U.S.A. - How and Why Police Monitor Protests

By Tom Risen

 People in cities across the U.S. continue to protest separate recent grand jury decisions not to indict police officers who killed unarmed black men , with demonstrations catching on in countries around the world. They've staged “die-ins” by lying down in stores and train stations, marched through streets holding signs reading "We Can't Breathe," blocked traffic intersections and chanted slogans like "black lives matter” and "hands up, don't shoot." They also brought back a rallying cry heard during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement: "The people united can never be divided!”

As they did during the Occupy protests, law enforcement is once again reportedly monitoring these demonstrations using video recordings to make lists of who attended and organized protests, according to civil liberties groups. The question of who has access to that footage also raises privacy concerns for these groups about President Barack Obama’s push for officers to wear body cameras to document their interactions with people.

“I have been attending protests in Boston for years and it seems like Boston Police Department policy to videotape protests,” says Kade Crockford, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Massachusetts Technology for Liberty Project.

The Boston Police Department had video teams at recent protests but activity was not recorded because there were no incidents, says Lt. Mike McCarthy, spokesman for the department.

“The only times the video cameras are rolling is if there is an incident,” McCarthy says. “We use it to assist us to identify anybody who may be committing a crime during the event and to ensure officers are obeying rules and regulations.”

A mobile pod camera vehicle “commonly used at large events” was also present during a recent protest in Chicago, Martin Maloney, a spokesman for the Chicago Police Department tells U.S. News in an email.

“[Chicago Police Department] will always protect residents' First Amendment rights of free speech and peaceful assembly,” Maloney wrote. “ In many cases this week CPD even shut down major streets to facilitate the protests.”

A representative of the Oakland Police Department tells U.S. News that it has not videotaped recent protests. All videotaping of protests by the New York City Police Department must comply with federal Handschu Authority guidelines, a set of policies that prohibit photographing or videotaping lawful protests, Det. Cheryl Crispin, a spokeswoman for the department, told U.S. News in an email.

Videotaping protests could help officers spot people who become violent at demonstrations but a lack of privacy protections on the data could enable politically motivated harassment if police don’t like the protesters, says Faiza Patel, a program director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. Body cameras raise the same privacy concerns as those devices would record “intimate situations between police and citizens, like a domestic disturbance,” Patel adds.

"The NYPD has been videotaping protests for quite some time," she says. “Police video surveillance policies are not well developed and vary from department to department.”

Video footage could be used to support charges against protesters arrested during demonstrations. New York City police arrested more than 220 people during peaceful protests on Friday on charges including disorderly conduct and failure to clear the streets, ABC News reports.

While law enforcement monitors for crime but does not interfere with peaceful assembly, this surveillance can also have “a chilling effect” to intimidate people against lawful protest, says Eugene Puryear, an organizer of the DC Ferguson activist group that has marched in the nation's capital in recent weeks. This fear of being listed by police as an activist is why some people hide their faces during marches by wearing Guy Fawkes masks made popular by Anonymous protesters, Puryear says

“I think the police videotaping protests is clearly an intimidation tactic,” he says. “That being said, it clearly has not succeeded given the vibrancy of the movement.”

Police surveillance does not worry veteran activist Holly Wood, 29, of Belmont, California, but she told U.S. News in an email that she has not attended recent protests because she works evenings as a child-care provider. It would be unsafe to bring a child to protests, she says, because of safety concerns about crowds turning violent or police crowd control methods like tear gas or “kettling” crowds into a small area, Wood wrote. Body cameras for police could help increase crowd safety by holding officers accountable, she added.

“Many people are afraid of how potential employers will interpret activism,” Wood wrote. “No one is certain of how the government is using their data” from videotaping protests.

The fear of being entered into a government database for peaceful protesting did not stop Donald Ray, 35, of Washington, District of Columbia, from marching on Friday for more accountability about police violence against unarmed citizens.

“I don’t know about others, but I’m not worried,” Ray says. “I would be happy if the police knew I was in a protest.”

Government surveillance of protests went beyond videotape during the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in 2011, however, according to government documents disclosed to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. The heavily redacted documents show “intelligence agencies working with law enforcement to catalogue peaceful protest activities,” and it is unclear who had access to the data and what it was used for, says Mara Verheyden-Hilliard executive director of the advocacy group.

“We can reasonably anticipate that the same thing is happening now,” she says.

Law enforcement used funding and resources from the Department of Homeland Security to monitor Occupy movement protesters and organizers, which included the Boston Regional Intelligence Center collecting and retaining a wide range of intelligence on participants including student activists, according to documents That Boston intelligence office is one of the dozens of “fusion centers” across the U.S. created after the terrorist attacks of September 2001 to coordinate information on terrorism threats.
Terrorism is the U.S. is rare, so fusion centers have been used to help state and local law enforcement collect and analyze data on criminal activity, says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU in the nation's capital. Protests can sometimes fall into this category, whether they are violent or peaceful, he says. “We need to take a close look at the fusion center concept and whether it provides a good return on investment for law enforcement.”

Fusion centers collect information – not just from law enforcement but also from private sector and the public, says Mike Sena, president of the National Fusion Center Association. Sena denies that these centers are being used to monitor peaceful protests.

“We have no role with the collection of information on peaceful protests,” Sena says. “The only information we review is when there is an active criminal threat.”

The centers contact local law enforcement when they discover there will be large - scale events so police and fire department resources will prepared, and to ask whether there is a risk of a crowd becoming violent, says Sena, director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center fusion center.

Though the benefits of such surveillance seem evident when it comes to dealing with terrorism, a bipartisan report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 2012 raised doubts about the merits of fusion centers.

“Instead of strengthening our counterterrorism efforts, they have too often wasted money and stepped on Americans’ civil liberties,” Sen Tom Coburn, R-S.D., who is the ranking member of the subcommittee.

Civil liberties groups fear a chilling effect on free speech from other methods of surveillance that police could use to support cases against protesters, including monitoring of cell phones and social media accounts used by protesters. The New York Police Department successfully fought Twitter in court to obtain the social media records of an Occupy Wall Street activist to bolster a case against him for the charge of disorderly conduct during a protest that blocked traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Law enforcement may also be using devices that can intercept mobile phone signals while they're being sent to a cell tower, Stanley says. These commercially available devices known as “stingrays,” which can collect people’s cellphone data including their location and data stored on the phone like call records, have reportedly been used by the Justice Department. The ACLU has identified law enforcement agencies in 19 states and the District of Columbia that own those devices .

When asked whether law enforcement has sent his fusion center in Northern California data about protesters’ cell phones, Sena told U.S. News, “I have never received a request for analysis for that type of information.”