Who is running the NYPD?
This is pretty obnoxious:
For at least a year before the 2004 Republican National Convention, teams of undercover New York City police officers traveled to cities across the country, Canada and Europe to conduct covert observations of people who planned to protest at the convention, according to police records and interviews.
Aside from the civil liberties, what a fucking waste of tax dollars. Undercover officers all over the country? What the hell did they think was going to happen? What were they going to do with this information? Did they really think that there were going to uncover a secret plan of some kind?
March 25th, 2007 19:46
They wanted to prevent people from expressing themselves in democratic political ways. The neoliberal police state entails a vision of political rationality that is diametrically opposed to politics as direct participation. Neoliberalism seeks to replace liberal democratic politics with governance judged by criteria of productivity and profitability - business norms supplant juridical norms (e.g., George Bush’s remark after the 2004 election: “I earned political capital in [this] campaign and now I intend to spend it”). On this neoliberal political reasoning, it is more cost-efficient for the government to send out the police to disrupt protestors organization strategies before they get to the protest (if they waited until the protest, then they’d have to potentially lose “political capital” by committing nationally-televised violence against the protestors). Not only is this a clear repression of democratic participation, but also it is a clear reduction of the liberal rule of law to a matter of tactics. (And an obvious violation of the separation of powers - the police should be part of the executive branch, but they usurp the powers of the judicial branch when they decide before the protests that the protestors are already guilty of some conspiracy. But such blurring of principled boundaries is the price we are paying for believing that this “war of terror” is a perpetual crisis that justifies such decisionism.)