NYT: Secrets of the Police

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/opinion/08wed2.html?ex=1344225600&en=cd8fd04f86bd839e&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Secrets of the Police

Published: August 8, 2007

The city of New York is waging a losing and ill-conceived battle for overzealous secrecy surrounding nearly 2,000 arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Yesterday, for the second time in three months, a federal judge ordered the release of hundreds of pages of documents that detail the Police Department’s covert surveillance leading to the convention. People who were detained, some for days and without explanation, may finally begin to get some answers.

If the decision by Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV stands, the documents may figure in scores of lawsuits challenging police tactics that included the heavy-handed: rounding up suspects on the streets, fingerprinting them and putting them in holding pens until the convention was all but over. That such a police action happened in New York, and during the large, democratic show of a political nominating convention, was troubling.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly seemed to cast an awfully wide and indiscriminate net in seeking out potential troublemakers. For more than a year before the convention, members of a police spy unit headed by a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency infiltrated a wide range of groups. As Jim Dwyer has reported in The Times, many of the targets — including environmental and church groups and even a satirical troupe called Billionaires for Bush — posed no danger or credible threat. Tracking them was, at the least, a waste of resources that could have been better used elsewhere.

The Police Department surely has good reasons for needing to keep parts of their covert activities under wraps, particularly where operations against potential terrorism are concerned. The judge — and even the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs — correctly acknowledged a need for limited nondisclosure. The names of undercover agents and other potentially compromising information in the documents have been redacted. We hope that’s enough to let them see daylight. (The Times was a party to the lawsuit that released more than 600 pages of documents in May.)

New Yorkers have been tremendously patient with the demands of living in a city scarred from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and now made secure in ways, large and small, that can often interrupt their lives. They accept that the police have a job to do in keeping everyone safe, and they are overwhelmingly cooperative. But the overarching police strategy that culminated in the arrests three years ago this month did not feel like it was done with just safety in mind.

Along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s denial of permits for protests on Central Park’s Great Lawn, the police action helped to all but eliminate dissent from New York City during the Republican delegates’ visit. If that was the goal, then mission accomplished. And civil rights denied.

[L. Coyote]

1. Important. This legal action hopefully reestablishes American rights

A huge monetary award often is a greater deterent than idealism. Those who conducted the illegal surveillance and roundups should also suffer criminal prosecution. In today's America, that seems very unlikely, given the police are the spys.

[broadcaster]

5. If I recall, NYC PD sent teams across the country to

surveil possible activists in the run up to the convention,
and to 'interview' some of these people in an obvious effort
to keep them from coming to NYC.

I believe that these incidents, and others (like the case
in Asheville where a couple who hung an American flag upside
down were arrested after the police broke into their home and
beat the woman's husband inside their own home--no warrant) are
made special note of as to what local police can get away with.
The only way to fight this, since police seem to like to interpret
the Constitution according to their biases, is to come down hard
with public attention when these situations are discovered to shine
very bright lights into the situation and to do it very immediately.

If I were monitoring how passive the American population is or is not,
I'd definitely be looking at all these cases when they happen to
see how much push back there is and how fast it comes.

The problem is, these things seem to happen first, and then afterward
amends are made. We need to reverse this sequence.

imho.

[Richard Steele]

2. "Mission accomplished, and civil rights denied." K&R

[Mandate My Ass]

3. The same thing happened in Philadelphia in 2000. These people sued

the city and won - big time! NY did the same thing but on a larger scale. :wtf:

At the 2000 convention, our then police comissioner Timoney was very up front about the fact that he loathed protesters and no treatment of them was too harsh and no tactics too low.

[BridgeTheGap]

4. And police plants are usually the instigators

proposing the most outlandish tactics and behavior...