During a city council meeting last week that dealt, in part, with budget cuts set to affect the DA’s office, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said a very curious thing.

In a bold effort to protect his budget–perhaps even increase it– Morgenthau let slip that the NYPD plans to arrest up to 1000 street protestors a day during this summer’s Republican National Convention. That’s about three times the number of actual criminal arrests the NYPD would normally make on a daily basis. With that tidal wave of arrests coming, of course, Morgenthau’s office will need to hire more prosecutors. He pointed out that his numbers came from Ray Kelly, and that state court officials have already arranged to triple the number of arraignment courts in operation during the convention in order to handle all those extra arraignments.

A wee bit disturbing, no?

Planning security for such an event is one thing, and is to be expected. But to have someone like Morgenthau or Ray Kelly come out and say, essentially, that they intend to arrest 1000 people a day because they don’t like the Republican party? That goes way beyond taking steps to "protect us" from "terrorists."

Morgenthau’s announcement is just one more bit of evidence that something has gone very, very wrong here. We’d like to say our backs were turned when it happened, but that just doesn’t ring true anymore.