Dyke March marshal, June 2007, New York City
Photo: Annulla of Blather From Brooklyn

Through the spring and summer months, the New York City Police Department has continued its campaign to shut down, suppress and contain political demonstrations, often in a completely unreasonable, ill-informed and even insulting manner. Recently, the Police Department has outright refused or stalled permits for events organized by the African Diaspora Education Society, Gays and Lesbians of Bushwick Empowered, the PrideFest and the Audre Lorde Project's Trans Day of Action.

Yet, even as many groups scramble to assemble pro-bono teams of attorneys to fight for permission to hold events, the NYPD has secretly issued a parade permit to the largest annual unauthorized political gathering on a Manhattan street, the 15th annual New York City Dyke March. Later today, tens of thousands of lesbians and their supporters will sally forth onto Fifth Avenue in a parade of lesbian visibility without knowing that their display has received the seal of government approval.

That's right, unrequested by and unbeknownst to the organizers, the NYPD has granted legally permitted status to the Dyke March and has done so for years.

How do we know this? Because Assistant Chief Thomas Graham, the commander of the Disorder Control Unit and the NYPD's expert on managing political demonstrations, says so in sworn testimony.

In a statement given under oath on March 23, 2005, then Inspector Thomas Graham, describes what he calls the "big secret." Here is an excerpt from the court transcript in which he is questioned by attorney James Meyerson:

Q: You issue permits at the scene?

A: We actually have issued permits on the street. And I'll give you the event. We used to have - it's the Dikes [sic] on Bikes. It used to be motorcycles and it's a gay women's march.

Q: Lesbians, yes.

A: I like gay women. If you like lesbians, we'll do lesbians.

Q: Anyway.

A: Back on the ranch. They normally march down from Fifth Avenue, down Fifth Avenue from 62nd Street. They have believed for years that they have not had a permit.

Q: I'm sorry, they believed for years?

A: Most of them believe - 99 percent of them believe there's no permit for that event. But we always co-oped [sic] some of the leadership to cooperate with us. Sign a permit, have your march, leave one traffic lane open.

Legally speaking, it seems that since the Dyke March has been around so long, the right for the marchers to walk down Fifth Avenue has been "grandfathered," or exempted from the usual requirement for a permit.

But what is the interest of the police in tricking the Dyke March organizers into thinking they do not have a permit when they have been granted one administratively?

Chief Graham touches upon this in the transcript:

A: They even tell us where they're going to take their clothes off, when they expose themselves. [ed: with the safety of large numbers, some women choose to go topless, which is legal in New York State] So I know we've actually issued the paper permit in the street.

Q: The day of the incident?

A: This was the day of the incident. That, I know has gone on.

Q: Do you guys tell anybody about this?

A: No, that was a big secret. That was a big secret because we didn't even tell the marches [sic] they had a permit. Because they believed they didn't because that was one of the reasons for marching.

Ok, so the NYPD decided not to tell the Dyke March organizers they had been granted a permit so they would not be disappointed that they were involved in a political action which was legal? Because it would not seem militantly radical enough?

That explanation seems somewhat bizarre.

Could it be that the police do not want to encourage other groups to think that they too might be able to organize large events in midtown Manhattan without approval from the Police Department?

That's possible. Because in the not-so-distance past, many demonstrations were organized just that way - without ever formally seeking permission from the authorities.

In 1993, when the first Dyke March took place, it was common for protest organizers to negotiate the logistics of demonstrations with the police as the events took place on the street. There were a lot of positive aspects to that system, both for the organizers and for the police. In most instances, the model which the police used to handle demonstrators was a fluid one based on negotiation and accommodation. There was an unwritten understanding that if 1,000 or more demonstrators showed up, the NYPD would open up one traffic lane in the street to ease their passage, if only to move the group along more quickly. Groups which were smaller than that would make their way along the sidewalk while the police followed nearby to monitor the proceedings. It may seem hard to believe in today's era of over-policing and pre-emptive arrests, but at that time New York City police officers took pride in their cool-headed, unflappable manner during protests. If no unplanned arrests took place, both protesters and organizers went home thinking that they had a pretty good day.

