The St. Paul RNC settlements

Colin Moynihan has a rather damning report in today's NYT on the settlements out of St. Paul this week in regards to police abuses during the 2008 RNC.

Perhaps one of the most egregious cases (this isn't new info) was the St. Paul Police preemptive attack on I-Witness Video. From NYT:

The other settlement, announced last week, resolved a federal lawsuit filed against members of the St. Paul Police Department and the F.B.I. after the police handcuffed and detained 10 people in a house in St. Paul for several hours. Although nobody was arrested, some of the people said their computers and phones had been searched.

Among them were members of I-Witness Video, a New York City-based collective that assembled videotape evidence during the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York that was used to impeach sworn testimony by police officers in cases stemming from that convention.

An affidavit submitted in support of a search warrant for the home cited 21 heavy packages that had been delivered there and stated that an F.B.I. agent “has information from a reliable source that the packages contained weapons that are to be used during the R.N.C.” No weapons were found.

The Strib says the various recent settlements announced total about $175,000.