Convention time
Anyone who knows me well, knows that I would probably be the last one to attend a GOP sponsored event. I actually won’t be inside the convention but I will be doing some journalism work outside, talking to protesters and such. This summer I have been working for this online magazine called ThreeSixty. With the RNC coming to town next week, We’ll be busy with a lot of different articles and events. I guess we have two people who are going into the convention itself, you had to be 18, so that ruled me out. I don’t mind though, I get to see where the real action is: on the streets outside the Xcel. I’m pretty excited. I think it will be an memorable experience that I won’t soon forget.
Earlier in the summer I went to this journalism workshop with this ThreeSixty program at the University of St. Thomas. I was working with a few St. Thomas students working on a video project with another high school student. While there I had my first real ‘journalist experience’. I was working with a student at St. Thomas, and we were down at this John McCain fundraiser because we wanted to get some protest footage for our video. While we were downtown St. Paul, this police officer starts taking our picture. We were a little confused. We knew that we weren’t doing anything illegal, just shooting video in a public place. So the other guy I was with was wearing sunglasses and when the police officer starts taking our picture from the middle of the street that is blocked off, he takes his sunglasses off, kind of as a joke. Well the officer says “Thank you” and turns around and heads back to show his boss or whatever. We are very confused, but we keep shooting. We finish up and head back to our car. As we are leaving that’s when things got really sketchy.
We pull out of the parking lot and we get pulled over. The first thing that I thought was that they were going to take our tape. Now I know that they cannot take it (without a warrant) but that’s the first thing that went through my head. The officer says that they has heard from a “reliable source” that we hadn’t paid for our parking. This was completely false and we had the ticket to prove it, but we cooperated. Then the officer comes back and says he’ll need to take down all our information because we were witnesses to this supposed parking violation. They took all our information down and let us go, we hadn’t done anything wrong. But there’s more.
Later that week I am over at the St. Paul Police Headquarters and I’m shooting video with a different St. Thomas student. While there, an undercover police officer comes up to us, identifies himself as a police officer and asks what we’re doing. It’s a valid question, I’m not going to lie, we looked kind of suspicious. But we told him what were shooting for and who we were and all that. Then he turns to me and says “weren’t you down at the McCain fundraiser shooting video.” :O I told him I was and he said that they were just curious and then he left us to our business. It was so shocking. So now I’m on some sort of list I’m sure. It was a good story to tell the other people at the workshop.
I don’t know what to expect down at the convention but I’m curious to see if any officers will recognize me. I’m not doing anything illegal I promise. Just journalism.
3 years ago