Joseph writes: "Documents obtained by The
Intercept confirm that undercover police officers attended numerous Black Lives
Matter protests in New York City between December 2014 and February 2015. The
documents also show that police in New York have monitored activists, tracking
their movements and keeping individual photos of them on file."
Black Lives Matter protesters in New York City. (photo: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters)
Undercover Police Have Regularly Spied on Black Lives
Matter Protesters in New York
By
George Joseph, The Intercept
19 August 15
Documents obtained by The Intercept confirm that
undercover police officers attended numerous Black Lives Matter protests in New
York City between December 2014 and February 2015. The documents also show that
police in New York have monitored activists, tracking their movements and
keeping individual photos of them on file.
The nearly 300 documents, released by the Metropolitan
Transit Authority and the Metro-North Railroad, reveal more on-the-ground
surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists than previous reports have
shown, conducted by a coalition of MTA counterterrorism agents and undercover
police in conjunction with NYPD intelligence officers.
This appears to be the first documented proof of the
frequent presence of undercover police at Black Lives Matter protests in the
city of New York, though many activists have suspected their presence since
mass protests erupted there last year over a grand jury’s decision not to
indict Daniel Pantaleo, a police officer involved in the death of Eric Garner.
The protest surveillance and use of undercover
officers raises questions over whether New York-area law enforcement agencies
are potentially criminalizing the exercise of free speech and treating
activists like terrorist threats. Critics say the police files seem to document
a response vastly disproportionate to the level of law breaking associated with
the protests.
The documents were released to activists after several
requests under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, which asked for records
from the MTA, MTA Metro-North, the New York State Police, and
the NYPD pertaining to Black Lives Matter protests at Grand Central Terminal
between November 2014 and January 2015.
In the 118 pages released by the MTA, the names of
undercover police officers are redacted at least 58 times in five December 2014
protests, 124 times at five protests in January 2015, and 10 times at one
protest in February 2015. The Intercept has been unable to contact any
of the undercover police reporting on protests because the MTA said it redacted
the “names of undercover police officers,” citing the New York Public Officers
Law stipulating that certain records, which “if disclosed could
endanger the life or safety of any person,” may be withheld. Metro-North also
redacted the names of undercover officers. Both entities also said they
redacted location and contact information for regular MTA police named in the
documents.
Together the 118 MTA and 161 Metro-North documents
also showed monitoring of an additional protest in November 2014, 11 protests
in December 2014, nine protests in January 2015, and two protests in February
2015 by MTA officials and undercover police working at times in conjunction
with NYPD officers.
In response to The Intercept’s request for
information on the use of undercover police officers at Grand Central protests,
MTA spokesperson Adam Lisberg issued the following statement: “The Metropolitan
Transportation Authority Police Department must ensure the safety and security
of millions of people who pass through our railroad systems every day, at a
time when transportation networks have been persistently targeted by
terrorists. We accommodate peaceful protest in our transportation system, while
also ensuring that protest activities do not prevent customers from using the
system for transportation. We take all appropriate police measures to ensure
the safety and security of our customers, but we do not discuss the particulars
of those operations.”
The NYPD has not released documents in response to the
request, but documents released by the MTA and Metro-North show that NYPD
officials have also been involved in the surveillance of Black Lives Matter
protests in Grand Central and beyond. The NYPD did not respond to a request for
comment.
Many of the documents released include live updates on
protests from undercover police officers, reporting on group sizes, and the
tracking of protesters’ movements around the city, particularly the movements
of New York’s “People’s Monday” protests, which focus attention on, and
demonstrate on behalf of, victims of police brutality, and which repeatedly
convene at Grand Central. Some of the reports go further than tracking group
movements, however, referring to specific activists and including photos of
them.
In one document concerning a
protest on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, for example, an officer, whose name is
redacted because of his undercover status, sends frequent updates on
protesters’ movements in Grand Central. The officer also notes that Jose
LaSalle, founder of New York police watchdog group Copwatch Patrol Unit, has
been “observed inside Grand Central Terminal.” LaSalle is mentioned four times
in the documents, twice for delivering a “mic check” and twice for his mere
presence, as seen in document below. His picture also appears in the files
several times:
“I think its just another example of how anyone who is
practicing their constitutional rights and speaking against the government is
going to be considered a domestic problem,” says LaSalle. “It’s sad because all
we’re doing is speaking because we feel there is no justice for people being
brutalized by the system. It’s sad we have to be targets of surveillance when
were not committing crimes.”
