Dave Weigel:
My friend Mike Elk has a story so head-spinning and pathetic that it must be enjoyed in one long read. D.C. labor activists suspected that plainclothes cops were infiltrating protests. Jeffrey Light and Sean Canavan, lawyers with United Students Against Sweatshops, wondered about the identity of a woman who kept showing up at protests but no other organizing meetings. They eventually figured out that the woman was a cop, Nicole Rizzi.
They figured this out because she wrote about her work, online….
Hey, it’s that new-fangled ‘community policing’! Because now that all street crime in DC has been eliminated, it’s time to crack down on those DFHs with their ‘flyers’ and ‘petitions’.From Mike Elk’s In These Times article:
… The story of how Rizzi was uncovered reads like a mix of “Gossip Girl” and “The Wire.” Activists pieced her identity together from her obsessive posting to social media sites, including Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, WordPress and Yfrog.
Lacy MacAuley, an activist and media manager for the Institute for Policy Studies, has suspected for the past several years that a protester named “Missy” was an undercover cop. “Missy” seemed to be at every protest, but no one knew her. However, MacAuley had no way of proving her suspicions…
A law enacted by the D.C. Council in 2004 imposes strict guidelines on police when they investigate or attempt to infiltrate First Amendment-protected groups. The Police Investigations Concerning First Amendment Activities Act of 2004 specifies that the MPD departments can only investigate free speech activities if they can prove sufficient cause that protestors are engaged in crime and they have the authorization of the Executive Director of the DC MPD Intelligence Fusion Divisions (or an appropriate supervisor of similar rank). To send in undercover officers, they have to go through the same authorization process again.
But USAS attorneys Sean Canavan and Jeffrey Light say the MPD rarely follows this law…
Light, who filed the case on behalf of USAS, says that undercover surveillance sows suspicion among activists and hinders collective action.
“If they are putting an undercover [cop] there, then they are putting undercover [police] everywhere. That is a big problem for a lot of these groups,” says Light. “You are trying to get people to come out and protest knowing that there is a undercover cop there—it’s a huge problem.”
Shishido Strain says his run-ins with Rizzi have already made him wary of strangers who want to get involved in fights for workers’ rights….
Which is (has always been) the point to these half-arsed Keystone Kops “infiltrations”: Not so much gathering information — although they’ll hoover up any tidbits they might be able to use ‘for later’ — as setting up a climate of fear and suspicion where anyone might be a narc or a provocateur.
Open Thread: Bad Cop, No Donut, “Missy”!Post + Comments (49)