Kinder Morgan Paid Pennsylvania Police Department to ‘Deter Protests’ over Pipeline

[enough]

http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/elist/eListRead/kinder_morgan_paid_pennsylvania_police_department_to_deter_protests/

BY ADAM FEDERMAN – MAY 21, 2015

ACLU calls arrangement “flat out unconstitutional”

Between June and October 2013, Kinder Morgan, the largest energy infrastructure company in North America, paid a local Pennsylvania police department more than $50,000 to patrol a controversial pipeline upgrade. The company requested that the officers, though officially off-duty, be in uniform and marked cars. Kinder Morgan’s aim, according to documents obtained by Earth Island Journal, was to use law enforcement to “deter protests” in order to avoid “costly delays.”

It’s unclear if the police department instructed its officers to explicitly “deter protests” but, if officers carried out Kinder Morgan’s request, their conduct would clearly violate the First Amendment rights of protesters.

“It is politically and socially entirely inappropriate for a private company to be able to hire a police department and use its officers to try to intimidate protesters of one stripe or another,” says David Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer in Philadelphia and a Senior Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

In a letter to the Eastern Pike Regional Police Department (EPRPD) dated May 1 2013, Duane Jones, Kinder Morgan’s corporate security manager, acknowledged the “controversial nature” of the pipeline project and requested that the local police “provide a visible presence to create a deterrent effect.” The officers began conducting patrols in June 2013 and were paid $54.80 an hour for their off-duty services. The patrols were terminated in October of that year.


snip> much at link above

Thanks to Judi Lynn for posting this story in Good Reads today.

[Curmudgeoness]

1. This is not the first time that tactic has been used.

I remember reading about companies paying the police to "protect them" back when unions were trying to get established. It was not acceptable then, and it isn't acceptable today. We have made no progress.