Secrets of the Police

NYT Editorial

The city of New York is waging a losing and ill-conceived battle for overzealous secrecy surrounding nearly 2,000 arrests during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Yesterday, for the second time in three months, a federal judge ordered the release of hundreds of pages of documents that detail the Police Department’s covert surveillance leading to the convention. People who were detained, some for days and without explanation, may finally begin to get some answers.

If the decision by Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV stands, the documents may figure in scores of lawsuits challenging police tactics that included the heavy-handed: rounding up suspects on the streets, fingerprinting them and putting them in holding pens until the convention was all but over. That such a police action happened in New York, and during the large, democratic show of a political nominating convention, was troubling.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly seemed to cast an awfully wide and indiscriminate net in seeking out potential troublemakers. For more than a year before the convention, members of a police spy unit headed by a former official of the Central Intelligence Agency infiltrated a wide range of groups. As Jim Dwyer has reported in The Times, many of the targets — including environmental and church groups and even a satirical troupe called Billionaires for Bush — posed no danger or credible threat. Tracking them was, at the least, a waste of resources that could have been better used elsewhere...........