The Post put up an article that was just propaganda for the police detailing all of the items they seized during the DNC. The article was written as if they had proof that the police were in some sort of imminent danger because of these items, but upon a more thorough reading I have to wonder how serious this is.
For instance:
“An estimated 200 bottles of urine in a vacant house”
This does seem excessive, but it could also have been a homeless person squatting in a vacant house that has no running water and instead he was using bottles and not getting rid of them. The problem is that without any suspects or evidence of who left the bottles in the house, the motivation behind the bottles is unclear.
The mayor said that a stockpile of pipe was found close to police headquarters and that a bag of quick-connect brass fittings for propane bottles and 6- to 8-foot heavy-duty chain also was seized. PVC pipe was found in an alley in LoDo. Nails and screws were found scattered in LoDo streets. In another incident, two propane tanks were found chained to a fence in a LoDo parking lot.
Again there are not enough details here for anything to be useful. Having lived in downtown Denver for many years I can tell you that even without the DNC if you looked hard enough you could find all of these items. All of these items could have a reasonable and legal explanation. Without more detail it is impossible to know.
The city also found material for a "sleeping dragon," which protesters form by using PVC pipe and chains to link themselves together, the mayor said.
This may be accurate, but so what? I guess the police are afraid that they cannot handle defenseless people who are chained together, unable to fight back, unable to run. The worst thing those protesters could have done after chaining themselves together is to be a nuisance.
Sonny Jackson, a spokesman for the Denver Police Department, said more than 150 individuals had been arrested during the convention, but he was unsure whether any of those had been arrested in connection with the items that were seized.
Nobody was arrested in connection with the items seized because no crimes were committed. If the police had something more tangible, they would be bragging about how they stopped something serious from happening. Instead they are bragging about nothing and trying to make it sound like something. The most they can claim is that they may have stopped some cops from getting hit with pooh, which is gross, but it is not really all that dangerous.
original story:
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_10382440
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