One Small Step for Decency

Via the New York Times, a judge is forcing the city of New York to release, albeit in a redacted fashion, lots of documents on the spying the NYPD did on protest groups that were protesting the 2004 Republican Convention.

Needless to say, this is good news, though it's pretty clear that the folks in question should have never been arrested and the NYPD and NYC should be suffering some pretty serious sanctions for this behavior.

Is that going to happen? Oh hell no - this is America, baby! Can't have people in giant Bush costumes walking the streets of NY. That might disrupt the old white men's country club reunion, or whatever:

The city had largely based its bid for nondisclosure on the need to protect those identities and methods, and argued that the public might misinterpret the documents or the news media sensationalize them. But the civil liberties lawyers insisted that the documents — even without the sensitive materials — were needed to show in court that the police had overstepped legal boundaries in arresting, detaining and fingerprinting hundreds of people instead of handing out summonses for minor offenses.

The order was the latest development in the long-running case, which posed thorny questions about the free speech rights of protesters and the means used by law enforcement officials to maintain public order.

That they are "thorny questions" is a nice way of saying "the police and the city arbitrarily decided to mass-arrest anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then hold them in inhospitable conditions for days, and then try to claim it was all legal and necessary on the grounds that the protesters were 'dangerous'."

I guess it does depend on what you mean by dangerous. Were they dangerous to public perception? Sure. Dangerous to anyone's actual safety? Hardly. But that the new America for you - once police departments realized they could bust protesters illegally and then cage them for indefinite periods without any real consequences, the new "tactics" spread like wildfire across departments all over the country.

Bleh.