[NYTr] NYC's Explosion in Police Repression, Surveillance a Threat to Us All

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

TomDispatch via Alternet - Oct 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63990/

NYC's Explosion in Police Repression and Surveillance 
Is a Threat to Us All 

By Nick Turse

One day in August, I walked into the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United
States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Nearly three years before I had
been locked up, about two blocks away, in "the Tombs" -- the infamous
jail then named the Bernard B. Kerik Complex for the now-disgraced New
York City Police Commissioner. You see, I am one of the demonstrators
who was illegally arrested by the New York City Police Department
(NYPD) during the protests against the 2004 Republican National
Convention (RNC). My crime had been -- in an effort to call attention
to the human toll of America's wars -- to ride the subway, dressed in
black with the pallor of death about me (thanks to cornstarch and cold
cream), and an expression to match, sporting a placard around my neck
that read: WAR DEAD.

I was with a small group and our plan was to travel from Union Square
to Harlem, change trains, and ride all the way back down to Astor
Place. But when my small group exited the train at the 125th Street
station in Harlem, we were arrested by a swarm of police, marched to a
waiting paddy wagon and driven to a filthy detention center. There, we
were locked away for hours in a series of razor-wire-topped pens,
before being bussed to the Tombs.

Now, I was back to resolve the matter of my illegal arrest. As I walked
through the metal detector of the Federal building, a security official
searched my bag. He didn't like what he found. "You could be shot for
carrying that in here," he told me. "You could be shot."

For the moment, however, the identification of that dangerous object I
attempted to slip into the federal facility will have to wait. Let me
instead back up to July 2004, when, with the RNC fast-approaching, I
authored an article on the militarization of Manhattan -- "the
transformation of the island into a 'homeland-security state'" -- and
followed it up that September with a street-level recap of the
convention protests, including news of the deployment of an
experimental sound weapon, the Long Range Acoustic Device, by the NYPD,
and the department's use of an on-loan Fuji blimp as a
"spy-in-the-sky." Back then, I suggested that the RNC gave New York's
"finest," a perfect opportunity to "refine, perfect, and implement new
tactics (someday, perhaps, to be known as the 'New York model') for use
penning in or squelching dissent. It offered them the chance to write
up a playbook on how citizens' legal rights and civil liberties may be
abridged, constrained, and violated at their discretion."

Little did I know how much worse it could get.

No Escape

Since then, the city's security forces have eagerly embraced an Escape
>From New York-aesthetic -- an urge to turn Manhattan into a walled-in
fortress island under high-tech government surveillance, guarded by
heavily armed security forces, with helicopters perpetually overhead.
Beginning in Harlem in 2006, near the site of two new luxury condos,
the NYPD set up a moveable "two-story booth tower, called Sky Watch,"
that gave an "officer sitting inside a better vantage point from which
to monitor the area." The Panopticon-like structure -- originally used
by hunters to shoot quarry from overhead and now also utilized by the
Department of Homeland Security along the Mexican border -- was
outfitted with black-tinted windows, a spotlight, sensors, and four to
five cameras. Now, five Sky Watch towers are in service, rotating in
and out of various neighborhoods.

With their 20-25 neighborhood-scanning cameras, the towers are only a
tiny fraction of the Big Apple surveillance story. Back in 1998, the
New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) found that there were "2,397
cameras used by a wide variety of private businesses and government
agencies throughout Manhattan" -- and that was just one borough. About
a year after the RNC, the group reported that a survey of just a
quarter of that borough yielded a count of more than 4,000 surveillance
cameras of every kind. At about the same time, military-corporate giant
Lockheed Martin was awarded a $212 million contract to build a
"counter-terrorist surveillance and security system for New York's
subways and commuter railroads as well as bridges and tunnels" that
would increase the camera total by more than 1,000. A year later, as
seems to regularly be the case with contracts involving the
military-corporate complex, that contract had already ballooned to $280
million, although the system was not to be operational until at least
2008.

