First things first: Joel Rosenberg brought up a great point in two comments in this thread the other day; no police department is immune from causing problems such as the ones Minneapolis had last Friday at the “Critical Mass” rally-turned-riot.

Mitch, I think the perception in the worst — and numerically small, but dominant — culture of the MPD is that they’re collectively utterly untouchable, and that what the peons think of as misbehavior has so long gone without consequence that there’s no need to worry about it. It’s how you get things like a cop booking a guy in on a non-existent crime (civilian possession of hollowpoints); the one that got drunk, decided to recreationally tune up a guy in a bar, took it outside and got beaten up and his gun taken, and got a couple of days off with pay; etc.

Those are hardly the only examples; they’re the ones that come to mind without having to violate some innocent’s privacy.

Or, to put it cynically, when one’s motto is “l’etat, c’est moi,” one doesn’t pay much attention to the subtleties of the latest polling.

Now, I’ve shared my misgivings about the upper-management of Minneapolis’ police department in the past. And while I know an awful lot of excellent officers on the MPD, the department does have a history of having had some bad apples that have caused all sorts of problems. They don’t have the most sympathetic reputation.

Which, along with Joel’s comment, started me thinking: what if the rioters were counting on that fact?

And I thought back to the other day, when I was at the anarkids’ “press conference”. I received a copy of the anarkids’ prepared statement about the bike rally riot.

There was a passage in the statement that caught my eye; it seemed almost incongruous in context…:

The RNC Welcoming Committe (RNC-WC), a group hosting the pReNC, gave a public speech before the ride exhorting riders to avoid confrontation throughout the weekend.

…and I filed the thought away for later.

“Later” arrived some time after reading Joel’s comment…

…and getting the following email yesterday. Over on an e-democracy discussion group, a friend and occasional interviewee of mine – who has never been mistaken for a conservative – wrote about the riots (with me adding occasional emphasis):

The way I read this situation is that we have first hand reports of
people they had never seen before making grandiose statements about what to do when the cops show up, something that has never been an issue with CM before. And then the cops do show up – in force, coordinated with the Deputies. Someone had tipped them off that a riot was about to happen.

Who tipped them off?

Why, the rioters, of course.

That part seemed incongruous to me at the time; for something like the “Critical Mass” rally to go from bucolic meander to riot inside a week? For the cops to have a bear in the air and cars standing by? For fifty cops to show up when the first disturbance call went out (although believe me – I understand why cops respond so quickly to “officer needs assistance” calls)?

That’s the way it used to work in Miami. You take a crowd of peace-loving citizens and start a riot by giving the cops an anonymous tip that there will be a riot. If you have police department that is known to to Neanderthal at the slightest provocation, it’s an easy gig to arrange. Then you have a whole bunch of middle class white people who have their dresses bloodied because they are no longer virgins when it comes to rioting. You want the middle class white people pissed off as all Hell at the cops for their awful brutality. You want them on *your* side when the big show comes to town. You want their resources and their money and their bodies, all for your cause.

Why would you do that?

It’s called “radicalizing”.

In my article on the subject, and in various communications with others on the situation, I’ve used different words – that the riot makes the anarkids and their lilywhite liberal supporters feel like victims, thereby justifying whatever means they want to bring to bear in protest.

And if I were looking to create exactly such an incident, what Metro police department would I pick as…my mark, for lack of a better term?

I use the term “mark” because that’s where the email was leading:

In short, Minneapolis got played. Bigtime. The rubes who fell for this
routine are nothing less than suckers. I’m especially mad at the cops for
falling for this, but they’ve never showed that they had too much in the
way of sense before so it’s not much of a surprise.

And then, this part here – which brought my attention directly back to that Anarkid press release about the big speech telling the Critical Massers to “stay peaceful”:

What I am quite sure of is that this WILL happen in Saint Paul sometime in
the near future. Any of you who attend a peace rally or any other thing
will suddenly hear someone shouting about how to conduct yourself in the event of a major police action. That’s the warning shot. They do this because they want you to flee to avoid arrest.

And, according to the Anarkids’ own press release, that’s exactly what they got:

Nearly twenty squad cars arrived on the scene. Over forty police created a line formation in which they advanced on bikers, arresting, and brutalizing those who fell behind.

If this correspondent is right – and some reading about crowd/mob psychology is on my agenda here – it’d seem that the Anarkids have taken charge of the public agenda. They even seem to know the political turf pretty well:

I heard that there was a similar incident in the works two months ago in Saint Paul, but our cops didn’t over-react enough to start the appropriate riot. If that is true, good for them. Having the best led and best paid police force in the state is doing us well.

Of course, even the best cops – and I share the correspondent’s regard for the SPPD – get worn down. And the Anarkids would seem to know that:

Remember, above all else – this isn’t about you. It’s not about your rights or your person or anything like that. It’s about finding fresh meat to put into the grinder to get a really big riot going. They will have to stir things up a lot if they are going to have a big show one year from now, and that means radicalizing a lot of people. That also means beating down Saint Paul’s finest and getting them battle-weary.

Don’t play that game. It’s not yours to win. Stay cool, stay smart.

True for all of us, really, on both sides of the fence – since any counter-protests will no doubt be met with provocations designed to play equally into their plans.

Something to keep in mind for the 9/15 counterprotests.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 5:23 am and is filed under Days of Adolescent Rage. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.