Alex Vitale, a Brooklyn College associate professor in
sociology, whose work focuses on policing, argues this is part of a long
history of police surveillance of activists like LaSalle. “Historically, law
enforcement, both local and national, have a track record of keeping files on
activists, engaging in surveillance, and targeting for excessive enforcement
action people identified in leadership roles in social movement,” he said. “The
evidence shown by these documents raises warning flags about resources
committed and, more importantly, the degree to which local police agencies are
potentially targeting non-violent activists.”
The documents also hint that such surveillance
operations may be targeting groups across the city. For example, one email chain from December
9 included a table with the protest plans of four groups, including those
of “Students and Faculty from East Side Community High School,” a public school
in Manhattan’s East Village:
Though the documents were obtained from the MTA and
Metro-North, they include several references to collaboration with NYPD
officers. In one email from January 1, 2015,
for example, an undercover police officer shares attached field reports and
photographs of a protest at Grand Central, which MTA counterterrorism agents
provided “in conjunction with NYPD Intel team members.”
In another document, sent February
13 concerning a demonstration at Grand Central, Anthony D’Angelis,
identified in the document as an MTA liaison with the NYPD’s counterterrorism division,
shared and labeled a photo of Alex Seel, a local photographer. In the
documents, D’Angelis uses an NYPD email address.
It is unclear if any of the undercover police
officers, whose names are redacted in the documents, are themselves NYPD
personnel. According to the ACLU, if the NYPD is collecting information about
protesters at Grand Central along the lines of the photographs that MTA
appeared to collect, it may be in violation of the historic “Handschu agreement,” which
regulates the department’s monitoring of political groups.
Under the decree, “the NYPD is not permitted to retain
information gathered from public events unless it’s connected to suspected criminal
or terrorist activity,” says Nusrat Choudhury, an attorney at the ACLU. “They
cannot identify someone and have their photo in their files unless they have
evidence supporting reasonable suspicion that he was about to commit criminal
activity or had engaged in criminal conduct.”
Regardless of these legal gray areas and the confusing
blend of agencies engaged in the surveillance, several protesters at Grand
Central say they are perturbed by the photo file’s existence, considering that
Seel did not share his name publicly that night and usually only comes to the
protests as a quiet photographer. “I was surprised that they had photos of
Alex,” says Kim Ortiz, a Black Lives Matter organizer with the Grand Central
People’s Monday group, also known by its hashtag, #PeoplesMonday. “He doesn’t
do any of the planning. It’s very telling. If they’re focusing on someone who’s
a silent supporter, I can’t imagine what they’re doing to people more at the
forefront.”
Seel says he was “surprised by how specific they were
with me, calling me photographer, and a documenter, and I’m pretty sure that
photo is from Penn Station, so they definitely had it on file or something. If
you look at my A14 pictures, I caught some serious stuff — cops pushing people
over — that’s my take on it. … So it’s definitely a fear tactic used to break
down certain aspects of the movement. They know that we’re the lens of the
movement.”
The MTA and Metro-North documents also show that
numerous counterterror and intelligence agents are involved in this monitoring,
despite repeated references in the documents to the “peaceful” and “orderly”
nature of the demonstrations. The Department of Homeland Security similarly
commented on the lack of violence at Black Lives Matter protests in documents
describing monitoring of those protests, published previously by The
Intercept.
In an MTA document from January 12,
D’Angelis, the NYPD counterterrorism division liaison, shared pictures that an
unnamed “activist posted” of police milling around Grand Central. The photos in
the email appear to be from the Twitter account
of Black Lives Matter activist Keegan Stephan. Just beneath the photos,
D’Angelis’s email claims the document is for “deterring, detecting, and
preventing terrorism.”
In another document from a December
7 protest for Eric Garner, Detective Keyla Hammam, identified as a member
of the MTA’s Interagency Counter-Terrorism Task Force, shared a photo of
prominent activist and former Philadelphia police officer Ray Lewis. An
undercover police officer made an entry accompanying Hammam’s photo, mentioning
Lewis’ past activities with Occupy Wall Street and stating: “A retired
Philadelphia Police Officer in uniform is one of the protesters at Grand
Central Terminal. He is also known to NYPD as a protestor in OWS and has an
arrest record with NYPD.” (Lewis was arrested on disorderly conduct charges in
connection with an Occupy Wall Street protest; the case was later closed by prosecutors.)
