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.
Here in Seattle, police who looked like regular civilians took photos of Black Lives Matter protesters throughout the fall. They did it at protests downtown and at the University Village mall, and one of them even took my photo. After I asked one of the other undercover officers who he was, the officer elbowed me, walked away, and then lied about it.
Curiously, when I filed a public records request for any photos taken by police at the U-Village mall demonstration on December 2, 2014, SPD's public records unit said it turned up no responsive recordsâmeaning no photos were taken or they'd all been deleted by the time I requested them. The city's intelligence ordinance allows police to take photos of demonstrators without prior authorization, but only if they delete them within five days. There's an auditor who's supposed to make sure police are carrying out those deletions, but he hasn't really been on top of it.
In New York City, however, we now know that undercover police were tracking protesters. The photos that police took of them are right there in the police files obtained through public records requests. NYC doesn't have an intelligence ordinance, like Seattle does, that's designed to prevent police from spying on dissidents and mandate the destruction of information that's gathered on them by police without special authorization. Among the people the New York police tracked are a photographer and ex-police officer who joined the protests.
"Itâs sad we have to be targets of surveillance when were not committing crimes," said Jose LaSalle, one of the protesters whose name and photo shows up in the files. Federal authorities, meanwhile, have been specifically monitoring the Twitter feed of activist DeRay Mckesson, Vice News's Jason Leopold reported recently. âSome of this surveillance is meant to scare us and potentially to figure out what peopleâs next steps are,â Mckesson told the Intercept.
