Looking over my news feed, I came across a story about how Austin PD withheld Brady material. According to the blog, Grits For Breakfast, APD infiltrated the #occupyaustin movement via undercover agents. Almost all police departments can and do regularly perform undercover operations to confirm illegal activity and make arrests accordingly. However, details from witness accounts suggest that these officers were not performing the actions of internal observers, but opportunistic perpetrators instead.
You see, normally, when protesters to their thing, the local government does whatever it can to "legally" remove the protesters. When protesters decide not to be moved, they end up violating the law, get arrested, get charged with a misdemeanor slap on the wrist, and generally end up doing what they should have done in the first place: protest, but protest with accordance to the rules. However, what Grits reports is that the officers may have gone for a little extra credit on this assignment. According to witnesses, the undercover officer purchased and built "dragon sleeves" for protesters to make it harder to be removed. This changes the charge from a misdemeanor to a felony under Texas law, as they were "in possession of a criminal instrument during the protest."
Upon being subpoenaed for records of his participation in this matter, Officer Shannon Dowell showed up to the court with only "a
little note that I made here regarding [an Occupy] meeting." Somehow he had not only lost all text and email correspondence on his computer, but lost his thumb drive full of photos on the way to the courthouse that morning.
Needless to say, Judge Joan Campbell was not impressed. She ordered the prosecution to hand over the identities of the remaining undercover officers as witnesses.
Little worth reporting about this case has transpired since the publishing of the Grits article, however I think that this article is worth mentioning because of the non-partisan and factual emphasis that the writer utilizes. Despite being mostly fact-based, the Grits author presents the information in a way that makes it easy to enticing to read. In fact, every article that I have read on the Grits For Breakfast blog has been high on factual integrity.