In 2006, according to a Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) spokesman,
the MTA already had a "3,000-camera-strong surveillance system," while
the NYPD was operating "an additional 3,000 cameras" around the city.
That same year, Bill Brown, a member of the Surveillance Camera Players
-- a group that leads surveillance-camera tours and maps their use
around the city, estimated, according to a Newsweek article, that the
total number of surveillance cameras in New York exceeded 15,000 -- "a
figure city officials say they have no way to verify because they lack
a system of registry." Recently, Brown told me that 15,000 was an
estimate for the number of cameras in Manhattan, alone. For the city as
a whole, he suspects the count has now reached about 40,000.

This July, NYPD officials announced plans to up the ante. By the end of
2007, according to the New York Times, they pledged to install "more
than 100 cameras" to monitor "cars moving through Lower Manhattan, the
beginning phase of a London-style surveillance system that would be the
first in the United States." This "Ring of Steel" scheme, which has
already received $10 million in funding from the Department of Homeland
Security (in addition to $15 million in city funds), aims to
exponentially decrease privacy because, if "fully financed, it will
include. ... 3,000 public and private security cameras below Canal
Street, as well as a center staffed by the police and private security
officers" to monitor all those electronic eyes.

Spies in the Sky

At the time of the RNC, the NYPD was already mounted on police horses,
bicycles, and scooters, as well as an untold number of marked and
unmarked cars, vans, trucks, and armored vehicles, not to mention
various types of water-craft. In 2007, the two-wheeled Segway joined
its list of land vehicles.

Overhead, the NYPD aviation unit, utilizing seven helicopters, proudly
claims to be "in operation 24/7, 365," according to Deputy Inspector
Joseph Gallucci, its commanding officer. Not only are all the choppers
outfitted with "state of the art cameras and heat-sensing devices," as
well as "the latest mapping, tracking and surveillance technology," but
one is a "$10 million 'stealth bird,' which has no police markings --
[so] that those on the ground have no idea they are being watched."

Asked about concerns over intrusive spying by members of the aviation
unit -- characterized by Gallucci as "a bunch of big boys who like big
expensive toys" -- Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly scoffed. "We're
not able to, even if we wanted, to look into private spaces," he told
the New York Times. "We're looking at public areas." However, in 2005,
it was revealed that, on the eve of the RNC protests, members of the
aviation unit took a break and used their night-vision cameras to
record "an intimate moment" shared by a "couple on the terrace of a
Second Avenue penthouse."

Despite this incident, which only came to light because the same tape
included images that had to be turned over to a defendant in an
unrelated trial, Kelly has called for more aerial surveillance. The
commissioner apparently also got used to having the Fuji blimp at his
disposal, though he noted that "it's not easy to send blimps into the
airspace over New York." He then "challenged the aerospace industry to
find a solution" that would, no doubt, bring the city closer to life
under total surveillance.

Police Misconduct: The RNC

As a result of its long history of brutality, corruption, spying,
silencing dissent, and engaging in illegal activities, the NYPD is a
particularly secretive organization. As such, the full story of the
department's misconduct during the Republican National Convention has
yet to be told; but, even in an era of heightened security and
defensiveness, what has emerged hasn't been pretty.

By April 2005, New York Times journalist Jim Dwyer was already
reporting that, "of the 1,670 [RNC arrest] cases that have run their
full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a
verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any
finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the
circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's
office agreeing that the cases should be 'adjourned in contemplation of
dismissal.'" In one case that went to trial, it was found that video
footage of an arrest had been doctored to bolster the NYPD's claims.
(All charges were dropped against that defendant. In 400 other RNC
cases, by the spring of 2005, video recordings had either demonstrated
that defendants had not committed crimes or that charges could not be
proved against them.)

