Twin Cities Indymedia is reporting ex-Bloomington police officer Richard Greelis' new memoir, "Cop Book" reveals more of the other side's tactics during the Republican National Convention in 2008. Most of the details are laughable misunderstandings, libelous advancements of State propaganda, and more or less useless, but there are some nuggets revealing how backwards "pig thinking" really is.Rather than sending in cops--who typically look, dress, smell, act, and talk like cops--we sent in sources who were younger, better looking, and willing to work, either for dismissal of drug charges or simply for money.
One might think that all the good guys--the cops--would work together to achieve this goal, but such was the not the case. Politics and egos tended to get in the way. We saw this happen. Most guilty in this endeavor was a certain law enforcement administrator who wanted to be the overall, end-all boss of the cop element of the RNC. He wanted the credit for saving St. Paul from the sky that was, according to him, falling fast. As Chicken Little of the law enforcement community, he took great pleasure in his (rumored) off-the-record leaks to the media about the grave state of affairs in the upcoming RNC. (As much as it pains me to admit, some of his worries about the sky falling were substantiated.) In addition to airing his concerns, he tended not to play well with other cop-types who did not work for him--like our intel unit.
Little had a longtime, reliable undercover in the Welcoming Committee who was getting him good intel. When he learned that our intel unit had inserted a source into the group as well, he became adamant that we remove him; adamant enough that he followed our intel unit back to Bloomington from a surveillance in Minneapolis, and performed a traffic stop on the truck I as driving. Though he was also in an undercover car, I recognized him and pulled my truck into a commercial parking lot just off the freeway. When cops talk to one another in vehicles, they position their cars, driver's door to driver's door, and speak out the windows. This positioning is the results of both years of tradition and years of performing this manuever as patrol officers. But when I pulled around to talk to Little, he continued in a circle, guiding his car around behind me determined to execute a routine traffic stop on my vehicle. Denying him the pleasure of chasing us around in circles until we were all dizzy, I stopped and allowed him to position his car behind mine. After all, we were all cops here, and we were in my city. We weren't even in his county. He had no jurisdiction in Bloomington. As he approached the passenger side of my truck, Leigh reluctantly lowered her window. Expecting obsequiousness, or at least acquiescence, he was disappointed to find that Leigh and I staunchly defended our position and strategy. Though I had a good working relationship with Little's intel commander, there had been some miscommunication between agencies, and Little overreacted like a spoiled child.
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Since we lost our undercover within the group, we decided to answer the Welcoming Committee's website solicitation to "Adopt a Sector" in St. Paul to protest from. ... Our intel unit made up an affinity group, gave it an appropriately provocative name, and got to work. We followed the Welcoming Committee's directions for claiming a sector and wrote our anti-capitalist manifesto which was then published on the RNCWC's website and other local and national radical websites. These anarchists are sharp, though! Days after adopting our sector, the Welcoming Committee's website started lighting up, smelling a cop-rat. The pronouns "we" and "they" had been used in such a way within the manifesto that, at times, the "we" became temporarily estranged from the "they," which constitutes a major faux-pas within a solidarity movement ...
Though shrewdly smelling our rat, they were never able to fully flesh us out. And although our adopted sector ended up being the site of several confrontations, I like to believe that our adoption of it caused an ulcer, or at least a gassy stomach, to the anarchist strategists.
This "made up affinity group" was Indy TACT, a fictional ad-hoc anti-capitalist group that attempted to make a claim for sector 2 during the RNC mobilization. Richard Greelis sounds like a stark, raving lunatic and if he had any hand in writing that lame ass "anti-capitalist manifesto" I would imagine the rest of his book is more ham-handed bullshit put to paper. Fucking cops. You give them a badge, a gun, and a car and they think they're actually making a difference. "Good guys." What a maroon.
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