Denver Won't Cage Protesters At DNC

Subject: Denver Won't Cage Protesters At DNC Fri Apr 18, 2008 5:34 am

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."

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_8960831

Denver Won't Cage Protesters At DNC

Denver Won't Cage Protesters At DNC

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