Since shifting to "zero-tolerance" law enforcement policies under Mayor
(now Republican presidential candidate) Rudolph Giuliani, the city has
been employing a system of policing where arrests are used to punish
people who have been convicted of no crime whatsoever, including, as at
the RNC or the city's monthly Critical Mass bike rides, those who
engage in any form of protest. Prior to the Giuliani era, about half of
all those "arrested for low-level offenses would get a desk-appearance
ticket ordering them to go to court." Now the proportion is 10%. (NYPD
documents show that the decision to arrest protesters, not issue
summonses, was part of the planning process prior to the RNC.)

Speaking at the 2007 meeting of the American Sociological Association,
Michael P. Jacobson, Giuliani's probation and correction commissioner,
outlined how the city's policy of punishing the presumed innocent works:

    "Essentially, everyone who's arrested in New York City, in the
parlance of city criminal justice lingo, goes through 'the system'. ...
if you've never gone through the system, even 24 hours -- that's a
shocking period of punishment. It's debasing, it's difficult. You're
probably in a fairly gross police lockup. You probably have no toilet
paper. You're given a baloney sandwich, and the baloney is green."

In 2005, the Times' Dwyer revealed that at public gatherings since the
time of the RNC, police officers had not only "conducted covert
surveillance ... of people protesting the Iraq war, bicycle riders
taking part in mass rallies and even mourners at a street vigil for a
cyclist killed in an accident," but had acted as agent provocateurs. At
the RNC, there were multiple incidents in which undercover agents
influenced events or riled up crowds. In one case, a "sham arrest" of
"a man secretly working with the police led to a bruising confrontation
between officers in riot gear and bystanders."

In 2006, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), reported "that
hundreds of Convention protesters may have been unnecessarily and
unlawfully arrested because NYPD officials failed to give adequate
orders to disperse and failed to afford protesters a reasonable
opportunity to disperse."

Police Commissioner Kelly had no hesitation about rejecting the
organization's report. Still, these were strong words, considering the
weakness of the source. The overall impotence of the CCRB suggests a
great deal about the NYPD's culture of unaccountability. According to
an ACLU report, the board "investigates fewer than half of all
complaints that it reviews, and it produces a finding on the merits in
only three of ten complaints disposed of in any given year." This
inaction is no small thing, given the surge of complaints against NYPD
officers in recent years. In 2001, before Mayor Bloomberg and Police
Commissioner Kelly came to power, the CCRB received 4,251 complaints.
By 2006, the number of complaints had jumped by 80% to 7,669. Even more
telling are the type of allegations found to be on the rise (and
largely ignored). According to the ACLU, from 2005 to 2006, complaints
over the use of excessive force jumped 26.8% -- "nearly double the
increase in complaints filed."

It was in this context that the planning for the RNC demonstrations
took place. In 2006, in five internal police reports made public as
part of a lawsuit, "New York City police commanders candidly
discuss[ed] how they had successfully used 'proactive arrests,' covert
surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in
2002, and recommend[ed] that those approaches be employed at future
gatherings." A draft report from the department's Disorder Control Unit
had a not-so-startling recommendation, given what did happen at the
RNC: "Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within
the crowds."

According to Dwyer, for at least a year prior to those demonstrations,
"teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities
across the country, Canada and Europe" to conduct covert surveillance
of activists. "In hundreds of reports, stamped 'N.Y.P.D. Secret,' [the
NYPD's] Intelligence Division chronicled the views and plans of people
who had no apparent intention of breaking the law, [including] street
theater companies, church groups and antiwar organizations, as well as
environmentalists and people opposed to the death penalty,
globalization and other government policies." Three elected city
councilmen -- Charles Barron, Bill Perkins and Larry B. Seabrook --
were even cited in the reports for endorsing a protest event held on
January 15, 2004 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday.

In August, the New York Times editorial page decried the city's
continuing attempts to keep documents outlining the police department's
spying and other covert activities secret:

    "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.... 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... many of the
targets ... posed no danger or credible threat."

The Times concluded that -- coupled with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's
efforts to disrupt and criminalize protest during the convention week
-- "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."

