9.08.2008

RNC post mortem: 50 million questions

The Republican National Convention is over and the event, and how law enforcement dealt with it, sparks a million questions -- or as my colleague Jeff Severns Guntzel writes, 50 million questions (a reference to the $50 million security budget for the four-day affair). Like me, he gathered a collection of projectiles fired at him during the protests, from "direct-impact rounds" to "Triple Chaser" tear gas grenades, and many of his questions revolve around what would've happened had any of these crowd-control tools -- many of which, the manufacturers warn, could result in death -- hit a protester or one of the countless media representatives or average joes ensnared on their way home from work. A definite must-read.

Guntzel is asking for your feedback -- what questions do you have? -- in comments at MnIndy. He makes this fine point:
There is also a more broad line of questioning. How should the deployment of any of these weapons be judged? There were clear incidents of violence by a small handful full of the many thousands of protesters who visited St. Paul, most of those incidents isolated to Monday’s protests (among these incidents: store windows were smashed, a delegate bus was hit with a brick, and at least one counter-protester was aggressively handled). But in each of the separate incidents I witnessed where Triple Chasers, pepper spray, or impact rounds were used, there were no evident acts of violence on the part of protesters.

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