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| NEWS > 08 August 2007 |
Other related articles:
Corruption probe fell short, s
On the advice of Crown prosecutors, only six of 12 drug-squad officers suspected of breaking the law were charged, document alleges
The biggest probe of police corruption allegations in Canadian history charged only half of the officers who were suspected of breaking the law, The Globe and Mail has learned.
Six Toronto police officers faced 22 criminal charges when the probe - headed by then-staff-superintendent John Neily of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police - wrapped up in January of 2004.
According to sources familiar with the "final report," which w... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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New York Times - United States
08 August 2007
This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.
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Secrets of the Police
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. Yesterday, for the second time in three months, a federal judge ordered the release of hundreds of pages of documents that detail the Police Department’s covert surveillance leading to the convention. People who were detained, some for days and without explanation, may finally begin to get some answers.
If the decision by Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV stands, the documents may figure in scores of lawsuits challenging police tactics that included the heavy-handed: rounding up suspects on the streets, fingerprinting them and putting them in holding pens until the convention was all but over. That such a police action happened in New York, and during the large, democratic show of a political nominating convention, was troubling.
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. As Jim Dwyer has reported in The Times, many of the targets — including environmental and church groups and even a satirical troupe called Billionaires for Bush — posed no danger or credible threat. Tracking them was, at the least, a waste of resources that could have been better used elsewhere.
The Police Department surely has good reasons for needing to keep parts of their covert activities under wraps, particularly where operations against potential terrorism are concerned. The judge — and even the New York Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs — correctly acknowledged a need for limited nondisclosure. The names of undercover agents and other potentially compromising information in the documents have been redacted. We hope that’s enough to let them see daylight. (The Times was a party to the lawsuit that released more than 600 pages of documents in May.)
New Yorkers have been tremendously patient with the demands of living in a city scarred from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and now made secure in ways, large and small, that can often interrupt their lives. They accept that the police have a job to do in keeping everyone safe, and they are overwhelmingly cooperative. But the overarching police strategy that culminated in the arrests three years ago this month did not feel like it was done with just safety in mind.
Along with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s denial of permits for protests on Central Park’s Great Lawn, the 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.
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