Posted on 04/18/2008 5:10:20 AM PDT by Libloather
Denver won't 'cage protesters' at DNC
By Chuck Plunkett
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated: 04/17/2008 04:38:57 PM MDT
Protesters will not be confined to "cages" during the 2008 Democratic National Convention, and the city wants to get away from the long lines of shoulder-to-shoulder, riot-gear-clad police that typified security at the national conventions in Boston and New York, Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown said today.
"We don't want to provoke violence," Brown said.
Brown said he talked with Mayor John Hickenlooper on Wednesday and that the two discussed "trying to get away from having lines of police officers."
Brown later asserted: "We aren't going to cage protesters."
The councilman made his comments before a group of about 50 students and others at the University of Denver law school, where local law groups are sponsoring a four-day series of workshops and discussions that offer training and tips for activists and protesters planning to demonstrate in and around convention week.
Brown participated in a noontime panel discussion with Glenn Spagnuolo, a representative for Re-create 68, the Denver-based umbrella group for war protesters and other activists that has said it will occupy Civic Center day and night throughout the convention, which runs Aug. 25 to Aug. 28.
Spagnuolo had charged that Denver planned to keep protesters as much as a mile away from the Pepsi Center, where the convention is to be held, saying he had it "on good authority" that the security perimeter would extend in a mile radius around the arena. Spagnuolo also reminded the group that protesters in Boston, where the Democrats held their convention in 2004, were contained behind security fencing far from the convention hall.
Details of the perimeter have not been released, but Mike Dino, who leads the Denver committee responsible for hosting the convention, told a group of business executives at the Pepsi Center this morning that the one-mile radius was a rumor and not true.
Brown said he expected details of the perimeter to be released in six to eight weeks.
Spagnuolo has said the city "is creating a very dangerous situation" because it awarded, in a blind lottery, a permit for Civic Center on the Sunday before the convention begins to the host committee's party planner. But he also has said that his group is nonviolent, and he repeated that claim several times today.
"They're trying their hardest to repeat a mantra that this group is going to engage in violence," Spagnuolo said. "That's a distraction to avoid focusing on the real violence that our country is perpetrating around the world."
CBS News
"When things blow up because the police have to enforce a permit that the Democrats got, don’t blame us for that," Glenn Spagnuolo, an organizer for the group, told the News.
And for a group of peaceful, new age, 'flower children' they picked a heck of a Logo....
"Join us in the streets of Denver as we resist a two-party system that allows imperialism and racism to continue unrestrained."
I think things in Denver will go ... 'just smashing'. 
the late Mayor Richard J. Daley during the 68 convention in Chicago
They should be caged at Guantanamo.
Might even work out. According to Colorado Deadly Force Statutes, residents in fear for their safety might have greater impact than riot police. (Colorado is a "Make my day" state)
Provoke/invite. Either way what he is saying is that by upholding the law the police presence is inciting the protesters to riot. It’s like blaming the Earth for gravity.
What I don’t understand is why the GOP convention is in Minnesota.
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