NEW YORK — The FBI is investigating whether New York Police Department officers violated the civil rights of protesters at the 2004 Republican National Convention, according to a letter sent by the bureau to a civil rights group.
In the letter, dated May 11 but received May 16, the FBI asked the New York Civil Liberties Union for assistance, saying it believed some of the organization's lawyers had represented people arrested at the convention.
The FBI said it was trying to identify and locate people who faced charges that were dismissed based on contradictory videotape evidence. It cited in particular the arrest of Dennis Kyne, saying the case was tossed after a videotape contradicted the arresting officer's account of what happened.
NYCLU associate legal director Chris Dunn said the FBI request was unprecedented.
"The disclosure of this investigation is a bombshell," he said.
Dunn said the organization was prepared to provide the FBI with multiple videos proving police failed to properly warn hundreds of protesters before they were arrested.
More than 1,800 people were arrested at the four-day convention in the summer of 2004 at Madison Square Garden, where President Bush accepted his party's nomination for a second term in office.
As they were released from custody, scores complained they were swept up without warning on mostly misdemeanor charges like obstructing governmental administration. Some insisted they were spectators or passers-by.
As many as 10,000 officers from the 36,500-member department, the nation's largest, were deployed to protect the city from terrorism threats and to cope with tens of thousands of demonstrators outside the convention.
At the time, the police department said that it had prepared for more than a year to respond to protest and terror threats and that millions of dollars were spent training officers how to handle chemical, biological or radiological attacks.
In a May 10 letter to the chairman of the Civilian Complaint Review Board, an independent mayoral agency empowered to investigate complaints against police and make nonbinding recommendations, police Commissioner Raymond Kelly defended the department's policing of the convention and demonstrations. Kelly called it one of the department's "finest hours."
The board chairman, Hector Gonzalez, had recommended in a letter to Kelly that deputy chiefs be trained to make sure protesters get adequate notice of what behavior will lead to arrest. With different tactics, the department "may possibly have avoided arresting a large number of individuals," Gonzalez said.
The police commissioner, though, said the board should consider "the realities of policing large demonstrations" and the difficulty of notifying each member of a crowd of the threat of arrest.
Dunn said on May 17 that he welcomed the FBI probe in part because evidence the NYCLU had collected showed that what happened in two locations where a third of all protest arrests occurred was "very different" from what police said happened.
"Since the day the convention ended, Commissioner Kelly has dismissed complaints that hundreds of protesters were unlawfully arrested," Dunn said. "We don't think he'll be able to dismiss the FBI."
In a May 15 letter to Kelly, Dunn noted that the Manhattan district attorney's office dismissed charges against all 227 people arrested at one location after reviewing videotape showing that everyone on the block was surrounded and arrested within one minute of a deputy chief's shouting an order to disperse.
FBI spokesman James Margolin said on May 17 that he could not comment on the bureau's role except to say he was not refuting that the letter was sent to the NYCLU.
Police department spokesman Paul Browne said the department's internal affairs bureau had been working with the FBI and the Manhattan district attorney's office since September, when it began looking into the Kyne arrest.