Caught in a cloud of tear gas

Most of the time, reporters try to keep themselves out of the story. On Monday afternoon, Legal Ledger Capitol Report managing editor Bill Clements and I found ourselves right in the middle of one.

We were driving out of a parking garage at the corner of Kellogg Boulevard and Minnesota Street and had just turned right onto Kellogg when we were forced to a dead stop: There were police in full riot gear (complete with gas masks) to our right, in front of a group of mounted cops; to our left was a line of demonstrators.

The cops weren’t fooling around. We hadn’t been stopped for more than 30 seconds before they released tear gas into the crowd, and began advancing east toward the line of demonstrators, which started to back up. (We shut off the car’s air conditioner and made sure all the windows were rolled up tightly, but some of the tear gas crept in and gave us sore throats and watery eyes.)

We sat there with nowhere to go as police moved past both our windows. We heard a big