Police Commissioner Kelly had a radically different take on his
department's conduct. Earlier this year, he claimed that "the
Republican National Convention was perhaps the finest hour in the
history of the New York City Department."

Police Misconduct: 2007

"Finest" might seem a funny term for the NYPD's actions, but these days
everyone's a relativist. In the years since the RNC protests, the NYPD
has been mired in scandal after scandal -- from killing unarmed black
men and "violations of civil rights" at the National Puerto Rican Day
Parade to issuing "sweeping generalizations" that lead to "labeling
almost every American Muslim as a potential terrorist." And, believe it
or not, the racial and political scandals were but a modest part of the
mix. Add to them, killings, sexual assaults, kidnapping, armed robbery,
burglary, corruption, theft, drug-related offenses, conspiracy -- and
that's just a start when it comes to crimes members of the force have
been charged with. It's a rap sheet fit for Public Enemy #1, and we're
only talking about the story of the NYPD in the not-yet-completed year
of 2007.

For example, earlier this year a 13-year NYPD veteran was "arrested on
charges of hindering prosecution, tampering with evidence, obstructing
governmental administration and unlawful possession of marijuana," in
connection with the shooting of another officer. In an unrelated case,
two other NYPD officers were arrested and "charged with attempted
kidnapping, armed robbery, armed burglary and other offenses."

In a third case, the New York Post reported that a "veteran NYPD
captain has been stripped of his badge and gun as part of a federal
corruption probe that already has led to the indictment of an Internal
Affairs sergeant who allegedly tipped other cops that they were being
investigated." And that isn't the only NYPD cover-up allegation to
surface of late. With cops interfering in investigations of fellow cops
and offering advice on how to deflect such probes, it's a wonder any
type of wrongdoing surfaces. Yet, the level of misconduct in the
department appears to be sweeping enough to be irrepressible.

For instance, sex crime scandals have embroiled numerous officers --
including one "accused of sexually molesting his young stepdaughter,"
who pled guilty to "a misdemeanor charge of child endangerment," and
another "at a Queens hospital charged with possessing and sharing child
pornography." In a third case, a member of the NYPD's School Safety
Division was "charged with the attempted rape and sexual abuse of a
14-year-old girl." In a fourth case, a "police officer pleaded
guilty.... to a grotesque romance with an infatuated 13-year-old girl."
Meanwhile, an NYPD officer, who molested women while on duty and in
uniform, was convicted of sexual abuse and official misconduct.

Cop-on-cop sexual misconduct of an extreme nature has also surfaced....
but why go on? You get the idea. And, if you don't, there are lurid
cases galore to check out, like the investigation into "whether [an]
NYPD officer who fatally shot his teen lover before killing himself
murdered the boyfriend of a past lover," or the officer who was
"charged with intentional murder in the shooting death of his
22-year-old girlfriend." And don't even get me started on the officer
"facing charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to
commit robberies of drugs and drug proceeds from narcotics traffickers."

All of this, and much more, has emerged in spite of the classic
blue-wall-of-silence. It makes you wonder: In the surveillance state to
come, are we going to be herded and observed by New York's finest
lawbreakers?

It's important to note that all of these cases have begun despite a
striking NYPD culture of non-accountability. Back in August, the New
York Times noted that the "Police Department has increasingly failed to
prosecute New York City police officers on charges of misconduct when
those cases have been substantiated by the independent board that
investigates allegations of police abuse, officials of the board say."
Between March 1, 2007 and June 30, 2007 alone, the NYPD "declined to
seek internal departmental trials against 31 officers, most of whom
were facing charges of stopping people in the street without probable
cause or reasonable suspicion, according to the city's Civilian
Complaint Review Board." An ACLU report, "Mission Failure: Civilian
Review of Policing in New York City, 1994-2006," released this month,
delved into the issue in even greater detail. The organization found
that, between 2000 and 2005, "the NYPD disposed of substantiated
complaints against 2,462 police officers: 725 received no discipline.
When discipline was imposed, it was little more than a slap on the
wrist."

