Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s city attorneys are fighting the release of police surveillance records related to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City by arguing that the public might misinterpret them or the news media will “fixate upon and sensationalize” them. Those are the risks we take in a democracy.
A review by our colleague Jim Dwyer of court records and some of the still-secret documents tells a stunning story. The police may have overreached and misused surveillance authority in a wide undercover effort to head off disruptions. In the months leading to the convention, officers were dispatched around the United States, and to Canada and Europe. The so-called R.N.C. Intelligence Squad, run with the help of a former senior C.I.A. official, was supposed to sniff out potential troublemakers, but it seems to have spent a lot of effort infiltrating and compiling dossiers on groups that clearly posed no danger. The Times and the New York Civil Liberties Union are trying to have the files unsealed to determine whether any laws were broken or civil liberties trampled in this effort.
The police maintain that they successfully protected the city from potential terrorism and the kind of violence that occurred in Seattle in 1999 during a meeting of the World Trade Organization. If they did that — legally — they should be eager to prove it.
Unfortunately, this dispute fits a deeply troubling pattern of Mayor Bloomberg’s tenure, which has been exemplary in so many other ways. The mayor sometimes does not quite seem to have made the transition from running a privately owned company, in which his word was law, to leading a major city, in which the voters serve as both board of directors and major shareholders.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/opinion/27tue2.html
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