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The New York Times
Secrets of the Police
EDITORIAL,
nytimes.com on the Web, 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.
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