Undercover Austin police officers aided Houston Occupy protesters

Wow, Austin must be a quite little town, with nothing going on, if the cops have to go this far to drum up some business.

The bushy-haired, bearded protester called "Butch" didn't say much during the Occupy Austin planning sessions. Instead, he took members aside and pressed them to turn to more aggressive tactics, not a surprising strategy for a national grass-roots movement that has spawned hundreds of arrests.

It turns out that Butch, however, wasn't some wild-eyed activist intent on bringing down the top "1 percent." He was actually Austin police detective Shannon Dowell, working undercover with two other officers who had
infiltrated the Austin branch of the protest movement.

That's entrapment. Wouldn't you would think he and the other 2 should have to go to jail for this?
Lol and the kicker is he busted himself by bragging about it at a party

State District Judge Joan Campbell lectured prosecutors during a Wednesday pretrial hearing for Garza about not disclosing the police officers' roles in the case and is now reviewing a large stack of Austin police emails delivered to her court by an Austin assistant city attorney.

Garza and the six other protesters at the December demonstration used "lock boxes," also called "dragon sleeves," to lock their arms inside tubes made of PVC pipe, a tactic designed to prevent authorities from easily removing the restraints while clearing protesters. Detective Dowell purchased and constructed the lock boxes, prosecutors now acknowledge.

'Clearly Brady material'

Police admit to infiltrating Occupy Austin, may have acted as provocateurs

Set up,
Well I suppose they have to fill up all of those private (for profit) prisons somehow.

When the local offshoot of Occupy Wall Street began a five-month encampment in Austin, Texas last fall, the Austin police assigned at least three undercover officers to infiltrate the group and gather information on potentially illegal actions.

According to the Austin Statesman, court documents and interviews show that the infiltrators “camped with other participants in the movement, marched in rallies and attended strategy meetings.”

They may also have gone further, acting as provocateurs to encourage the use of lockboxes or “sleeping dragons” — lengths of PVC pipe into which protestors insert their arms to make it harder for police to remove them during a demonstration.

Seven protestors who used the devices while blocking a port entrance in Houston last December 12 have been charged with a felony and face jail terms of from two to ten years under what the Statesman calls “an obscure statute that prohibits using a device that is manufactured or adapted for the purpose of participating in a crime.”

The question of the lockboxes came up during