In previous public incarnations, Stephen H. Sachs was something of a tough guy around here. He was U.S. attorney for Maryland, and then he was attorney general for Maryland. This is worth mentioning in the aftermath of Sachs’ announcement this week about violations of civil liberties by the State Police.
Much of Sachs’ history is about law and order. He is not one of these guys who hears sensitive civilians complain about nasty police and instinctively demonizes the folks in uniform. He can distinguish the good guys from the bad. He is smart, savvy, tough, and he has been around the block a few times.
And he makes no bones about it in the report he handed in on Wednesday: This time, the cops were out of line, and none of the grownups who should have known better did anything to stop them.
“Systemic obliviousness,” Sachs called it, when he handed over a report commissioned by Gov. Martin O’Malley.
Sachs was called in after complaints about police spying in 2005 and 2006 on groups who were doing nothing more than exercising their constitutional rights to free speech. One was protesting the death penalty; the other was protesting the war.
And it doesn’t matter if you agree with their points of view, or think they’re full of baloney. This is about the American system of democracy, in which we are allowed to express our feelings peacefully, in public, without the shadow of Big Brother lurking over us.
Were these folks a danger to anyone? As Sachs put it, in his 93-page report, “(State Police) surveillance revealed essentially no evidence of proposed criminal conduct or unlawful activity of any kind.”
In fact, the undercover trooper leading the surveillance, who attended dozens of meetings and protests and “took significant steps to build trust with the subjects of her surveillance,” noted repeatedly “the subjects’ stated intentions not to violate the law.”
And yet this covert activity paid by our tax dollars continued for 14 months.
Well, who cares?
With the U.S. economy coming apart at the seams, and the Democrats and Republicans looking for somebody to blame instead of some kind of solutions, who cares about a sidelight issue like civil liberties?
With mortgage foreclosures increasing by the tens of thousands, and small businesses sweating over credit, and Wall Street coming undone, who cares about out-of-control police putting a chill on free speech?
All of us should, that’s who.
“The surveillance undertaken here,” said the report to O’Malley, “is inconsistent with an overarching value in our democratic society — the free and unfettered debate of important public questions. Such police conduct ought to be prohibited as a matter of public policy.”
That sounds a little dry and legalistic, so let’s let Sachs put it into more conventional language. Those people who attended meetings, and later learned they had been infiltrated by police, “felt stigmatized as criminals and ‘enemies of the state,’ ” Sachs said.
Some told Sachs that it now takes “an act of courage” to take “an oppositional stance.”
That’s not the way we’re supposed to do things in America. We’re supposed to express ourselves openly, without ducking behind the anonymity of the radio talk show or the fractious Internet dialogue.
Do the police need to keep an eye on potential trouble? Of course. But, as Sachs said, “An indication of pre-existing or ongoing criminal activity … is almost always a predicate for such covert police activity.”
Without that, you don’t send in the cops to spy on peaceful political protest. In the case of the anti-war protesters — some of them nuns, theirs was the argument that insisted the U.S. had gone to war against a country that had not invaded us, and had no weapons of mass destruction, and were not a threat to us — an argument that too many members of the Congress, and the press, were too intimidated to make publicly when there was still time.
The State Police officially designated these protesters with that type of thinking as possible “terrorists.”
In his report to O’Malley, Sachs notes that no State Police seriously considered these protesters to be terrorists “under any reasonable and accepted definition of that word,” but none of the officers “seemed to consider that a government agency’s decision to label someone a terrorist” – and then shared that information with other agencies – “could cause serious harm to that person’s reputation, career, and standing in the community.”
At such times, you expect one of the grownups in the police, or state government, to step in. But nobody did. And that’s where Sachs used the term “institutional obliviousness.”