Much has come to light recently about the way the U.S. military has
been lowering its recruitment standards in order to meet the demands of
ongoing, increasingly unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including
an increase in "moral waivers" allowing more recruits with criminal
records to enter the services. Well, it turns out that, on such
policies, the NYPD has been a pioneering institution.

In 2002, the BBC reported that "New York's powerful police union....
accused the police department of allowing 'sub-standard' recruits onto
the force." Then, just months after the RNC protests, the New York
Daily News exposed the department's practice of "hiring applicants with
arrest records and shoving others through without full background
checks" including those who had been "charged with laundering drug
money, assault, grand larceny and weapons possession." According to
Sgt. Anthony Petroglia, who, until he retired in 2002, had worked for
almost a decade in the department's applicant-processing division, the
NYPD was "hiring people to be cops who have no respect for the law."
Another retiree from the same division was blunter: "It's all judgment
calls -- bad ones.... but the bosses say, 'Send 'em through. We'll
catch the problem ones later.'"

The future looks bright, if you are an advocate of sending the force
even further down this path. The new choice to mold the department of
tomorrow, according to the Village Voice, the "NYPD's new deputy
commissioner of training, Wilbur 'Bill' Chapman, should have no trouble
teaching 'New York's Finest' about the pitfalls of sexual harassment,
cronyism, and punitive transfers [because h]e's been accused of all
that during his checkered career."

In the eerie afterglow of 9/11, haunted by the specter of terrorism, in
an atmosphere where repressive zero-tolerance policies already rule,
given the unparalleled power of Commissioner Kelly -- called "the most
powerful police commissioner in the city's history" by NYPD expert
Leonard Levitt -- and with a police department largely unaccountable to
anyone (as the only city agency without any effective outside
oversight), the Escape from New York model may indeed represent
Manhattan's future.

Nick Turse v. The City of New York

So what, you might still be wondering, was it that led the security
official at the federal courthouse to raise the specter of my imminent
demise? A weapon? An unidentified powder? No, a digital audio recorder.
"Some people here don't want to be recorded," he explained in response
to my quizzical look.

So I checked the recording device and, accompanied by my lawyer, the
indomitable Mary D. Dorman, made my way to Courtroom 18D, a stately
room in the upper reaches of the building that houses the oldest
district court in the nation. There, I met our legal nemesis, a city
attorney whose official title is "assistant corporation counsel." After
what might pass for a cordial greeting, he asked relatively politely
whether I was going to except the city's monetary offer of $8,500 --
which I had rejected the previous week-- to settle my lawsuit for false
arrest. As soon as I indicated I wouldn't (as I had from the moment the
city started the bidding at $2,500), any hint of cordiality fled the
room. Almost immediately, he was referring to me as a "criminal" --
declassified NYPD documents actually refer to me as a "perp." Soon, he
launched into a bout of remarkable bluster, threatening lengthy
depositions to waste my time and monetary penalties associated with
court costs that would swallow my savings.

Then, we were all directed to a small jury room off the main courtroom,
where the city's attorney hauled out a threatening prop to bolster his
act -- an imposingly gigantic file folder stuffed with reams of "Nick
Turse" documents, including copies of some of my disreputable
Tomdispatch articles as well as printouts of suspicious webpages from
the American Empire Project -- the obviously criminal series that will
be publishing my upcoming book, The Complex.

There, the litany of vague threats to tie me down with depositions, tax
me with fees, and maybe, somehow, send me to jail for a "crime" that
had been dismissed years earlier continued until a federal magistrate
judge entered the room. To him, the assistant corporation counsel and I
told our versions of my arrest story -- which turned out to vary little.

