Journalists and protesters who felt unduly smacked around at the Republican National Convention have begun filing their lawsuits, accusing police officers of wrongful imprisonment, excessive force, intimidation, battery, and, in one case, repeatedly tasering a man without cause.

Attorney Ted Dooley filed seven suits representing eight people last week and said the chaos and police violence in St. Paul last September was "unlike anything I'd ever seen."

His clients say they were peaceably protesting/journalizing and complied with all police instructions, but were still tackled, battered, arrested, detained, shot at close range with projectiles, and/or tasered. One client, Michelle Gross, says she was singled out for a strip-search in front of several men simply to humiliate her.

Another, Michael Whalen, was hosting members of Eyewitness Video (a group that documents police behavior during protests) when his home was raided. That warrant listed, among other reasons for the raid, that Whalen had co-owned a bookstore, that he received large boxes in the mail (turned out to be vegan pamphlets), and that he "had supported Irish independence twenty years ago."

Whalen's complaint alleges that police simply wanted to "punish plaintiff for his exercise of freedom of speech and association with journalists known to document police abuses."

The St. Paul police, Dooley says, were taking "heavy suggestions" about the RNC tactics from Homeland Security and the FBI, resulting in an uncharacteristically heavy-handed approach to the protests. "There's a document that's floating around," he says, "a Homeland Security document on how to 'do' protests that was copied almost page-for-page for the RNC '08 in St. Paul." Dooley also says St. Paul had at least 106 law enforcement agencies "on tap" to come help with the protests.

Defendants in the suits include individual officers and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.

"I was just talking to a guy from the New York Times," he said. He was at the Republican National Convention in New York in 2004 and said this was much, much worse."

(Relive the RNC, with preemptive raids, pepper spray, Dan goosing beauty queens and/or Anderson Cooper, the wrap-up, and a whole lotta Slog posts. Photo from Flickr.)