(If you're bored enough to read this, you deserve a map.)

The New York Times said:
"As the march ended, police trailing the rear grabbed one marcher and began pepper spraying people in the area. It wasn't immediately clear what led police to grab the man."


I witnessed this one; I think I did, anyway. What I saw wasn't actually at the end of the march, merely at the tail end of the crowd walking. It looked like the guy wanted to leave the march and tried to exit the street via an intersection being covered by riot cops. A couple cops shoved at him a couple times to push him off, then it juxtaposed as he tried to get away and they tried to nab him. As they grabbed at him they also maced him from behind, macing ~ a 180 degree arc 1-2 lanes of traffic in radius for good measure. I got a whiff of it from about 20 feet away; I suck at estimating numbers in a crowd, but it's probably safe to say a couple dozen people got a stronger dose than I did, at least (I really suck at numbers).

Aside from people climbing things they shouldn't be climbing (and getting away with it), I didn't see anything else on the walk. Well, after everyone finished the march to the Xcel Center, or as close as we were allowed to get, we milled about for a while, costumed hippies sharing the patchouli love, bandito miscreants shouting taunts to cops behind fences (definitely more for their protection than the cops'), and you know, [mostly] normal people as well. I asked some officious looking people in yellow smock-ish things how long we were allowed to be around there (I got tired of shop class goggle-wearing, bandana'd paranoids swearing that cops were going to rush us with teargas in two minutes...every two minutes) and after some calls they confirmed that we had the space until 11. Don't question this: the yellow smock people were old, nice, and must certainly be infallible. Thus, at 8:20pm, a crowd of riot police capable of lining a city block chased us out. The paranoids and the bandito miscreants stuck around to make sure the cops were serious, but moved along relative quietly. Why? Because we're Minnesota Nice, and besides, when you play chicken with a Roman legion of storm troopers, it's best to lose quickly and safely out of arm's reach.

Mickey's Strikes Back:

With those cops at our back, we're walking along and I see Mickey's! As I my mind wandered towards thoughts of "What happened to Emilio Estevez anyway?" I'm brought back to Earth by the sound of police declaring us an unlawful assembly and chucking teargas our way. -- What I saw was green smoke. I assume it's teargas, but I won't lie and say I was willing to run into the cloud to check. At this point a decent sized crowd is flanked on this street with lines of riot police on each end and they're teargassing us. At this point, everyone that is in my view has been totally peaceful, and we're all stuck looking at each other wondering where the hell do we go now? Answer: all praise off-street parking! A couple volunteers pointed out a parking lot on the north end of the street and tried to get people to calmly walk -- don't run! -- into the parking lot to get off the street, away from the cops. I guess they smell fear. So now instead of sitting on a street thinking how fucked we all are, we're in a parking lot doing the same thing. That's a step up, because opposite the building I'm standing next to, about 6-8 flashbang grenades go off over the next minute or two. Even if you have a giant brick building between you and a flashbang, it is scary loud.

Heresay: later in the night I talked to a guy who described being caught stuck between two flashbangs, and a member of the press who said the bombardment began within seconds of a crowd complying with an order to step back. I don't know any more than that. As we were comparing stories, he added that he'd also seen gas grenades with a white gas that he thought were just general smoke bombs.

So now we're stuck in a parking lot wondering what to do. (A photographer got a shot of two well-dressed women huddled scared in a doorway. He couldn't have asked for better models.) The north end of the lot is taped off and manned by a handful of blue uniformed officers. Some brave soul steps up and rolls a twenty on his Diplomacy check; he explains how we're trapped, and the officer sympathetically agrees to escort the dozen of us in earshot up and over a block to get past the police lines. I have no idea what happened to the several dozen other people in that parking lot. Hopefully they got lucky as well. In any case, we barely made it unscathed ourselves; we had to hop some hedges and move across the local hospital's lawn to get to where we needed to be, and riot cops detached from the line blocking that street to chase us down. They caught up to us hopping the first hedge, and a riot cop stood 3 feet from a man, ready to mace him even as our uniformed escort stood 6 feet away yelling at him to stop and let us pass. We nearly got in as much trouble exiting the lawn, but luckily that police line wasn't as inclined to leave their posts to chase us. After that, it was a pretty uneventful, if hostile, herding back to the capitol. (Some particularly bored riot cops took to strobing with their flashlights anyone who turned an eye in their direction at one point when a crowd of us were stuck wondering where we were going to be moved next.) Once there, we were pretty much free to disperse to the north and west; east and south were possible if you took a nice detour, and finally a bit before 9:20, the cops finally decided to leave.

Impressions: riot police are intimidating. When they march on you, it's like 50 stormtroopers slowly counting to 3.

If you're willing to speak in a clear, submissive tone from 20-30 feet away and hold your hands open and visible, you have about equal odds that your question will be met helpfully, neutrally, or with a hostile threat. Those are surprisingly good odds, and I certainly got better results than most did.

Aside from the moron who I saw arrested for trying to push past riot cops (Darwin Award honorable mention if I ever saw one), I'm having trouble understanding what precipitated or justifies the level of force I saw used tonight. This was a crowd far more peaceful than I would have expected; they didn't have it in them to riot. Who teargases Minnesota Nice?

I wish I could have been everywhere at once. I want to know what I missed from my perspective, so I can understand both what provoked the authorities, and how they responded.