It is terribly ironic that as NYPD fights tooth and nail to stop others from assembling and marching, they have forced a permit onto the Dyke March organizers who have never sought one and likely never will.

I look forward to the day when demonstrators can talk about lesbian rights, justice for transgender people, the cultures of the African continent, or whatever they please without having their political message subsumed in some needless fight with the police over the right to take up public space.

The group 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care is protesting death threats made against New York City Councilmember Charles Barron on the NYPD Rant website earlier this week. They want to find out if NYPD officers were responsible for the threats and to have the officers fired if that's true. The NYPD says they are looking into the threat. But this is not the first time that an NYPD Rant'er has threatened Barron. In December of last year someone posting on NYPD Rant under the screen name "EA1025" urged that Barron be "shot on site" [sic].

Federal authorities in Germany intend to use police dogs to track activists at the upcoming G8 summit, according to the Associated Press. A spokesman for the federal prosecutor's office has confirmed that the police have already taken scent samples from "several" activists.

Scent tracking was a tool of the Stasi, the notorious East German secret police. The AP story quotes Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble saying that "potentially violent" activists may be placed in "preventative detention" for up to two weeks. The summit will be taking place in Heiligendamm, a Baltic Sea resort town in the former East Germany, from June 6-8. If you think this kind of thing could not happen here in the U.S., take a look at this recent item on the "Danger Room" blog. A U.S. government research agency is hoping to develop a device to "collect human scent for future use to track a specific target."

So many choices. The NYPD RNC Intelligence documents are available on four websites which each offer different possibilities for searching the files.

Since none of the available navigation tools will answer every need, the serious researcher should consult more than one navigation aid. While the indexes provided by the New York Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times are helpful guides which enable the reader to grasp the broad features of the surveillance program, they do not capture every instance in which a group or individual appears in the documents. For example, the Times index does not include any citations for I-Witness Video, which is written about on five pages of the intelligence documents. Nor does the Times list "Stonewalk," an event organized by family members of September 11th victims, which is cited on four pages of the documents. The NYCLU's index appears to be more complete, but even so, activist Lisa Fithian, whose name appears on eighteen pages of the documents, is cited as appearing on only thirteen pages by the civil liberties union. The I-Witness Video search capability is the most successful in ferreting out each citation; it uses optical character recognition (OCR) software to make the scanned documents searchable as text, but is occasionally inaccurate because that conversion is imperfect.

Here are the NYPD Intelligence documents from the Republican National Convention spy campaign that lawyers for New York City fought desperately to keep from public view.

City lawyers argued that "The documents were not written for consumption by the general public," and "The documents contain information filtered and distilled for analysis by intelligence officers accustomed to reading intelligence information." Additionally, the news media would "fixate and sensationalize" on the intelligence documents.

Now you can see for yourself.

We have begun the process of posting all 600 pages of documents to the website. We will get them up just as soon as we can. We'll also be adding new indexing and searching capabilities to help you navigate through the documents.

Members of the National Socialist Movement pose in Orlando. Ohio NSM leader Mark Martin stands in back row, far left; FBI informant David Gletty kneels in front row, third from left.

David Gletty, the lead organizer of a neo-Nazi march through a historically black neighborhood in Orlando, Florida has been named as an FBI informant by the Orlando Sentinel. Shocked Orlando community leaders have demanded an investigation. Alzo Reddick, a former Florida state legislator, asked, "Was the FBI informant an activist or participant? Was he an agent provocateur from the get-go?"

>> Watch blimp-cam

>> Watch body-cam

>> Watch helicopter-cam

Even though the NYPD's written policy of blanket surveillance of demonstrations has been enjoined by a federal judge, the scope of the police spying is not widely known. The official police rationale for videotaping public events—that it helps to "prevent and detect terrorist activity"—hints at the vast potential applications of the policy in a time of public anxiety over the possibility of terrorist acts.

