The NYPD has reportedly been closely monitoring Black Lives Matter protesters—a fact revealed by multiple Freedom of Information Law requests over the past few years. Now, a batch of nearly 700 NYPD emails, reported by the Appeal and released by M.J. Williams law firm, show just how intensive and how sweeping the surveillance program has been.
After grand juries failed to indict the police officers responsible for the deaths of Michael Brown, Jr., and Eric Garner, BLM staged regular protests throughout 2014 and 2015. In New York City, emails show that the NYPD enlisted not only undercover officers to infiltrate the organizing groups, but also "NYPD handlers" and civilian informants to help them keep tabs on participants. They routed the information they gathered—reports, photographs, social media activity, and quite possibly, text messages—back through the upper echelons of the NYPD's Organized Crime Control Bureau and Intelligence department, and ultimately, to then-Police Commissioner William Bratton.
Attorney M.J. Williams told the Appeal that she developed suspicions about NYPD activity on MLK Day in 2015, when she joined a small group of protesters in a "wildcat" march on Grand Central. Only a handful of people, eight or nine, knew about the plan, she said, and no one had discussed it loudly enough in public for others to overhear. Still, about 25 minutes into the surprise march, the group ran into NYPD officers, blocking their way.
"More cops were there than protesters, so much so that we decided to take the subway," Williams told the Appeal. After that incident, it increasingly seemed to Williams that police must be getting intel on BLM plans. She started pulling FOIL requests, which confirmed her hunch: The NYPD did have undercover officers at BLM demonstrations, many of which the NYPD filmed.
This latest release illuminates just how extensive the NYPD's BLM files are: Police have held onto photos, social media snippets, and emails profiling particular protesters, even though the events in question occurred four years ago.
In accordance with the Handschu Guidelines—laid out in a 1985 consent decree, stemming from a lawsuit challenging the lengths to which police could go in monitoring political activists—the NYPD can undertake surveillance of political and religious organizations, if and only if police have information pointing to crimes those organizations have committed, or are about to commit.
In 2003, the guidelines expanded to allow the NYPD to monitor potential terrorist threats. As the Appeal points out, officers are free to attend public demonstrations, but they cannot hold onto "information obtained from such visits," unless that information "relates to potential unlawful or terrorist activity." Which really says a lot about how the police view BLM, a non-violent organization exercising the constitutional right to peaceful protest.
In response to a Gothamist inquiry, the NYPD issued a statement saying the department "does not interfere with Constitutionally-protected activities, and did not investigate Black Lives Matter as a political organization or movement." Furthermore:
The NYPD was focused on ensuring the safety of the public, protesters and officers at these events. The large daily demonstrations in late 2014 often involved hundreds, sometime thousands of people. The vast majority of these demonstrators cooperated with police efforts, and the NYPD helped facilitate these protests by moving along with them, when necessary stopping traffic to aid in the demonstrators safe movements.
There were, however, small groups of individuals within the larger numbers, who had specific plans to go beyond lawful protest, and to deliberately disrupt the lives of New Yorkers. Investigations were solely focused on the unlawful conduct of these individual participants. In one high-profile example, two police lieutenants were assaulted on the Brooklyn Bridge. Some of the individuals involved regularly advertised their plans to ‘shut down New York’ by blocking traffic on bridges, tunnels, and main avenues of New York City. These blockages not only inconvenienced hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, but potentially placed lives in danger by causing gridlock situations which hampered the response of police, fire and ambulances to emergencies.
The monitoring of publicly available social media channels, and the use of plainclothes officers to report on movements of large crowds and any detected plans to commit illegal activity, are legally permissible and routine police work. The communications reflected in the emails describe the movements of large groups of protestors with a focus on preventing violence or the mass disruption of traffic.
In 2017, however, a lawsuit made public another round of emails in which officers discussed protesters' movements. Those included photos of text messages, suggesting that undercover officers had made their way into small activist circles. The emails also included photos identifying key organizers, which retired NYPD detective sergeant and John Jay College professor Joseph Giacalone told the Guardian helped police weaken movements: "If you take out the biggest mouth, everybody just withers away, so you concentrate on the ones you believe are your organizers," Giacalone said. "Once you identify that person, you can run computer checks on them to see if they have a warrant out or any summons failures, then you can drag them in before they go out to speak or rile up the crowd, as long as you have reasonable cause to do so."
On Monday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arlene Bluth—presiding over a lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union—ruled that the NYPD must turn over its records on police surveillance of BLM members' phones and social media accounts, and whatever technology it may have used to interfere with those communications. But given everything we already know about the way the NYPD has approached BLM, the conclusion here already seems pretty clear. As Williams told the NY Daily News, the extended surveillance "betrays an assumption of criminality by the NYPD."
Asked about the ruling on the Brian Lehrer show Thursday, NYPD Commissioner Jame O'Neill said, "I think the brunt of this decision was about technology, I think it was about cell phone jamming, was the contention. I’m not going to go into what technology we have or we don’t have, but we do not interfere with Constitutionally protected activities. I know from the demonstrations back in 2014, I was out there each and every day... and it’s not something that we do. We have to move forward, but it’s certainly not something that the NYPD does."
