May 25, 2007
THEY LIKE TO WATCH
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The NYPD paid extra close attention to this ACT UP demo
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Jennifer Flynn knew she was being followed. During the Republican National Convention in New York City in August 2004, she arrived at her parents' house in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to find several mini-vans and a car with no license plates parked outside the door. She later called her lawyer, Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU), because she believed she was being unfairly surveilled for organizing the Still We Rise March, a peaceful protest highlighting the RNC's neglect of people with HIV/AIDS, immigrants, the poor, and the homeless . "I hesitated to talk about what I thought was going on. You can't really say you think you're being followed because you look like a wing-nut," says Flynn, the executive director of NYC AIDS Housing Coalition.
It turns on that Flynn isn't a wing-nut and neither are members of hundreds of other groups across the country who might have suspected that they were being spied on. After a judge granted a New York Times and NYCLU request to make them public, 600 pages of secret New York Police Department documents were released last week recounting widespread police surveillance of groups involved in planning protests in the months leading up to the Republican National Convention. The NYCLU's Dunn wanted the documents unsealed on behalf of seven people who were among the almost 2,000 protestors arrested during the convention and whom the NYCLU is representing. Housing Works, NYCAHN, ACT UP and the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign were among the groups mentioned in the reports.
The city originally refused to release the documents, ostensibly because they feared the information would sway jurors deciding the cases brought in connection with the convention arrests. The NYCLU is still fighting in court for the release of the rest of the police documents, which detail more invasive spying than the first batch.
"I'm not surprised we were being watched, but I'm disappointed that, when it comes to free speech, the Bloomberg administration has continued some of the tendencies of [ex-mayor Rudolph] Giuliani," says Charles King, Housing Works president and CEO.
A waste of resources
Police documents mentioned Housing Works on June 3, 2004 as one of the groups planning Still We Rise. "The interesting thing about it is that at the point, we were probably in negotiations with police for a permit. They didn't have to do anything to covert to figure it out," King says.
Flynn says that when she stumbled on the police in suburban New Jersey, she was on the phone with the NYPD clearing up details about the march. "It is a little ridiculous to send all those cops to follow me. I was in constant communication with the NYPD to make sure the sound equipment could access the stage! Here they are watching me, and I'm on the phone with their colleagues. It certainly was a huge waste of resources," she says, adding, "All we were doing was planning a large march about poor people's issues in New York City. Everyone was invited — including undercover cops." According to Flynn, the documents also contained numerous factual errors.
ACT UP was mentioned various times in the NYPD documents, which included a blow-by-blow of the group's famous demo in which a dozen people stood naked in a Manhattan street — their bodies marked with slogans — chanting "Bush, stop AIDS! Drop the debt now!." ACT Up's Eric Sawyer says that the group assumed they were being spied on all along, and acted accordingly. "We tried to do face-to-face meetings with people we knew to be real long-term activists as opposed to new possible plants. That's about the only thing we could really do."
The Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign was also quite a popular target in the police documents, which noted a basketball fundraiser the group was organizing. Cheri Honkala, the group's national organizer, says she thinks the police have other tidbits, since numerous "reporters" shadowed the organization, but then dropped out of sight. "The thing that's more frightening to me is what's not in the documents," she says.
Untold secrets
Not all of the protests that took place during the Republican convention were mentioned in the released NYPD documents. There was no record of the planning of Housing Works' demo in Grand Central Station, where 20 people were arrested, or Housing Works' Bed-Stuy bird-dogging of condom foe Sen. Rick Santorum. But this doesn't mean they won't be included in yet-to-be-revealed memos. "The documents we're now able to look at are mainly drawn from open source information. You could wander into any large meeting or pick it up from a newsletter. But there was a huge amount of surveillance going on," says Eileen Clancy, the project director for iwitnessvideo, which is posting the documents on the web. "Because Housing Works isn't listed doesn't mean that Housing Works isn't under surveillance. The much more detailed documents that relate physical surveillance have yet to be revealed."
Clancy says more juicy information should be revealed in the next three to six months, assuming the court give those who were surveiled the justice they deserve.