Judge Charles Haight delivered a withering blow to NYPD's blanket surveillance of public gatherings in a carefully rendered, 47-page decision.

Haight's decision clarified the Handschu guidelines, the rules which the NYPD must follow when videotaping or photographing political activity. He ordered that the current NYPD policy of wholesale surveillance of demonstrations stop immediately.

Newsday picked up the I-Witness Video story about the Chief Smolka video. This is the first time video from this website has been cited in the mainstream news media. In true "old media" style, Newsday doesn't credit I-Witness Video or the videographer by name or even link to the video as a service to its readers; but the article says the video "is making waves on the Internet and in the department."

The Newsday article brings some new information to light. Cynthia Greenberg speaks about what is not visible in the video. She says Chief Smolka kicked her repeatedly in the head and body, resulting in a concussion. She also says that, as he assaulted her, he called her a "fucking cunt" and accused her of "resisting" him. (Newsday censors the expletives.)

The article also describes a deposition of Chief Smolka, where he offers a convoluted explanation of how his knee perhaps happened to come in contact with Cynthia Greenberg's head.

Newsday reporter Rocco Parascandola summarizes the scene caught on tape like this: "Although only seconds long, it looks bad."

Readers of an earlier post may have been puzzled about why NYPD Chief Bruce Smolka's unique talents would be in demand at a leading purveyor of beauty products for women.

I-Witness Video received this note over the transom from a legal observer who did not wish to be identified. It provides some insight into the history of the relationship between Revlon and the NYPD.

FluxRostrum, whose videocamera was stolen by NYPD officers on October 30, 2006, is still fighting for possession of his camera and tape. Sources tell us that the Civilian Complaint Review Board has opened an investigation into the matter. The blogger Aldon Hynes sent a complaint to the NYPD via e-mail and received a follow-up phone call from a Sgt. Hanlon of Internal Affairs. Hynes reports,

After 26 years on the police force, two-star NYPD Chief Bruce Smolka is retiring and leaving for a security job at Revlon. The timing of his departure is both striking and curious. Since the Street Crimes Unit which he commanded was forced to close after the killing of Amadou Diallo, Chief Smolka has had a meteoric rise within the NYPD. He is currently the borough commander of Manhattan south of 59th Street, which is the plum patrol assignment at his level within the department.

Why would Chief Smolka choose to leave now, at the height of his career, holding one of the most prestigious assignments the department has to offer?

By law we cannot arrest someone just because he may call a cop a pig. We cannot arrest someone because he asks for a name or a badge or takes a picture.

-- Lorenzo Casanova, Deputy Police Commissioner, NYPD. [1]

We know that NYPD officers harass photographers for taking pictures of stuff that the police decide is "sensitive." But what if police officers decide that they themselves are the "sensitive" stuff?

In my previous post, we found that taking photographs in public places is firmly protected under the Constitution.

Yet, in the cold light of post-September 11th New York City, the NYPD seems to think that it should be able to decide who is allowed to take pictures of anything that the police deem "sensitive." This kind of thinking is justified under the rubric of fighting terrorism.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about whether or not people can be prevented from taking pictures or shooting video in public. Just what is the law around taking pictures in public places?

Over 18,000 people have viewed FluxRostrum's video Get That Camera! since it was posted on this website and others last week. The videotaped assault on Flux and the theft of his camera by NYPD officers has been re-posted to scores of blogs including Amanda Congdon's high-profile ABC News video blog.

On October 30, 2006 at a demonstration protesting the murder of journalist Brad Will in Mexico, members of the NYPD assaulted an independent videographer and stole his videocamera.

I-Witness Video was born in the wake of the crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly which followed the embattled Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in 1999. Since 2000, we have used video as the foundation for our investigations into police and government misconduct in and around political demonstrations.