“I wasn’t surprised at all,” Lewis said when asked
about the monitoring. “From my experience in law enforcement, I know the key concept
to knocking out all protests is taking out leaders. So they see certain people
and target them.”
Vitale, the sociology professor, argues that police
response to peaceful protests and civil disobedience is often wrongly designed
to resemble counterterrorism operations, illustrating a broader mission creep
in policing over the last decade. “Protests by their nature are disruptive, and
that by itself should not be grounds for surveillance and file-keeping,” he
said. “But in the post-9-11 environment, there’s been a major shift towards
risk aversion and massive expansion of intelligence gathering in a way such
that protest activity often gets lumped in with terrorism investigation.”
In January, NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton stirred
controversy when he announced that the department would commingle efforts
against terrorism with the containment of protests. Bratton said his new
Strategic Response Group “is designed for dealing with events like our recent
[Eric Garner] protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in
Paris.” Bratton also noted, “In New York, dealing with terrorism, and
large-scale disorder, and other so-called ‘black swan’ events involves similar
skill sets.”
Many Black Lives Matter activists argue the
surveillance documented in the MTA files does not constitute crime or terrorism
prevention, especially given how non-confrontational the People’s Monday
protest events have been.
“We do the same thing every week,” says Stephan, the
People’s Monday organizer whose Twitter photos were in the documents. “We read
aloud the facts of their cases, and statistics about police killings,
generally. … The biggest confrontation that has occurred was when police
threatened to arrest us for doing die-ins, but
ultimately, they didn’t even make arrests for this — and haven’t — because even
when we do die-in we aren’t obstructing access to the trains.”
Indeed, many of the MTA and Metro-North documents
support Stephan’s claim, mentioning that the protests remain “peaceful,”
“orderly,” “in order,” and “all orderly.” According to one email exchange from January
19, 2015, still in the swing of the post-Eric Garner non-indictment
protests, top MTA officials casually discussed a Grand Central
protest, CC’ing the Metro-North’s chief security officer
and remarking that protesters “just began chanting. The usual routine.”
Nonetheless, this intelligence gathering on activists
by undercover police and counterterrorism agents continued, according to the
documents.
Comedian and Black Lives Matter activist Elsa Waithe
believes the purpose of this intense police surveillance is to chill dissent
and gather information in order to better target organizers. Waithe stopped
attending the weekly Grand Central protests after an April
14 demonstration in which video shows her being
shoved by a man identified as a police officer, allegedly because
Waithe was trying to film an arrest.
“Weeks before the assault, a police officer referred
to me by name, and I don’t know how he knew it,” says Waithe. “We were in Grand
Central just about every single week before, so they set up a crow’s nest —
like two to three guys with cameras standing up high above the concourse — a
lot of those photos in your documents look like it must have come from that
angle. When you know they’re recording and watching you — that’s a feeling I
can’t ever shake. I don’t know what they’re doing with all those hours of tape
because there’s nothing much there. It’s just being used to intimidate us.”
Waithe argues this prior surveillance in part
contributed to her assault: “The day it happened, someone was getting arrested
pretty roughly so I went to go film cause I’m a member of Copwatch. The officer
shoved me back like a football player and I fell to the ground. I fell onto a
wrought iron metal tree guard, and had to be taken in the ambulance because of
severe swelling in my ribs. I think they already had information on me and saw
that as an opportunity.”
Nonetheless, according to organizers, the intensity of
this surveillance was expected from the get-go and dogged many of them even
before the Black Lives Matter movement. Angie Brilliance, an organizer from
Chicago with the group Black Youth Project 100, recalls fighting in a 2012
campaign for a mental health care facility in one of Chicago’s black
neighborhoods, only to find out that some of the most provocative organizers
among them may have been police informants.
“We need to be aware, especially given the digital
organizing of the modern era, about how we’re being tracked,” says Brilliance.
“I know we and many groups we’re affiliated with try as much as possible to not
put any plans down on digital documents, to meet in person, and other
strategies I probably shouldn’t make public — we have to learn from what the
state did to break up our ancestors’ struggles.”
Most Black Lives Matter activists interviewed by The
Intercept noted that while the intense surveillance of their lives gave
them pause, it wouldn’t stop them from protesting.
“Some of this surveillance is meant to scare us and
potentially to figure out what people’s next steps are,” says DeRay Mckesson,
an activist whose prominent social media presence has reportedly been monitored
by both private cybersecurity
firms and the Department of Homeland Security. “But what we’re doing is right.”
C 2015 Reader Supported News
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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