NYPD Spies Broadly before 2004 RNC

I keep shying away from writing in this blog because it takes too long to write thoughtful, well-researched stories. But I have no interest in writing shitty damsel-in-distress/cats in trees/media whore with small trembling dog and large SUV/ your kids may be in danger from the following trend which will be embarrassingly referenced-type stories, and little interest in writing bitchy stuff about the outfits that famous people have chosen to wear. If you're interested in this last item, I direct you, with approval of what you will see there and yet recognition that that scene is not mine, to dlisted. Then I remember that I'm writing this blog to provide simple, snappy summaries of what's in the news, not in depth news analysis. So I'm going to try to do that.

Today's story was one I read in the New York Times. Government documents were recently released to the public, and those documents say that the New York Police Department (NYPD) spied on a lot of Americans before the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC). The NYPD sent agents out to lots of different states, and to Europe and the Middle East, and gathered information about people who planned to protest at the RNC.

That's the whole story.

Here's the way you stop a protest, if you are a policeman. First, arrest the protesters. Hold them in custody until the event they intended to protest is over, then release them without charging them with anything. With any luck, they'll be so grateful to be back on the street that they won't complain.

The NYPD used information about certain protesters, which information was gathered during the pre-RNC spying process, and arrested lots of those protesters and held them and then released them without charging them with anything. They followed the plan I outlined in the last paragraph.

This raises lots of questions, but there are two that I want to consider. Is this sort of thing good? And: does it matter one way or the other?

Is this sort of thing good? Well, if it prevented a terrorist attack, I guess it's good insofar as it prevented the attack. But it certainly makes the part of the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights after the first semicolon into nothing but a bunch of words. "But what if they weren't going to assemble peacefully? Aren't the police justified in locking them up?" I can hear silly people asking. To which I hypothetically reply, hey, look at them. They're opposed to the war in Iraq, and probably all other wars. The vast, vast majority of them did not assault police. (Some of them did throw "fake dog feces," whatever that is, at cops. I think this is a silly gesture. I think If you throw something at a cop, you'd better throw something more serious than fake dog feces. Throwing fake dog feces makes you look like a punk-ass who's cruising for an evening of getting the shit beaten out of you by Jerry Orbach in a hospital-green interrogation room.) This group of protesters is not spoiling for a fight. They're spoiling to stand around and chant, and maybe scream, and talk to people who agree with them. A lot of them probably showed up at the protest to stand around with like-minded people, and to attenuate the feeling that the entire country had gone batshit, waterboard, jackboot insane. Throwing them in jail probably isn't going to attenuate that feeling in their minds.

Does it matter that the protests were weakened by the police? The dodgy, cop-out answer, is "It depends on what you think a protest should achieve." If the purpose of the protest is to allow private citizens to express their views, then yes, it does matter that the strength of the protests was diminished. Some of the people did not get to express themselves in the way they had chosen. But if the purpose of the protests was to thwart the Republican Party, then it probably doesn't matter that the strength of the protests was diminished. The Republican Party's plans would have gone ahead just the same, even if there had been a full strength protest.

If the police fuck up your shit at a protest, girls think you're way sexy, or at least way sexier than you were before they fucked up your shit. I have personally seen this happen twice, and I live in the most politically un-engaged part of the country. I've even been so cynical as to doubt the purity of the political motives of male protesters. So maybe lots of people got what they wanted out of the situation. The cops got to beat on some weedy, wiry dorks and girls without bras, and the wiry dorks and girls without bras got an erotic experience which made their post-protest sex fantastic, consecrated as it was by the bond of having suffered under somewhat-provoked state-sponsored violence and tinged with the certainty that you are among the unjustly persecuted.

So, what do I think? I think this was complicated theater. Cops got to feel big, which is the main benefit of the job. Anti-authoritarians got to feel persecuted, which is one of the sweetest feelings for the anti-authoritarian. If the actions of the NYPD actually prevented terrorism, there is no way that they would tell us. Maybe they waterboarded some batshit insane Sunni Saudi Arabians in Egypt until, covered in shit and vomit, they coughed up the dirty secrets of their Manhattan sleeper cells. But I'm sure if that actually happened, we're not learning about it.

Theater. It's all theater.