Bruce Nestor on Minnesota Public Radio

After reading coverage of demonstrations and arrests in St. Paul this week during the Republican National Convention, I spent time this evening watching raw video of some of the incidents, in which police used percussion grenades, smoke bombs and tear gas on smallish groups of demonstrators who didn't appear to be doing anything except marching where they weren't supposed to.

Which brought to mind the words of Bruce Nestor, president of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyer's Guild, on Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning show earlier in the day (September 5, 2008):

The expressed intention of the RNC Welcoming Committee was to try to block traffic. I ran into one of those blockades myself on the way back from the Law Enforcement Center, and it was some young kids who had stopped a Volvo in the middle of 7th street. They were peaceful, there was a person playing guitar, and the police dealt with it, frankly, very professionally: They cut people loose, they cleared the intersection, and life went on. Traffic was disrupted for 15 to 20 minutes. ...That response to me was appropriate. Clear the barricade, move people on.

The type of response that's not appropriate: Raid homes at gunpoint, arrest people, charge them with furthering terrorism -- which really trivializes the real violence of terrorism and tries to put people on trial for their political views. And then militarize the whole city.

That's what I object to, that's what the National Lawyers Guild objects to. And in part because we really see it as a pattern across the country that's evolved to suppress free speech, to try to say that people in the streets are, somehow, for one, dangerous so don't join them, and two, they're weird so you don't really want to associate with them.

It's to say that doing what's a traditional American and democratic function -- taking politics beyond voting or just writing a letter by going into the streets and demonstrating -- is somehow wrong.

Transcribed from Minnesota Public Radio's sound archive.