theatlantic | When last in power, Bloomberg presided over the mistreatment of
Democrats who sought to protest Republicans, violating the
constitutional rights of hundreds of dissenters.
At the time, Bloomberg was a first-term Republican mayor of New York.
The GOP hoped that holding the 2004 Republican National Convention in
the city, a site of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, would help reelect
George W. Bush. Protests in deep-blue New York were inevitable.
Bloomberg had months to prepare.
And he did. Nearly as soon as the convention location was announced,
the police department that Bloomberg presided over launched a secret
mission to infiltrate protest groups, The New York Times later reported:
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.
From Albuquerque to Montreal, San Francisco to Miami, undercover New York police officers attended meetings of political groups, posing as sympathizers or fellow activists, the records show.
Some people planned to break the law during protests,
but in hundreds of secret reports, the NYPD “chronicled the views and
plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law,”
including “members of street theater companies, church groups and
antiwar organizations, as well as environmentalists and people opposed
to the death penalty, globalization and other government policies.”
Spying was just the beginning.
