Police admit to infiltrating Occupy Austin, may have acted as provocateurs

Police admit to infiltrating Occupy Austin, may have acted as provocateurs
(rawstory.com)

When the local offshoot of Occupy Wall Street began a five-month encampment in Austin, Texas last fall, the Austin police assigned at least three undercover officers to infiltrate the group and gather information on potentially illegal actions.

According to the Austin Statesman, court documents and interviews show that the infiltrators “camped with other participants in the movement, marched in rallies and attended strategy meetings.”

They may also have gone further, acting as provocateurs to encourage the use of lockboxes or “sleeping dragons” — lengths of PVC pipe into which protestors insert their arms to make it harder for police to remove them during a demonstration.

Source used in above article;
Austin police infiltrated Occupy Austin

The officers camped with other participants in the movement, marched in rallies and attended strategy meetings with Occupy Austin members.

The officers also may have crossed a fine line in undercover police work: They helped plan and manufacture devices - often called "lockboxes" - that allowed Occupy members to tie themselves together during a protest in Houston, according to interviews and court records. The use of the devices, which makes it harder for police to break up human chains, resulted in Houston police filing felony charges against seven protesters who had attempted to block a port entrance in Houston on Dec. 12.

The revelations include behind-the-scenes details of the lengths the Police Department went to in its efforts to monitor and control the Occupy Austin movement, which maintained a presence at City Hall for nearly five months. According to court documents, police brass up to and including Chief Art Acevedo approved the infiltration operation.

Police officials confirmed the use of undercover officers in the Occupy Austin movement but declined to comment on the officers' role in obtaining the lockbox.

One of the police infiltrators was a Detective Shannon Dowell, who, when subpoenaed by Harris County District Judge Joan Campbell for records and emails of his involvement in his role as 'agent provocateur', claimed the hard drive containing those records 'fell out of his pocket, and into a gutter'.

That's just plain dirty.
And it happened in my hometown.
I saw the headline on the way to work.
Front Page big story.
I'm glad the Austin American Stateman put it there.

Thanks as always Black Marketeer.

Also on a side note. The 6 of us leftist/liberals on ATS
apparently have been bashing the 52,000 right wing members
of ATS according to a new thread.
I guess we are effective.
See you in the trenches.

Go ahead and bash the # out of each other....till you get too tired of the fighting and try to work together for the improvements we need in the quality of our lives and recently lost freedoms......the whole left /right paradime is a construct of the elite for gods sake!

reply to post by Blackmarketeer


i think you'll find this happened in ALOT of Occupy encampments,
this behaviour was required to justify the evictions.

set up trap and claim illegal behaviour



xploder