With court dates for all but a handful of Occupy Portland protesters finally set yesterday morning, much of the drama in the movement’s months-long court fight—at least in the pre-trial phase of proceedings—has finally been put to bed. But still up in the air? Whether the police will reveal if they were using informants or undercover officers during the protests. Although chances are we won’t find out anytime soon.
Defense attorneys for Occupy have been warring with the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office over police reports and documents. And they’ve gotten a number of them, including 134 pages of police documents the Mercury first reported on last month. These documents mention “an Occupy Portland source” the cops were using to gather intelligence on the movement. But whether this source was an informant, an undercover officer, or even a person at all and not a website is still unknown. Lawyers say it will probably stay that way.
In court yesterday, it still wasn’t confirmed whether the source was a person. Nonetheless Multnomah County Judge Cheryl Albrecht ruled that “source” would be revealed, if, and only if, the DA decides to ask that source to testify in the upcoming court dates.
“We’re all operating under the assumption that it is a person,” says Richard McBreen who argued the motions requesting the police documents. But it’s ultimately the DA’s decision to call the source or not, and McBreen says he suspects the DA won’t call the source to the stand, because doing so wouldn’t much help the government’s case. “So that pretty much ends our inquiry right there,” he says.
But you never know. The court dates during which the mystery source may or may not be revealed are listed below the cut.
And they are:
Sep. 5-6: trial for Chapman Square evictions
Sep. 11: trial for Main and 3rd
Sep. 26-27: trial for Jamison Square.
Oct. 2: trial for Col. Summers Park
Oct. 3-4: trial for Chase Bank
Oct. 8-9: trial for Elizabeth Nichols
Oct. 15: trial for F29 protests
Nov. 13-14: trial for May Day
Oh, informants. I’ve dealt with a lot of informants, including being asked to be an informant multiple times (by family, none-the-less), and to find out that a close “friend” was actually a sex offender in Florida and had been spying on my group for over 2 years. Other friends have been called informants falsely, and I’ve been called an informant many times. In addition, I’ve dealt with Portland informants, even outing one during an anti-police brutality march two years ago. In that case, it was an older brunette lady, about 5’2″, who was on a cell phone hands-free device calling back to police HQ with details about the march and descriptions of people. We reviewed pictures and found out she was indeed a police officer.
Informants are always people, and a lot of time, they’re real scum bags who have been pressured into their position in order to escape a horrible judicial punishment. Other times, they are people who volunteer in order to fulfill some crazy sense of vigilantism. Regardless of where the informant comes from, informants are prone to falsifying information in order to boost their self-importance or make themselves seem useful.
In this case, I’m willing to bet the “Occupy Portland” source was Dan Sandini – he was really active during Occupy Portland trying to do his “undercover” work exposing the stupid radicals. There’s no reason he wouldn’t pass information over to the cops, and undoubtedly, information was passed to him about rallies and tactics due to a lack of security culture. There were certainly elements of “right-wing” (for lack of a better word) people who thought it would be dandy to infiltrate Occupy for the point of bringing down the group, at least 5 of them, so even if it wasn’t Sandini, it was probably one of his associates (or several of them).
Also, it’s worth noting that the police did send cops to infiltrate Occupy’s General Assemblies before the whole fiasco at Chapman square. Those police officers were called-out after just a few meetings by members of the police accountability movement. I highly doubt the Portland Police kept a sworn officer embedded undercover for so long, especially when it is so easy to pressure someone into becoming an informant (just throw Measure 11 at ’em, and they’ll turn), and informants have near-zero cost for the police. Moreover, 90% of plane clothes “undercover” police officers are easily picked out of a crowd of leftists (just look for the people who are groomed), so they wouldn’t have lasted long.