Greensboro, North Carolina has a rather shaky history when it comes to police-protester relations. The cops apparently couldn’t decide who they disliked more in 1979 when a Kluxer/NeoNazi group went up against the Communist Worker’s Party and stood back to observe while nine people were shot dead. But oh they’re right on the ball when Dear Leader’s tranquil soul might be disturbed:

…members [of The World Can’t Wait NC] clashed with police during a downtown protest against President Bush in January. Seven protesters were arrested at the rally after they confronted plainclothes officers with the Criminal Intelligence Division who were photographing protesters and the license plates of cars. The protesters faced a variety of charges, including assaulting a public official, inciting a riot and carrying a concealed weapon.

So the ACLU has filed suit to find out just exactly what written guidelines are in place telling cops what to do in such circumstances. Turns out….there aren’t any. The policy, it appears, is Make Shit Up As You Go Along.

The Greensboro News-Record is doing a pretty decent job of covering this situation, as best I can tell from this distance. In response to the ACLU’s suit,

Interim police Chief Tim Bellamy …said: “We don’t have any written rules about surveillance. It’s decided on a case-by-case basis. If we feel like there’s a potential for danger or it’s going to be a very large group, we’ll have people out there.”

The department monitors groups and individuals who aren’t the targets of active criminal investigations if they believe the information could be useful later, Bellamy said. The department will share the information with other law enforcement organizations if asked, he said.

Why does this not fill me with reassurance, and happy pink bunny feelings of being protected?

Nor am I the only one unimpressed by this non-policy, or afflicted with tinfoil-hattism to such a degree as to entertain just a trickle of a tendril of a thought that the thumb of Street Justice might lean a little heavier on the side of the scale favoring what in my younger days was called The Establishment:

“I’m not anti-police, and I appreciate them coming to demonstrations to make sure everything is safe,” said Bruce Burch, a member of The World Can’t Wait and one of the protesters named in the ACLU request. “But I think there’s a difference between that and their being there for another purpose — to do surveillance on people who are exercising their First Amendment rights.”

Burch said the department should establish guidelines for surveillance to help avoid abuses of the tactic. With the ongoing national debate on domestic surveillance and recent state and federal investigations of the department, Burch said he wants to be sure any surveillance is based on a credible threat of danger — not on ideology.

So next time Dear Leaders or one of his upper minions comes to Greensboro, let’s say some moron, or one of those unreconstructed Kluxers (but I repeat myself) throws a firecracker in the crowd. Whose names, faces, license plate numbers, etc., are going to be the first ones pulled when the order goes out to “round up the usual suspects”? Why the ones already in the “Protesters” file, natch.

If you’re due to re-up your ACLU membership anytime soon, you might want to include a mention of this suit with your check, with an “attaboy!” or other term of commendation of your possibly more elegant choosing.

Oh, and why this little story from a little town in which you most likely don’t live might matter to you anyway, see this item in today’s LA Times. From our good friend Pooty-Poot’s New Modern Free Russia:

The ranks of the “insane” over the last three years have included women divorcing powerful husbands, people locked in business disputes and citizens, like Imendayev, who have become a nuisance by filing numerous legal challenges against local politicians and judges or lodging appeals against government agencies to uphold their rights.

Unlike during the Soviet era, when an all-powerful KGB locked up those who challenged the foundations of the regime, there appears to be no systematic federal repression of dissidents through the mental health system. Instead, citizens today fall victim to regional authorities in localized disputes, or to private antagonists who have the means, as so many in Russia do, to bribe their way through the courts.

“People are being institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals unlawfully, and on the most diverse grounds,” the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights concluded in a 2004 study. “Not only did punitive psychiatry exist during the Soviet period, and not only does it exist today, unfortunately there are no grounds to hope that it will disappear in the foreseeable future.”

But for Chrissakes don’t get depressed about this!

In another case here in Cheboksary, a four-term opposition deputy in the regional parliament, Igor Molyakov, spent six months in jail on libel charges in 2004. While incarcerated, he was ordered committed for psychiatric hospitalization after a judge agreed with government lawyers that Molyakov’s repeated writings about corruption among local authorities reflected an outlook so “somber” that it might constitute a “mental disorder.”

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