DENVER — A graying folk singer belted out protest songs in a downtown park as handfuls of black-clad demonstrators milled about. Activists stepped to a microphone to denounce oppression of Native Americans and the poor.
The only sign that the midday gathering Monday was anything other than a run-of-the-mill congregation of local leftists was the dozens of police in riot gear, staying under spruce trees to avoid the brutal sun.
"I don't see it really getting any rowdier," Shannon Frances, a veteran Denver activist, said as she waited for people to assemble for the day's march.
After months of warnings about tens of thousands of dissidents descending on Denver, protests here have begun with a whimper, not a bang.
A warehouse that police converted into a razor-wire-rimmed holding facility for arrestees during the convention sits largely empty; 12 people had been arrested for demonstration-related activity as of Monday night.
Dozens of new rifles the Denver Police Department bought to fire nonlethal ordnance at unruly protesters remain unused. Marches have been so small the city is reopening streets it had cordoned off.
"Everybody's happy with how it's going so far," said Bryan Thiel, a spokesman for the Joint Information Center that Colorado authorities have assembled to track activities at the Democratic National Convention.
Demonstrators, who braced for confrontations with what they feared would be trigger-happy police, are also happy.
"Building an overflow detention center gave us a sign they were going to make mass arrests," said Glenn Spagnuolo, a spokesman for Recreate 68, the umbrella group coordinating many of the protest activities. "We're going to stay nonviolent and I hope that relieves them."
Ever since demonstrators jammed the streets of Seattle and shut down meetings of the World Trade Organization in 1999, cities have used controversial tactics to keep protesters from disrupting political conventions.
During the Democratic National Convention in 2000, Los Angeles police used pepper spray and nonlethal bullets to break up a 15,000-person concert outside Staples Center after a small group of anarchists began to pelt officers with debris. At the Republican National Convention in 2004, New York police arrested hundreds of activists who were later released when judges dismissed the charges against them. Both cities paid out millions of dollars to settle lawsuits.
