NYPD Surveillance of 1960s Young Lords Activists Found

Police records were found Thursday of the New York City Police Department's monitoring of The Young Lords, a prominent activist group of Puerto Ricans in the city 50 years ago.

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The Young Lords was a social movement in the 1960s that pressured for reforms to improve the lives of residents of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx, and spread awareness about Puerto Rico’s culture and history.

College history professor Johanna Fernandez, who was the group’s first minister of education, had previously sued the police department to have those records released in 2014. Lawyers for New York City told a judge that the NYPD couldn’t find the decades-long records of surveillance, infiltration, and sabotage of political movements.

NYPD Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters Lawrence Byrne has said that "it’s not at all unusual or nefarious that physical documents or folders from the 1970s have disappeared," Byrne said. "But this goes back 45 years. It's unfortunate, we'll continue to search for it, but we haven't been able to locate it."

But this week, more than 500 boxes of documents and photographs were found by the city's Department of Records and Information Services in a Queens warehouse. The city will inventory the documents and are expected to release them to Professor Fernandez in the next months.

Fernandez considers this discovery a victory. "We've won an insight into the history of New York and the relationship of its people who want to see a more democratic society to the police," said Fernandez.

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"These records are important not only for what they tell us about the history of police violations of civil liberties—an issue that's still very relevant today—but ironically, because of the breadth of the surveillance, they also tell us something about life in New York and in America. They show us facets of New York history that we would not otherwise have had access to if the police hadn't been so obsessively surveilling people."

The Young Lords was a group founded by Puerto Ricans, modeled on the Black Panther Party. One of their first actions was to force the City of New York to increase garbage pickup in East Harlem in 1969. They also inspired activists around the country to occupy churches and hospitals in an attempt to open the spaces to community projects.

They called for self-determination for Puerto Ricans, community control of institutions and land, freedom for political prisoners, and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, Puerto Rico and other countries.

Under the terms of the Handschu Decree, a settlement that restricts the NYPD's ability to monitor or interfere with people based on their political or religious activity. Even so, the police force is not allowed to transfer or destroy the records of its previous political surveillance, without permission from the Municipal Archives.

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