NARAL Undercover Audio: Intimidation Tactics of Texas Anti-Abortion Group. Tracking license plates?

[madfloridian]

From You Tube today. This is the most chilling kind of intimidation, and it's legal.

Published on Aug 12, 2014

NARAL Pro-Choice Texas and Progress Texas released a video containing audio from “Keeping Abortion Facilities Closed,” a training hosted by anti-abortion groups at the State Capitol on August 4, 2014. The video reveals the methods anti-abortion activists currently employ to physically intimidate women from accessing safe and legal abortion care in Texas. The disturbing tactics outlined by the four speakers in the video include: identifying and monitoring patients, providers and clinic staff, lining sidewalks outside clinics to dissuade patients from entering clinics, tracking and cataloguing the physical descriptions and car license plates of patients, and searching tax records to find locations of new abortion providers.

[madfloridian]

1. identifying and monitoring patients, searching tax records, tracking license plates

And it sounds like they intimidated staff of these clinics.

[LeftyMom]

2. Some of those things require government employees to misuse resources

I'm sure TX will get right on finding what state employee runs such an odd pattern of plate numbers...

[madfloridian]

4. If they track a woman by license plate....I would fear violence.

Maybe not meant to happen, but then some extremists are known to have killed abortion doctors. Would they go to her home to intimidate?

This is quite disturbing to me.

[LeftyMom]

5. They do this everywhere they can.

It's an admission of criminal activity but it's not at all a surprise.

[JHB]

10. It's possible that what they're doing doesn't necessarily use state resources...

From what they described, they could be simply recording license, make & model, and driver/passenger descriptions in their own database and keeping track within that system, without running plates via the police or DMV.

That said, I'm sure they have people who can come up with "legitimate" excuses for running plates on vehicles that they have identified as being of particular interest.

[HERVEPA]

3. Nothing new here to any clinic escort.

[madfloridian]

6. Probably not. But it's alarming to me and perhaps to others who were not aware.

I have been aware of the obstructions and blockages, but I did not realize how far they were taking it.

[msanthrope]

7. Nope....I ended up filing a restraining order against a nut that followed me

home.

[freshwest]

8. Fascist teabagger techniques used since 2010. Citizen vs. Citizen.

[madfloridian]

9. More about this from Hunter at Daily Kos.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/08/12/1321082/-Abortion-protestors-trained-in-how-to-track-doctors-patients