“I feel like I’m having a nightmare. She said. “Honestly, I feel pretty humiliated by it, because all these people are trying to speak and they’re drowning.” Ruddock said, “It was grotesque and clearly designed to make me know they were watching me.” CRG identified her, found a video of her music, and “blown my music all over my neighborhood”.
“I felt like I was going to have a panic attack,” she said. Ruddock tried to explain the situation to other activists—many of whom were unaware that she was a musician, much less that it was her song—and quickly left the rally. She doesn’t know why she was sneaked out but suspects it’s because she’s often in the area around Seven Points with her camera in hand, taking pictures of the unrest in her neighborhood. that.
CRG also played audio recordings of Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches to drown out the chants at the rallies, according to three activists we spoke with. According to Rick Hodsdon, president of the Minnesota Council of Private Detectives and Protective Agent Services, there are no formal complaints against CRG. A complaint will trigger an agency investigation and may result in the revocation of the confidentiality license and potentially criminal charges.
Check out the “information report”
What Ruddock didn’t know was that the CRG also operated as a secret intelligence team for the Minneapolis Police Department. According to emails obtained by MIT Technology Review, CRG has surveyed activists in Uptown and often reports to the department. One such 17-page report, titled “Initial Threat Assessment,” described the organizers as part of “antifa,” a term often used in far-right discourse to exaggerate the threat by radical left-wing political groups. Ruddock was identified as one of the leaders of antifa, a claim she called “ridiculous” and said she had “never affiliated with antifa or any extremist group.”
(MIT Technology Review does not publish the reports we have reviewed because of the risk of spreading misinformation and potentially defamation.)
Some of the reports included information sourced from the internet and social media, as well as photographs of Ruddock and other activists. In an exchange between Seven Points and MPD, Seven Points mentioned CRG’s “camera they monitor”. Some of the information was taken from the AntifaWatch website, including photographs of Ruddock and other activists from a mass arrest during a protest on June 5, 2021, two days after Smith’s death. The 2021 charges against Ruddock have since been dropped because of “insufficient evidence” and there is still pending litigation against the city surrounding the arrest.
AntifaWatch says it “exists to record and monitor Antifa and Far Left.” The website publishes photos of nearly 7,000 people accused of engaging in anti-French-related or anti-French activities, along with other information about them. Its information is pulled from news reports, social media posts, and submissions that anyone can make. The website states that “for a Report to be approved, it must have a reasonable level of evidence (News, arrest photos, riot images, self-identification, etc.).” MIT Technology Review attempted to verify some of the entries on the website and found the score was incorrect. For example, the daughter of former New York City mayor Bill de Blasio was listed under arrest at the Black Lives Matter protest on May 31, 2020, in New York City. AntifaWatch describes Chiara de Blasio as “rioting with antifa”, despite the police report does not indicate that de Blasio was involved in the riots.
The website states that “a report on AntifaWatch is in no way prescriptive or constitutive of an accusation of a person participating in Antifa, terrorism or terrorist groups” and says it is “not a scam website.” island”, although it clearly tries to identify and disclose personal information about people. Its posts often contain large parsed language. It also features facial recognition: anyone can upload an image and the site will return potential matches from its AntifaWatch database.
