By Nick Pinto, June 9, 2020
The New York City Police Department may be violating a 35-year-old agreement meant to keep the police from investigating individual’s protected political speech, according to the lawyers who negotiated it.
In a letter sent to the police department’s legal counsel Monday, the lawyers raise concerns about recent reports that the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, along with the FBI, have been questioning protesters arrested on curfew violations about their political sympathies and affiliations, along with their social media behavior.
First reported by Univision and then by The Intercept last week, the accounts of political questioning now number more than a dozen, according to Martin Stolar, one of the authors of the letter. One of those accounts comes from Hannah Shaw, a former staffer in the Mayor’s Office, who detailed her encounter on the night of June 4th in a Twitter thread.
