St. Paul Posts: Youth Vote '08 reporter describes protests, arrest

By Dean Treftz, Youth Vote '08 correspondent

ST. PAUL, Minn. - When I arrived at Thursday's protest the scene reminded me more of Monday's peaceful, relatively easy-going main march than Tuesday's tense standoff.

I was surprised. I'd taken off from the convention center around 5:30 p.m. to check out what was supposed to be the most confrontational big protest. I'd read somewhere that the protesters said they would stay beyond their designated protest time as a logistical 'flip of the bird' at the authorities.

I found them mostly on the bridge over Interstate 94 near the capital on John Ireland Boulevard. For the most part, this didn't appear to be a crowd spoiling for a fight. Everyone seemed to feel it - the cameras were busy interviewing people, unafraid of missing any conflict. Even the cops were relaxed.

Even when a group started marching toward the capital at about 6 p.m., it seemed almost... fun. But the marching allowed the more confrontational protesters to separate themselves out toward the front. The potential for conflict started to appear when the march wheeled toward the Cedar Street bridge over 94 and a handful in front started running.

The majority of marchers held back, wary of involving themselves in whatever happened when the frontrunners hit the wall of police quickly forming at the bridge's entrance. But the back eventually caught the front, which found itself face-to-mouth with a team of equestrian officers.

So they chanted as onlookers and journalists looked on and teams of police reinforcements arrived.

Still, the mood was relatively light, neither the cops nor protesters seemed overly tense. That may have been partly thanks to the legions of cameras on the scene. In fact, the crowd chanted "the whole world is watching" several times.

After a half an hour of chants punctuated by small scuffles, at 6:40 p.m. the police made their move, cutting through the crowd and encircling the front 30 or so people of the march. The cops then began slowly arresting those ringed-in while the remainder chanted for them to be let go.

But the tactic seemed to have worked. By 7 p.m., the crowd had dwindled somewhat and whatever they had been a part of seemed dead. Many wandered back to the parking lot for the park just behind the lines.

A resurgence of energy reappeared 20 minutes later when a bullhorn-wielding man was able to kick-start chants that had been stalling before. At this point, the protesters seemed to realize they had to stay dense in order to keep any momentum. They even began beckoning with chants of "out of the park, into the street."

When the cops grabbed a couple people lined around the circle of protesters at 7:30, the fuse was lit. The protesters began moving back toward the capital.

At first, they were hesitant, nebulous and without a clear direction, but after cries of "stay together," and "group up," a distinct march solidified. When they headed back toward the John Ireland Boulevard bridge where I first found them, things seemed to intensify quickly. Police had blocked the entrance to the bridge, so the protesters made out for the Marion Street bridge one block east.

At this point, it seemed the police felt they had lost control of the march. Cops on bikes swiftly cut through the group in hopes to head them off. It became more apparent when the cops didn't help stop cars at the 94 offramp in between the two bridges. There were a couple anxious moments when cars, realizing they were driving into a protest march at 40 miles an hour, had to slam on their brakes.

Several people had the brilliant idea of directing the march down the offramp to disrupt traffic on the interstate but couldn't convince the rest to stare down cars going 60 miles an hour.

Finding the Marion Street bridge blocked as well, the marchers had run out of bridges to downtown so they turned north toward the arterial University Avenue. The cops really had to scramble. Having given up on their destination of the Xcel Center, the crowd became that much harder to predict.

The teams of police frantically trying to get in front of the unchained march gave the air electricity with the collective intuition that there was no way this would be allowed to continue now. They reached University with police officers still working to control the cars at the intersection.

The marchers hung a right and headed toward another thoroughfare, Rice Street. The police decided to end it by hastily blocking University 200 feet in front of Rice.

For the second time, the protesters and police met head-on. This faceoff was much shorter.

A lit wick like those on fireworks dropped into the no man's land between the two groups. It looked like it came from a marcher, but I couldn't make out what it was.

It didn't matter. Within seconds, gas grenades hit the ground and everyone started to run. Flash-bangs turned that into a sprint.

From this point on, I'm going to have to make this a more personal account thanks to a splintered group and my unwillingness to stick around and confirm that there wasn't any tear gas mixed in with the smoke grenades (I don't think there was).

I scrambled under a fence with a group of others, and we made our way back toward Marion Street. The smoke and near-constant flash-bangs were compounded by shells - made of a chalk-like substance to mark suspects -  launching out of the haze.

We ran into a fairly sizeable contingent of the original marchers reforming near a warehouse like building. Having no intention of getting anywhere with cops on horseback approaching to confront them, I held back, only to be spurned by advancing flash-bangs only a few feet away.

It became increasingly clear - and confirmed with orders from a police bullhorn -  that we were being herded south back toward 94 with smoke and the noise-making grenades.

So we started walking south, with some of the protesters reforming and bangs indicating where others were running into our new invisible fence. Ahead, the bridge was left open and a wall of cops waited at the other end.

Hesitant to wander into what had previously been a jealously guarded gateway downtown, I stopped short of the bridge. The neo-marchers seemed to be noisily stepping out of bounds by moving back toward John Ireland so I held up my hands and yelled at a nearby cop wall "where are we supposed to go?"

No answer. I walked onto the bridge.

There was a handful of others on the bridge that seemed just as uninterested in making a statement by being there. We approached the line of police on the far side of the bridge, I held up my media credentials and - from a decent distance - inquired as to what travel restrictions we were under as obvious non-protesters and media.

Silence. We milled for a bit, no one wanting to get within mace range to ask more politely.

Eventually, a bullhorn told us to sit down on the bridge and put our hands on our heads. We did, and about 300 others joined us.

We were there for three and a half hours. Luckily, we hadn't been picked up outside the bridge like other reporters who I learned were processed and didn't leave their holding cells until 3 a.m. -  midnight ain't that bad.

We waited. They started slowly arresting people on the other end of the bridge. We waited. A few blocks away John McCain talked about how more unites us than divides us. We watched them take pictures of each other with us in the background.

Eventually, they figured out that the two photographers next to me and I were media. We were told that we had ignored repeated warnings to leave an unauthorized protest zone, no exceptions for the media. We were getting misdemeanors for reporting.

We were graciously escorted to be cited - officially for unlawful assembly - by St. Paul Police Commander Joe Neuberger. He was near the end of a tough week.

My bridgemate Jeff Schorfheide, a photographer with University of Wisconsin's Badger Herald, explained (truthfully) that he had been trying to get to the convention but all the bridges were blocked by police, so he got corralled here.

Neuberger smiled wide, "sure you were, sure you were."

He graciously informed us of what we had done wrong.

"This isn't Beirut," guys, he said. He added we're not embedded and that when smoke starts going off, we have to get out of there.

I considered pointing out that by the time the smoke hit, our route was pretty well marked by the flash-bangs and man on the bullhorn, but he seemed to know what he was talking about.

I asked him how many people were being arrested on the bridge.

"No," he said. "You're not press, you're prisoners."

Dean Treftz is a former reporter with the Daily Iowan and is a senior at the University of Iowa majoring in journalism and economics.