Surveillance Prompts a Suit: Police v. Police

The demonstrators arrived angry, departed furious. The police had herded them into pens. Stopped them from handing out fliers. Threatened them with arrest for standing on public sidewalks. Made notes on which politicians they cheered and which ones they razzed.

Meanwhile, officers from a special unit videotaped their faces, evoking for one demonstrator the unblinking eye of George Orwell's "1984."

"That's Big Brother watching you," the demonstrator, Walter Liddy, said in a deposition.

Mr. Liddy's complaint about police tactics, while hardly novel from a big-city protester, stands out because of his job: He is a New York City police officer. The rallies he attended were organized in the summer of 2004 by his union, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, to protest the pace of contract talks with the city.

Now the officers, through their union, are suing the city, charging that the police procedures at their demonstrations — many of them routinely used at war protests, antipoverty marches and mass bike rides — were so heavy-handed and intimidating that their First Amendment rights were violated.

A lawyer for the city said the police union members were treated no differently than hundreds of thousands of people at other gatherings, with public safety and free speech both protected. The department observes all constitutional requirements, the city maintains.

So funny! Everybody's rights were equally trampled. That's what passes for fairness in America now.

Welcome to the party, cops. Tell me, how does it feel?

This occured right as half a million Americans poured into NYC to protest the GOP's convention. The infamous protest where cops - maybe even some of the same ones whining about the trampling of their rights in this incident - rounded up large groups of people with orange netting and threw them into "Gitmo on the Hudson" by the hundreds.

I also seem to remember that some of the real protestors joined in with the cop's protest. (Not that cops can't be real protestors, but it seems a bit surreal, given all that cops to do stifle protests.)

Obviously as long as Team Bush is in power, what goes around will come around and Bloomberg is part and parcel of Team Bush.

Why not join us at Camp Liberty? You already know the score: you can't really exercise you First Amedment rights to Free Speech without a completely Orwelliam outpouring of police repression, surveillence, and threats of arrest if you even look at a cop wrong.

Please, join with us in protesting the Bush Administration. You know they are screwing you blind. Just admit it.

Join us.