Police risk their lives every day to protect our homes and our families. They are the good guys. Or they are supposed to be.
Until they cross the line. The Maryland State Police spent 14 months crossing that line by spying on anti-war and anti-death penalty groups.
Recommended Stories
This isn’t like the old Soviet Union or Iraq under Saddam Hussein. In those countries, spying was followed by arrest, imprisonment and often death. Here, it’s followed by embarrassing revelations that our State Police acted more like Keystone Kops than the KGB.
According to a just-released report, “The state trooper assigned to lead this surveillance was then a member of MSP’s Homeland Security and Intelligence Division (HSID) and acted at the direction of HSID commanders.” Homeland Security officials were worried about dangerous anti-death penalty protests.
So worried, in fact, that they paid a trooper to attend more than two dozen protests and meetings — all with the money the state squeezes out of you each payday. The trooper insinuated herself into these groups, building trust and writing reports about laughably mundane events. (Perhaps she would like a part-time job covering zoning hearings.)
What did she find? Absolutely nothing. After 24 meetings and events, she found less criminal behavior than any night on the Beltway. Her 14 months of effort uncovered only one discussion of any possible crime — trespassing. According to the report, “the trooper noted repeatedly the subjects’ stated intentions not to violate the law during their planned protests.”
Activists commented on how they felt they were under surveillance from several police and government organizations. It would appear paranoid — if you weren’t reading about those fears in a State Police report.
The investigations were so wrongheaded, former Attorney General Stephen H. Sachs just concluded a detailed investigation. His assessment was that those involved were less thought police and more just thoughtless police — ignoring the ramifications of labeling this a “terrorist” inquiry.
Even more disturbing is that Sachs found no one — “troopers, civilian intelligence analysts, supervisors, or the then-Superintendent — gave any thought whatever to the possibility that its covert surveillance of these groups, though not intended to suppress their rights of expression and association, was in any way inappropriate.” Earlier this week former Superintendent Tim Hutchins explained the situation this way to state senators: “We have to maintain situational awareness.”
To be that clueless takes work. To be that clueless with police powers is truly scary.
The American Civil Liberties Union is seeking information on more groups, so maybe this is just the beginning. Either way, it should also be the ending — for someone’s career. Officers involved in this police fiasco should be fired. We paid for this gross violation of freedom. Now it’s their turn.
Ironically, all this occurred in Maryland, where police try to discourage the “stop snitching” culture of the streets. Who knew we needed to get that culture off the streets and into the State Police barracks?
