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Oregon’s top civil rights lawyer alleges racial profiling

By Associated Press
Published: October 26, 2016, 9:24pm

PORTLAND — Oregon’s top civil rights lawyer filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against his boss and others in the state Department of Justice after learning that his colleagues surveilled his Twitter account because one of his posts turned up in a search for the Black Lives Matter hashtag.

Erious Johnson, the department’s civil rights director, said in the lawsuit that the January 2015 tweet included a picture of the logo of the hip-hop group Public Enemy. The logo depicts a black man in silhouette in the crosshairs of a gun, but a state investigator mistook the black man for a police officer and wrote to his supervisor that Johnson could be a threat to police, court papers say.

That mistake led Johnson’s colleagues within the department to compile a report on him and comb through his Twitter posts — all without his knowledge and while he continued to work alongside them, according to the lawsuit filed in Eugene, Ore.

In a separate civil rights complaint filed with the state earlier this year, Johnson said the surveillance wouldn’t have happened “had I not been a black male” and “had my Twitter activity involved matters other than the lives and experiences of black people.”

An outside investigation ordered by state Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum earlier this year found that the surveillance activity violated state law and department policies. Rosenblum is running for re-election on Nov. 8.

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