The Minneapolis and St. Paul Police Departments have been raiding houses and meeting halls where suspected RNC protest groups are thought to convene since last Thursday, angering many people who've had no designs for any criminal behavior and generally turning the Twin Cities into a totalitarian police state. Even lawyers and journalists have been arrested and detained by authorities, though not a single violent or criminal act has occurred.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune, the primary local paper of the Twin Cities, ran a piece on the raids Saturday, which was followed by a truncated version a few hours later on CNN.com. Even FOX News ran a short piece surprisingly free of slant.

Beginning on Thursday, police have been targeting sites known to house protest groups such as the RNC Welcoming Committee, a group of between 35 and 50 members that Ramsey County sheriff Bob Fletcher describes as "a criminal enterprise made up of 35 self-described anarchists... intent on committing criminal acts before and during the Republican National Convention."

"These acts include tactics to blockade and disable delegate buses, breaching venue security and injuring police officers," Fletcher told the Star Tribune. According to that paper, deputies seized a variety of items that they believed were tools of civil disobedience: a gas mask, bolt cutters, axes, slingshots, homemade "caltrops" for disabling buses, and buckets of urine.

As damning as those supplies might have been, the preemptive strikes against other groups like I-Witness Video, a New York-based group that monitors police conduct during protests, and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, a non-violent organization whose name is self-explanatory, are shocking and inappropriate, to say the least.

I-Witness Video helped overturn hundreds of wrongful arrests at the RNC in New York City four years ago, according to its website. Yet both I-Witness and the PPEHRC were subjected to sudden searches, detainment, handcuffs, and being treated like common terrorists. Some members of I-Witness were even stopped by police while biking blocks away from their house, where they were questioned while other cops rifled through their bags.

The longest, most in-depth account of the raids that I've found thus far is a piece on Salon.com by Glenn Greenwald, who was formerly a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. Greenwald's account features regular updates as the events continue to unfold.

In this video, a member of I-Witness Video describes what happened to her and what she saw. Clearly, the RNC is off to a rocky start, and the coming week will offer no shortage of news -- however disturbing it may be.

[Image: members of I-Witness Video outside their St. Paul headquarters surrounded by onlookers from the media, photographed by David Joles of the Star Tribune]