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People protest after a grand jury decided not to indict officer Daniel Pantaleo in the Eric Garner case. Photograph: Yana Paskova/Getty Images

Undercover officers in the New York police department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian.

The records, produced in response to a freedom of information lawsuit led by New York law firm Stecklow & Thompson, provide the most detailed picture yet of the sweeping scope of NYPD surveillance during mass protests over the death of Eric Garner in 2014 and 2015. Lawyers said the new documents raised questions about NYPD compliance with city rules.

The documents, mostly emails between undercover officers and other NYPD officials, follow other disclosures that the NYPD regularly filmed Black Lives Matter activists and sent undercover personnel to protests. The NYPD has not responded to the Guardians request for comment or interview.

Emails show that undercover officers were able to pose as protesters even within small groups, giving them extensive access to details about protesters whereabouts and plans. In one email, an official notes that an undercover officer is embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to Grand Central Station. This intimate access appears to have helped police pass as trusted organizers and extract information about demonstrations. In other emails, officers share the locations of individual protesters at particular times. The NYPD emails also include pictures of organizers group text exchanges with information about protests, suggesting that undercover officials were either trusted enough to be allowed to take photos of activists phones or were themselves members of a private planning group text.

That text loop was definitely just for organizers, I dont know how that got out, said Elsa Waithe, a Black Lives Matter organizer. Someone had to have told someone how to get on it, probably trusting someone they had seen a few times in good faith. We clearly compromised ourselves.

Keegan Stephan, a regular attendee of the Grand Central protests in 2014 and 2015, said information about protesters whereabouts was limited to a small group of core organizers at that time. I feel like the undercover was somebody who was or is very much a part of the group, and has access to information we only give to people we trust, said Stephan, who has been assisting attorneys with a lawsuit to obtain the documents on behalf of plaintiff James Logue, a protester. If youre walking to Grand Central with a handful of people for an action, thats much more than just showing up to a public demonstration that sounds like a level of friendship.

Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD detective sergeant and professor at John Jay College, agreed that it would not be easy for an undercover officer to join a small group of protesters and hear their plans. It would be pretty amazing that they would be able to get into the core group in such a short window of time, said Giacalone. This could have been going on a while before for these people to get so close to the inner circle.

The NYPD documents also included a handful of pictures and one short video taken at Grand Central Station demonstrations. Most are pictures of crowds milling about or taking part in demonstrations. In one picture of a small group of activists, the NYPD identifies an individual in a brown jacket as the main protester. These images of protesters are reminiscent of those taken by undercover transit police, who were also deployed to Black Lives Matter protests in Grand Central Station in 2015.

Giacalone said this type of leadership identification was standard police practice at protests. If you take out the biggest mouth, everybody just withers away, so you concentrate on the ones you believe are your organizers, he said. Once you identify that person, you can run computer checks on them to see if they have a warrant out or any summons failures, then you can drag them in before they go out to speak or rile up the crowd, as long as you have reasonable cause to do so.

Attorneys say the documents raise legal questions about whether the NYPD was acting in compliance with the departments intelligence-gathering rules, known as the Handschu Guidelines. The guidelines, which are based on an ongoing decades-old class-action lawsuit, hold that the NYPD can begin formally investigating first amendment activity when facts or circumstances reasonably indicate that an unlawful act has been, is being, or will be committed and if the police surveillance plan has been authorized by a committee known as the Handschu Authority. (That committee was exclusively staffed by NYPD officials at the time.) However, according to the guidelines, before launching a formal investigation, the NYPD can also conduct investigative work such as checking of leads and preliminary inquiries with even lower standards of suspicion.

Michael Price, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said it was difficult to know whether NYPDs undercover surveillance operations crossed the line, as the documents did not make clear what, if any, stage of investigation the police were in at the time of the operations. But he said the departments retention of pictures and video raised questions, since police are not allowed to retain information about public events unless it relates to unlawful activity.

So my question would be: what was the unlawful activity that police had reason to suspect here? said Price. It doesnt appear that there was any criminal behavior they were talking about in the emails. Most references are to protesters being peaceful, so I would be very concerned if they were hinging their whole investigation on civil disobedience, such as unpermitted protests or blocking of pedestrians.

Throughout the emails, the NYPDs undercover sources provide little indication of any unlawful activity, frequently characterizing demonstrators as peaceful and orderly with only one mention of a single arrest.

The documents uniformly show no crime occurring, but NYPD had undercovers inside the protests for months on end as if they were al-Qaida, said David Thompson, an attorney of Stecklow & Thompson, who helped sue for the records.

Giacalone argued that police could have easily come up with a legal justification to initiate surveillance, especially if such operations occurred after the shooting of two NYPD officers in December of 2014 (all dates in the NYPDs email communications were redacted). But he noted that such investigative activities would be harder to justify if officers were not directly observing signs of unlawful activity.

If theyre not talking about any crimes being committed, theyre going to have a difficult time defending this. It may end up in another one of these lawsuits, said Giacalone. Some may say this is good police work, fine, but good police work or not, we have rules against this kind of thing in New York.

Attorneys have already filed a petition charging that the NYPD may have failed to produce all of its surveillance records. But for some protesters, the damage has already been done.

In the first couple of months, we had a lot of people in and out of the group, some because they didnt fit our style but others because of the whispers that they were undercovers, recalled Waithe. Whether it was real or perceived, that was the most debilitating part for me, the whispers Its really hard to organize when you cant trust each other.

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NYPD officers accessed Black Lives Matter activists' texts, documents show - The Guardian