Wow. I’m speechless. Richard Greelis, an undercover cop who infiltrated organizing around the 2008 Republican National Convention, has written a memoir in which he tells bald faced lies about independent videographers supposedly turning their cameras off to hide protesters’ attacks on police, then documenting the police ‘response.’ I was there, shooting video for iWitness video, and this is complete BS. Dangerous BS. You kind of just have to laugh at it.
Just posted up on TC Indymedia:
http://tc.indymedia.org/2009/sep/ex-bloomington-cop-richard-greelis-book-reveals-rnc-undercover-work-pdfHere’s a lol: Cop Book
One chapter of Greelis’ memoir - titled simply “Cop Book” - details his undercover work around the 2008 Republican National Convention, including attending a Northfield peace group’s forum, placing a short-lived informant in the RNC Welcoming Committee, participating in Critical Mass and protests throughout the convention.
The Welcoming Committee sponsored training through various affinity groups, such as the National Lawyers Guild (NLG) and Citizens Against Police Brutality. These groups trained volunteers to be legal observers and videographers. Police sent informants to these, and other open classes, to learn what the training amounted to. Once trained, NLG volunteers were expected to wear the lime-green baseball caps that made them stand out in a crowd of protesters while they awaited the inevitable confrontations. When these confrontations arose, the observers’ instructions were to make notes on actions taken by police and record the names and badge numbers of officers involved. Videographers typically left their video cameras in the “off” position during confrontations with police, while protesters surreptitiously pelted the officers with rocks, garbage, excrement, and urine squirted from Super Soakers. When the police finally had enough, and brought out the tear gas and hickory sticks, the cameras started rolling and continued to roll until the last mope was piled into the last police transport. The videographers then turned their cameras off and offered up their video to any of countless sympathetic media outlets covering the event. (A movie, Terrorizing Dissent, released by Glass Bead Collective, et al., was made after the RNC using a compilation of these types of clips.)
To see what actually happened (massive police brutality that the Twin Cities doesn’t even have to pay for since the RNC allocated millions to cover the lawsuits beforehand) at the RNC 2008 I recommend viewing Ground Noise and Static or Terrorizing Dissent.
