Socialist Action /August 2000
Cops Assault Animal Rights Protest
Police and the local Democratic Party power structure
in Minneapolis have been active on more than one front lately. Plans by
animal rights organizations to demonstrate outside the recent meeting of
the International Society of Animal Genetics were met with a massive police
mobilization.
For weeks before the July conference, police showed
videotapes of the Seattle anti-WTO demonstration to local businesspeople
and neighborhood groups. Concrete barricades were built around possible
protest sites.
Letters from the Minneapolis police department
were sent to activists, including attorney Jordan Kushner of the local chapter
of the National Lawyers Guild, asking him to contact police if he planned
to participate in protests outside the conference. Kushner has been defending
activists arrested in police attacks on demonstrators on May 1 of this year.
Two days into the conference, hundreds of police
in riot gear surrounded demonstrators, arresting and pepper spraying some
72 people. Police and FBI charged that demonstrators had left canisters
of cyanide in the downtown area but have yet to prove that the containers
had anything in them but vinegar, which the protesters planned to use as
an antidote to pepper spray or tear gas.
Efforts by police and the city government to scare
the public about the "threat to safety" posed by the 200 or so
demonstrators are falling flat with the local media and even some in city
government. City Council member Jim Niland said, "Anyone who saw these
protesters saw that 99.9 percent of the protest was peaceful."
Among other actions, police raided a duplex housing
Sister's Camelot, which distributes free food to the hungry in Minneapolis.
Computers were confiscated, and the organization, now bankrupt, has been
evicted.
- C.B.
Socialist Action /August 2000 |