Officers tracked social media posts about racial justice protests with no evidence of violence, threatening First Amendment rights.
www.brennancenter.org
... Notably, the MPD officer who
oversaw the department’s intelligence branch at the time and was heavily involved in these activities was
suspended and subsequently
indicted in part for allegedly providing Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, with information about police investigations into the group. The officer’s connection to the Proud Boys only adds to concerns that bias rather than public safety was driving the department’s monitoring of racial justice protests.
Federal officials also disseminated false information about threats posed by protesters. Two reports from June 2020 — assembled by the
Department of Transportation and the
Naval Criminal Investigation Service and shared with the MPD and other law enforcement agencies — referenced “prestaging of bricks, rocks, sledge hammers [
sic], . . . and other weapons at protest locations” within a section listing tactics, techniques, and procedures that the FBI’s National Joint Terrorism Task Force determined were used by racial justice protesters. Claims like these from the federal government, which were
sourced from social media, had already been
repeatedly debunked by
reporting.
This information sharing about racial justice protests continued into 2021, with MPD and federal officials
sharing social media posts about vigils marking Breonna Taylor’s murder, insinuating that other actors attending the vigils could commit acts of violence with no apparent evidence to substantiate that conclusion.
As it stands, the MPD and the federal government lack adequate policies to rein in online surveillance. ...