Reportback of Santa Cruz Police Spying Policy Process : Indybay

Well, in short: It doesn't look good.

According to Mike Rotkin a new police policy on police surveillance will be published within a week or two. However, we are not terribly confident that it will represents a strong policy with all the needed checks and protections.

As a reminder, here were our bare minimums for a policy:

* Explicit protections for and definitions of First Amendment activities
* Limits on police powers regarding first amendment activities
* Steps the police have to take before considering monitoring a group
* Clear accountability and limited authorization
* Rules of conduct for undercover officers, infiltrators, and informants
* A strong auditing requirement

After the City Council's abrupt turnabout following the police auditor's pan of the internal police investigation.of police spying, the Council assuring us that they would work hand-in-hand with the ACLU to create a policy that protected citizen's first and fourth amendment rights, put limits on police powers and conduct, and provided adequate checks and audits.

But a month into the process, city managers were still stonewalling the process. After pressure by citizens, the process finally got going in fits and starts. Rather than use the draft policy provided by the ACLU of Northern California based on the San Francisco police first amendment policy, city managers based their first draft on the grossly inadequate policy hastily thrown together after the spying scandal.

There has been little back and forth with ACLU lawyers -- only one meeting and one opportunity for their review. Many of the ACLU changes were rejected without any attempt at explanation.

The most important failing of the proposed new policy is that, despite our repeated concerns, the policy only deals with undercover officers, not the greater issue of police monitoring of peaceful groups.

The proposed new policy suffers from many major inadequacies:

1. The policy only covers undercover activities
2. It contains no definition of 1st amendment activities
3. It contains no limits on when to monitor first amendment activities
4. The approval process is quite lax even allowing a deputy chief to make the decision
5. There are no limits on sharing information with outside agencies
6. The audit is weak -- facts of a violation of the policy are not made public in an audit

The policy makers have taken a few of the suggestions made by the ACLU, but have largely ignored the most important aspects of the ACLU advice.

Dick Wilson's letter says that the final policy will be published (but not yet approved) on July 5th. It seems that they will push a weak severely-limited half-baked policy through as soon as possible, claiming that they crafted a good policy hand-in-hand with the ACLU.

In the next few weeks, we'll be trying to meet with councilmembers, the local ACLU, the ACLU of Northern California (who's done the bulk of the work on this), and in general, raising a fuss that they are trying to bury the issue with a half-assed policy that still does not protect the rights of citizens.

We encourage you to convince City Council members that we will never accept police spying on our political and community groups and activities.

Rico

Links to photos related to the Santa Cruz Police Spying Scandal: http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/01/25/17981451.php