The Urban League’s director, Nkenge Harmon Johnson, accused the department of conducting “digital surveillance” of Oregonians who invoked the racial justice movement’s name on social media messages.
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Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum wrote to local civil rights leaders including the president of the Urban League of Portland on Tuesday saying Oregon’s Criminal Justice Division, which she supervises, monitored the Twitter feeds of a number of residents.
“It is improper, and potentially unlawful, for the Oregon Department of Justice to conduct surveillance and investigations on an Oregonian merely for expressing a viewpoint, or for being a part of a social movement”, the letter stated.
Rosenblum said she already ordered a stop to the surveillance, placed the investigator on paid leave and appointed Carolyn Walker, a partner with the Portland law firm Stoel Rives LLP who focuses on employment law and labor relations, to investigate the incident.
A group of OR activists are outraged upon discovering that an investigator at the state’s Department of Justice had been targeting Black Lives Matter supporters on social media.
The letter called for an immediate halt to surveillance of the Black Lives Matter hashtag and related topics, and an independent audit of the Oregon DOJ.
Rosenblum said in her letter she shares Johnson’s concerns. Johnson was told the Criminal Justice Division was “using software to conduct ‘threat assessments, ‘” and that his profile turned up in the search.
The incident sent shock waves through the social justice community in a state that just months ago passed a new law requiring written policies prohibiting profiling by law enforcement, but Mat dos Santos, legal director for the ACLU of OR, said Rosenblum responded quickly and fairly.
“Under OR law, it is illegal for state law enforcement to gather information about people’s political, religious and social views, associations OR activities”, Rogers said. “In addition to calling for an investigation, we are preparing to file records requests we hope will help reveal the scope of the program and who else has been caught up in this dragnet”, the ACLU said in its release.
In an interview with The Oregonian, the attorney general defended the agency’s overall investigations and said their search for threats to the police was legitimate.
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“They were looking for anti-police sentiments – potential threats to police”, she said.
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Rosenblum was asked if she still has credibility to lead a statewide task force that will look at law enforcement profiling in Oregon. She announced the group’s members in August – including Kayse Jama, director of Portland’s Center for Intercultural Organizing and one of the advocates who signed the Urban League’s letter.
