OAKLAND
Police spies
chosen to lead war protest
Demian Bulwa, Chronicle Staff
Writer
Friday, July 28, 2006
Two Oakland police officers working undercover at an anti-war
protest in May 2003 got themselves elected to leadership positions in an effort
to influence the demonstration, documents released Thursday show.
The department assigned the officers to join activists
protesting the U.S. war in Iraq and the tactics that police had used at a
demonstration a month earlier, a police official said last year in a sworn
deposition.
At the first demonstration, police fired nonlethal bullets and
bean bags at demonstrators who blocked the Port of Oakland's entrance in a
protest against two shipping companies they said were helping the war effort.
Dozens of activists and longshoremen on their way to work suffered injuries
ranging from welts to broken bones and have won nearly $2 million in legal
settlements from the city.
The extent of the officers' involvement in the subsequent march
May 12, 2003, led by Direct Action to Stop the War and others, is unclear. But
in a deposition related to a lawsuit filed by protesters, Deputy Police Chief
Howard Jordan said activists had elected the undercover officers to "plan the
route of the march and decide I guess where it would end up and some of the
places that it would go."
It was revealed later that the California Anti-Terrorism
Information Center, which was established by the state attorney general's office
to help local police agencies fight terrorism, had posted an alert about the
April protest. Oakland police had also monitored online postings by the
longshoremen's union regarding its opposition to the war.
The documents showing that police subsequently tried to
influence a demonstration were released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties
Union, as part of a report criticizing government surveillance of political
activists since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The ACLU said the
documents came from the lawsuit over the police use of force.
Jordan, in his deposition in April 2005, said under questioning
by plaintiffs' attorney Jim Chanin that undercover Officers Nobuko Biechler and
Mark Turpin had been elected to be leaders in the May 12 demonstration an hour
after meeting protesters that day.
Asked who had ordered the officers to infiltrate the group,
Jordan said, "I don't know if there is one particular person, but I think
together we probably all decided it would be a good idea to have some undercover
officers there."
Several months after the rally, Jordan told a city police review
board examining the April 2003 port clash that "our ability to gather
intelligence on these groups and this type of operation needs to be improved,"
according to a transcript provided by the ACLU.
"I don't mean same-day intelligence," Jordan told the civilian
review panel. "I'm talking about long-term intelligence gathering."
He noted that "two of our officers were elected leaders within
an hour on May 12." The idea was "to gather the information and maybe even
direct them to do something that we want them to do," Jordan said.
"I call that being totalitarian," said Jack Heyman, a
longshoremen's union member who took part in the May 12 march. He said he was
not certain whether he had any contact with the officers that day.
Jordan declined to comment when reached at his office Thursday.
In his deposition, he said the Police Department no longer allows such
undercover work.
City Attorney John Russo said he was not familiar with the
police infiltration of the protest, but said the city had made "significant
changes" in its approach toward demonstrations after the port incident. Police
enacted a new crowd-control policy limiting the use of nonlethal force in 2004.
The ACLU said the Oakland case was one of several instances in
which police agencies had spied on legitimate political activity since 2001.
Mark Schlosberg, who directs the ACLU's police policy work and
wrote the report released Thursday, cited previously reported instances of
spying on groups in Santa Cruz and Fresno in addition to the Oakland case. He
called on state Attorney General Bill Lockyer and local police to ensure that
law-abiding activist groups don't come under government investigation.
"It's very important that there be regulation up front to
prevent these kinds of abuses from occurring," Schlosberg said at a news
conference.
Schlosberg said the state needs an independent inspector looking
into complaints and keeping an eye on intelligence gathering at such agencies as
the California National Guard and the state Department of Homeland Security.
Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for Lockyer, said the attorney general
had not yet read the ACLU report. But he said his boss "won't abide violations
of civil liberties. There's no room in this state or anywhere in this country
for monitoring the activity of groups merely because they have a political
viewpoint."
Following the Oakland port protest and disclosures about the
monitoring of activists, Lockyer issued guidelines in 2003 stating that police
must suspect that a crime has been committed before collecting intelligence on
activist groups.
But Schlosberg said the ACLU had surveyed 94 law enforcement
agencies last year and found that just eight were aware of the guidelines. Only
six had written policies restricting surveillance activities, he
said.
