According to new documents obtained by The Guardian, undercover NYPD officers may have posed as Black Lives Matter protesters in infiltrating the protests and reading text messages in the group.
In 2014 and 2015, when groups were protesting the death of Eric Garner, NYPD officers were, according to documents obtained through a freedom of information lawsuit, watching groups as small as seven people and monitoring text messages to determine when the next meetups would take place.
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“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.”
Emails also showed pictures of crowd sizes at protests as undercover officers photographed the protests and made note of leaders.
The NYPD has not yet commented on this report.