this is a police state. they are doing illegal things such as raiding people’s houses, confiscating cameras and stopping people on the streets. why? an assumption that we’re a threat to the republican delegates, an assumption that everyone with a camera, everyone not in a business suit is here only to threaten these people coming to take over this town.
who’s next?
so, this doesn’t go too into detail about what happened, but we were followed for over 30 minutes. on and off the highway, around the mississippi river, through a McDonalds drive thru and finally to that intersection where we were pulled over. at that point it was just a relief, until we saw the guns.
when we got pulled over there were a lot of people already on the street. it was a busy intersection, and immediately a woman started taking pictures, until they screamed at her to “get out of the line of fire or we’ll shot! stop taking pictures or we’ll shoot”. the whole thing was hilarious and terrorifying at the same time. more and more people started gathering around us and legal observers (organized by Coldsnap legal collective) appeared. we were on the sidewalk in handcuffs, but not being questioned when 2 women came up to us and asked us for our names, writing down everything that happened and then calling a friend of ours who had stayed at my parent’s house to tell him what was going on. we saw several friends, a woman biked to her house and brought us back water, other people started asking the police what was going on and taking pictures. all in all it was pretty amazing.
