Undercover officers in the New York Police Department infiltrated small groups of Black Lives Matter activists and gained access to their text messages, according to newly released NYPD documents obtained by the Guardian. The documents show undercover cops were able to pose as protesters even within small, select groups, thus making them privy to extensive details about protesters’ whereabouts and plans.
In one email, an official highlighted that an undercover cop was embedded within a group of seven protesters on their way to New York’s Grand Central Station. In others, officers shared the locations of individual protesters at certain times. The NYPD did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment or interview.
Some of the emails even included pictures of organizers’ private planning-group text exchanges. The information uncovered in the documents, as The Guardian notes, suggests that the officials were either trusted enough to be able to take a picture of the activists’ phones, or were part of the group texts themselves, and that has now raised further questions about NYPD compliance to city rules.
“That text loop was definitely just for organizers; I don’t know how that got out,” Elsa Waithe, a Black Lives Matter organizer, told the Guardian. “Someone had to have told someone how to get on it, probably trusting someone they had seen a few times, in good faith. We clearly compromised ourselves.”
