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<h1 id="reader-title">The NYPD's Records of Its Own Misbehavior
Have Mysteriously Vanished</h1>
<div id="reader-credits" class="credits">Nick Pinto</div>
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<p class="pub-ago"> <span class="pubdate">Friday, May
20, 2016 <br>
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<p class="first-para">Just as lawyers for New York
City are preparing for a hearing in federal court to
close the books on lawsuits over the New York Police
Department's secret and illegal surveillance of
Muslims, a lesser-known lawsuit that concluded
Monday reveals that the police department's records
of its own ugly history of unconstitutional domestic
surveillance, which it was required to preserve for
posterity, have mysteriously gone missing.</p>
<p>Younger New Yorkers are probably familiar with the
NYPD's <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.ap.org/Index/AP-In-The-News/NYPD">Muslim
surveillance program</a>, its <a target="_blank"
href="http://gothamist.com/2013/10/10/occupys_undercover_shady_ubiquitous.php">infiltration
of Occupy Wall Street with undercover officers</a>,
and its <a target="_blank"
href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10000872396390444004704578031050540111858">unconstitutional
mass-arrests of protesters and bystanders</a> during
the 2004 Republican National Convention. But the
history of NYPD surveillance and harassment of
citizens based on their political, religious, or
ethnic identities stretches back considerably
farther. In the early years of the last century,
special NYPD squads targeted Italians, anarchists,
and communists. With the onset of the Great
Depression, the NYPD's "Radical Bureau" took up the
surveillance of communist New Yorkers. By the 1960s,
the Radical Bureau had been renamed Bureau of
Special Services, and it was going after groups that
included <a target="_blank"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_Racial_Equality">CORE</a>,
the ACLU, the NAACP, and the Black Panthers.</p>
<p>Some of the people targeted for political
surveillance by the NYPD filed a class action suit
in 1971, alleging that the police behavior violated
constitutional rights to free speech and assembly,
their right to due process, and their protection
from unreasonable search and seizure. The suit
dragged on for more than a decade, ultimately
resulting in a consent decree named after the lead
plaintiff, Barbara Handschu. The Handschu decree,
which still governs NYPD behavior today, in modified
form, is best known for committing the police not to
investigate anyone's political, ideological, or
religious behavior unless they have reason to
believe that person is engaged in a crime. But
another section of the consent decree also required
the NYPD to follow the New York City Charter and
Freedom of Information Law with regard to its
archive of surveillance files.</p>
<p>Judge Charles S. Haight Jr., who presided over the
Handschu decree, specified that this meant that:<br>
</p>
<blockquote class="city-back-superlight">
<p>The upshot of the settlement is that no
intelligence or political files, pre-1955 or
post-1955, can be destroyed without the express
approval of the City's commissioner of records and
information services, who is specifically charged
by the Charter to base his determination 'on the
potential administrative, fiscal legal, research,
or historical value of the record'.... I will not
assume that the police commissioner would
disregard the law by disposing of police records
without seeking the requisite approval.</p>
</blockquote>
<span data-vmg-track="2nd ad" data-vmg-ad="Teads"
class="inline-video" data-vmg-tracked="true"></span>
<p> <br>
But as the lawsuit resolved Monday reveals, that
seems to be exactly what happened. That suit was
brought by Johanna Fernandez, a history professor at
Baruch College, who first approached the NYPD a
decade ago as she was researching a book about
another group of political activists from the 1960s
and '70s, the Young Lords. Radical Puerto Rican
nationalists, the Young Lords are a critical and
fascinating piece of New York history. Inspired by
the Black Panthers, the Lords combined militant
tactics with a knack for getting things done in
their community. Deeply embedded in Spanish Harlem,
the group knew the neighborhood was profoundly
underserved by the city. The Department of
Sanitation was largely ignoring the area, and the
streets were full of garbage. The Young Lords
collected the trash, put it in the middle of the
streets, and set it on fire. For weeks. Pretty soon,
trash collection in the barrio improved markedly.<br>
</p>
<p>Working with doctors, the Lords tested East Harlem
children and found lead-poisoning levels through the
roof. They hammered the issue in the press,
ultimately occupying the offices of the Department
of Health. In 1970, the city created a new bureau to
address lead poisoning. The Young Lords led the
campaign to improve conditions at Lincoln Hospital
in the South Bronx, a hospital so bad that rats were
sometimes seen in the emergency room. When hospital
officials ignored demands for change, the Lords
conspired with doctors and nurses to seize the
hospital. On July 14 of 1970, they did just that,
running the hospital for 24 hours until they had
negotiated a series of reforms from the city.</p>
<p>Throughout, the NYPD was keeping close tabs on the
group. "[The police] were provocateurs," says
Fernandez. "They engaged in an enormous amount of
surveillance of the group. And they had members of
the NYPD who came to the office of the Young Lords
on Madison Avenue and asked to join the organization
for the purposes of undermining the work of the
group."</p>
<p>In researching her book, Fernandez recovered <a
