NYPD Stalks Two Police Reform Activists, Posts "Wanted"-Like Posters

From Alternet: Police Reform Activists Targeted by NYPD Won't Give In to Threats: Two activists found a surprise in their local police precinct--a poster with their mug shots, calling them "professional agitators" and providing police with their address.

By Kristen Gwynne, July 7, 2012
Two West Harlem residents, Christina Gonzalez, 25, and Matthew Swaye, 35, ran into a surprise when they showed up for a community meeting at their local NYPD precinct last week. There, on the wall of the 30th Precinct, were their mug shots—only they weren’t wanted for any crime.

Christina Gonzalez and Matthew Swaye are police reform activists who regularly film police interactions in their neighborhood, especially to record the NYPD’s controversial Stop and Frisk policy. Although filming police is completely legal, the poster (which was full of misspellings, I might add), advised officers to "be aware" that these "professional agitators" not only film police "performing routine stops," but also" post the videos on YouTube.
"Subjects purpose is to portray officers in a negative way and to [sic] deter officers from conducting their [sic] responsibilities." the warning from Sergeant Nicholson reads. "Do not feed into above subjects’ propaganda."
Gonzalez says it is the NYPD spreading propaganda and that the poster is an obvious tactic to criminalize, intimidate and target her. Since Gonzalez became involved with Occupy and the Stop-and-Frisk movement this fall, police have given her plenty of reasons to look over her shoulder, including calling her out by name and address, erecting a watchtower on her corner and aggressively arresting her sister in front of Gonzalez.
Of course, this is not the first time the NYPD or other police departments have targeted activists. The New York police have a history of infiltrating and intimidating activists, particularly during the Black Panther movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
For activists like Gonzalez, Stop-and-Frisk, a racial profiling tactic, is not only a violation of one’s constitutional rights, it is also part of the NYPD’s larger apparatus of racial oppression. Police stop more than 700,000 people per year, almost 90 percent of whom are young Black and Latino men. The best defense against the illegal searches, which occur during about 50% of stops, has proven to be video, and the ACLU recently launched an app to combat and document unconstitutional stops. But while the movement relies on cameras to expose Stop-and-Frisk, the NYPD targets filmers like Gonzalez with the same type of surveillance and repression police have used against activists in the past.

For the rest of Kristen Gwynne's article, click to the original page at AlterNet.