The city’s release of 330 pages of previously sealed documents from the federal court case on police surveillance clearly shows police have kept tabs on protesters.

The ultimate issue in the case pursued by the American Civil Liberties Union is whether police violated a 1978 federal court consent decree forbidding “political surveillance.”

The police department’s “domestic intelligence unit” of the era had a long, still largely hidden history of not only watching but infiltrating local protest groups of the 1960s and 1970s.

Then, as now, police claimed some surveillance was necessary to balance constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech and expression with the basic mission of public safety.

The problem then was that police amassed a lot of information to determine who they saw as a danger and who wasn’t – whose protest was a legitimate expression of dissent and who needed to be watched before and after.

Law enforcement gets a lot of rumors and reports, many of which turn out to be false or never come to pass. They can’t completely discount them because their job is public safety.

The reaction of police then and now to that balance demonstrates why civilian oversight of police in these matters is crucial. Leaving this to police is not an option.

We believe the police response over the last two years has crossed the line as a new wave of activism has turned out hundreds and thousands of people in the streets of our city.

Police Director Michael Rallings testified in an April deposition that he ordered a spreadsheet on protests to track police overtime as the number of protests grew in the summer of 2016, including the march that shut down the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.

From that, the effort grew into gathering information about some protesters and trying to anticipate where unpermitted protests might pop up.

Police brass insist they used open source social media posts to track what might happen and who was planning it.

Police decided that was the justification they needed to start connecting who those protesters knew or associated with.

And that’s how you wind up with a reading recommendation of a nearly 50-year-old book showing up in a police Power Point presentation along with charts showing known associates of some protesters, even a Facebook friends list.

Rallings noted that he saw gang members on the bridge. Members of the city’s various street gangs were openly a part of the march

There were a lot of Memphians in the streets that day two years ago. There were young professionals, office workers, construction workers, fraternity and sorority members, grandparents and parents – those with criminal records, those with no criminal records.

Police don’t decide whose protest is valid and whose is not. They don’t get to pick who they think has a right to march and protest. And while participating in a protest comes with some attention, it should not mean the police department keeps watching when the protest ends.