target="_blank"
href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/236617977/Young-Lords-Surveillance">a
small treasury of documents</a> from the NYPD and
other law enforcement agencies related to the Young
Lords — some of it possibly brought to light by the
<a
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-who-took-on-fbi-abandon-shadows.html"
target="_blank">1971 robbery of a Pennsylvania FBI
office</a> that exposed the FBI's <a
target="_blank"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO">COINTELPRO</a>
program. But rich documentation of the Young Lords
is hard to come by, not least of all because the
group, aware they were being spied on and
infiltrated by the NYPD, destroyed many of their own
records to protect themselves. Ironically, the
police surveillance that helped scuttle the Young
Lords probably generated the most complete record of
its activities.</p>
<p>So after her informal request to the NYPD went
nowhere, Fernandez filed a formal request for the
NYPD's records of the Young Lords through the
Freedom of Information Law, and when that request
turned up nothing, <a target="_blank"
href="http://gothamist.com/2014/08/12/nypd_spied_young_lords.php">she
sued for the records in 2014</a>. The records
Fernandez had already found from other sources
showed the NYPD had once had substantial records,
and so did reviews of the intelligence files
conducted during the Handschu agreement process. But
though Handschu precluded the department from
unlawfully destroying any of those records, the NYPD
and the City Law Department told Judge Alice
Schlesinger the records Fernandez wanted couldn't be
found. </p>
<p>Neither the Municipal Records Management Division
nor the NYPD could find any record that the Handschu
material had been destroyed. The last time anyone
outside the NYPD had scrutinized the records, in the
1980s, they were kept in Room 1206 at NYPD
headquarters in 1 Police Plaza. The NYPD claims they
were later transferred to a room in the Brooklyn
Army Terminal. But searches of both those rooms by
the NYPD came up empty.</p>
<p>In the course of the search, the police did come up
with an additional 590 documents relevant to
Fernandez's request — but they were mostly index
cards from a cataloging system that referred to the
<i>actual </i>documents Fernandez was looking for.
"The index cards point to a very complex and
thorough web of information-gathering on the part of
the NYPD," Fernandez says. "It's tantalizing, and
it's proof that other documents exist."</p>
<p>Fernandez argued that the city's nonchalant
attitude towards the missing records wasn't good
enough, and pressed for it to widen its search. The
city pushed back, saying Fernandez wanted them to
engage in a "fishing expedition." In her ruling
Monday, Judge Schlesinger reluctantly agreed.</p>
<blockquote class="city-back-superlight">
<p>No one can be identified today who has the
ability to determine where, if not the Handschu
room, were the Room 1206 documents transferred.
That is the problem. One I cannot solve, without,
I believe directing the Department to go to all
sorts of extremely burdensome lengths without any
real hope or expectation that these documents will
be found. I cannot and will not do that.<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p> Asked for comment, a City Law Department
spokesperson offered the following: "In response to
this request for NYPD documents from 1960s and
1970s, the NYPD produced 590 pages of documents. The
NYPD conducted a reasonable and good-faith search,
but was unable to locate additional documents. We
agree with the Court’s conclusion that NYPD should
not be required to search further, as additional
searching would not be likely to turn up the
requested material."</p>
<p>Martin Stolar, one of the class lawyers in the
Handschu case, says the failure to produce the
records is disturbing. "What's at stake here is an
extraordinarily important record of the uses and
abuses of police powers against political movements,
people's movements," he says. Stolar and the other
Handschu lawyers will be back in court before Judge
Haight on June 1 to discuss the settlement of the
Muslim-surveillance lawsuits. "Where the documents
are is not on the front burner for us at the
moment," he says. "Once the settlement is finalized,
I think we may want to take a look at this."</p>
<p>Fernandez says there's more at stake with her
lawsuit than a historian's research. In an age of
resurgent popular protest movements, from Occupy
Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, the policing of
popular movements is more relevant than ever. "Only
when we document the systematic ways in which the
police and government agencies have undermined
social movements will social movements that are
emerging today be able to voice their grievances and
articulate freely their highest aspirations for a
better society," she says. "This is about the
historical record, but it's also about the project
of democracy."</p>
<p>The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment.</p>
<p>Fernandez says she intends to appeal the decision.</p>
<p>Here's Judge Schlesinger's decision:<br>
<font size="-2"><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.villagevoice.com/news/the-nypds-records-of-its-own-misbehavior-have-mysteriously-vanished-8639201">http://www.villagevoice.com/news/the-nypds-records-of-its-own-misbehavior-have-mysteriously-vanished-8639201</a></font><br>
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<div class="moz-signature">-- <br>
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
415 863.9977
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="http://www.freedomarchives.org">www.freedomarchives.org</a>
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