The basic details were the same. As the city attorney shifted in his
seat, I told the judge how, along with compatriots I'd met only minutes
before, I donned my "WAR DEAD" sign and descended into the subway
surrounded by a phalanx of cops -- plainclothes, regular uniformed, Big
Brother-types from the Technical Assistance Response Unit (TARU), and
white-shirted brass, as well as a Washington Post photographer and
legal observers from the National Lawyers Guild -- and boarded our
train. I explained that we sat there looking as dead as possible for
about 111 blocks and then, as the Washington Post reported, were
arrested when we came back to life and "tried to change trains." I
asked, admittedly somewhat rhetorically why, if I was such a
"criminal," none of the officers present at my arrest had actually
showed up in court to testify against me when my case was dismissed out
of hand back in 2004? And why hadn't the prosecutor wanted to produce
the video footage the NYPD had taken of the entire action and my
arrest? And why had the city been trying to buy me off all these years
since?

Faced with the fact that his intimidation tactics hadn't worked, the
city attorney now quit his bad-cop tactics and I rose again out of the
ditch of "common criminality" into citizenship and then to the high
status of being addressed as "Dr. Turse" (in a bow to my PhD). Offers
and counteroffers followed, leading finally to a monetary settlement
with a catch -- I also wanted an apology. If that guard hadn't directed
me -- under threat of being shot -- to check my digital audio recorder
at the door, I might have had a sound file of it to listen to for years
to come. Instead, I had to be content with the knowledge that an
appointed representative of the City of New York not only had to ditch
the Escape from New York model -- at least for a day -- pony up some
money for violating my civil rights, and, before a federal magistrate
judge, also issue me an apology, on behalf of the city, for wrongs
committed by the otherwise largely unaccountable NYPD.

The Future of the NYPD and the Homeland-Security State-let

I'm under no illusions that this minor monetary settlement and apology
were of real significance in a city where civil rights are routinely
abridged, the police are a largely unaccountable armed force, and a
culture of total surveillance is increasingly the norm. But my lawsuit,
when combined with those of my fellow arrestees, could perhaps have
some small effect. After all, less than a year after the convention,
569 people had already "filed notices that they intended to sue the
City, seeking damages totaling $859,014,421," according to an NYCLU
report. While the city will end up paying out considerably less, the
grand total will not be insignificant. In fact, Jim Dwyer recently
reported that the first 35 of 605 RNC cases had been settled for a
total of $694,000.

If New Yorkers began to agitate for accountability -- demanding, for
instance, that such settlements be paid out of the NYPD's budget -- it
could make a difference. Then, every time New Yorkers' hard-earned
tax-dollars were handed over to fellow citizens who were harassed,
mistreated, injured, or abused by the city's police force that would
mean less money available for the "big expensive toys" that the "big
boys" of the NYPD's aviation unit use to record the private moments of
unsuspecting citizens or the ubiquitous surveillance gear used not to
capture the rest of the city on candid camera. It wouldn't put an end
to the NYPD's long-running criminality or the burgeoning homeland
security state-let that it's building, but it would, at least,
introduce a tiny measure of accountability.

Such an effort might even begin a dialogue about the NYPD, its dark
history, its current mandate under the Global War on Terror, and its
role in New York City. For instance, people might begin to examine the
very nature of the department. They might conclude that questions must
be raised when institutions -- be they rogue regimes, deleterious
industries, unaccountable corporations, or fundamentally-tainted
government institutions -- consistently, over many decades, evidence a
persistent disregard for the law, a lack of accountability, and a deep
resistance to reform. Those directly affected by the NYPD, a nearly
38,000-person force -- larger than many armies -- that has consistently
flouted the law and has proven remarkably resistant to curtailing its
own misconduct for well over a century, might even begin to wonder if
it can be trusted to administer the homeland security state-let its top
officials are fast implementing and, if not, what can be done about it.

[Nick Turse is the associate editor and research director of
Tomdispatch.com. His first book, The Complex, an exploration of the new
military-corporate complex in America, is due out in the American
Empire Project series by Metropolitan Books in 2008. His new website
NickTurse.com (up only in rudimentary form) will fully launch in the
coming months.] 

© 2007 Independent Media Institute.