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Lovely

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.
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In the house that had just been raided, those inside described how a team of roughly 25 officers had barged into their homes with masks and black swat gear, holding large semi-automatic rifles, and ordered them to lie on the floor, where they were handcuffed and ordered not to move. The officers refused to state why they were there and, until the very end, refused to show whether they had a search warrant. They were forced to remain on the floor for 45 minutes while the officers took away the laptops, computers, individual journals, and political materials kept in the house. One of the individuals renting the house, an 18-year-old woman, was extremely shaken as she and others described how the officers were deliberately making intimidating statements such as "Do you have Terminator ready?" as they lay on the floor in handcuffs. The 10 or so individuals in the house all said that though they found the experience very jarring, they still intended to protest against the GOP Convention, and several said that being subjected to raids of that sort made them more emboldened than ever to do so.
Several of those who were arrested are being represented by Bruce Nestor, the President of the Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers' Guild. Nestor said that last night's raid involved a meeting of a group calling itself the "RNC Welcoming Committee", and that this morning's raids appeared to target members of "Food Not Bombs," which he described as an anti-war, anti-authoritarian protest group. There was not a single act of violence or illegality that has taken place, Nestor said. Instead, the raids were purely anticipatory in nature, and clearly designed to frighten people contemplating taking part in any unauthorized protests.See videos and more reports here

Now,

haddyr has come up with a possible pretext for the raids, the fact that an organization calling itself the RNC Welcoming Committee was planning to disrupt the convention. However, other organizations such as Food, Not Bombs, to say nothing of members of I-Witness, a group that has the bad habit of filming the police doing rather illegal things (like arresting people without cause and lying about the circumstances) were also targeted and held in place until the raids were finished.

fengi adds even more context to the story:

Now, there are some people I consider confrontational idiots among the protesters. I don't like dealing with them in Chicago either. It should be pointed out their plans to disrupt traffic was just one part, one page of the anti-RNC organizing site. They were not, in fact, the organizers of all protests. Nor is a public discussion of such tactics necessarily count as a criminal conspiracy. In fact, that's why it's public. The police used their plans as an easy excuse for their behavior, but that makes it no less of an excuse and no more legal.

Meanwhile, this flimsy pretext has been stretched to justify a general crackdown on activists. Including surrounding a house where a video activists which specialize in monitoring police behavior, this raid without a subpoena may have had FBI involvement and ended without any arrests.

Earlier this week, Minneapolis police officers detained three filmmakers from the New York based Glass Bead Collective and confiscated their cameras:
According to a statement from the collective, the officers refused to file an official incident report or fill out a receipt inventorying seized property, claiming that they were allowed to conduct the search and seizure under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security due to security risks leading up to the Republican National Convention.

Afterwards, the three journalists/artists were released without receiving any charges or tickets. (Police kept their belongings.) Teichberg said he recently learned that the Minneapolis Police Department is claiming they are being investigated for trespassing on train tracks. “We were targeted. They knew who we were. This was an attempt not to let us document what is happening at the convention… They’re taking away the media’s ability to protest,” he said.
The Glass Bead Collective was one of the groups involved in lawsuits against cops who assaulted Critical Mass riders.

There were incidents and rumors of police intimidation of reporters and protersters leading to the Society of Professional Journalists to issue a statement of concern.And that breathless police report?