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Records detailing the New York Police Department’s surveillance of various activist groups during late 1950s up through the 1970s, which the department has long claimed to have lost track of, were discovered in a Queens warehouse during a routine inspection on Thursday.

The documents were long believed to be somewhere in Police Headquarters. But they were not, they were in some random room in Queens. Finally the NYPD can breath a sigh of relief that their lost files have been located—they probably never thought this day would come.

In the 1960s, what is now the NYPD’s Intelligence Division was called the Special Services Division, but most people just referred to it as the “Red Squad,” because it fought Communists. For 30 years, the files gathered under the Red Squad, which were supposed to be a matter of public record, were so disorganized that no one could study them. Eventually they disappeared altogether.

NY1 News reported there could be upwards of 500 boxes in the warehouse. According to a handy index, the boxes contain extensive files on the Nation of Islam, the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords.

New York City’s Records Department released a statement saying it is developing the parameters for public access to the files, but have yet to provide more details on the process.

As the New York Times notes, the records can be placed on a historical continuum of police surveillance of New York City communities that has lasted to the present day:

The files are bound to resonate not only among those subjected to surveillance decades ago, but also among current activists and organizations that have faced police surveillance and infiltration in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, the Police Department bolstered its spying capabilities; Muslim organizations and mosques in particular reported extensive surveillance. Others, including activists associated with causes ranging from the antiwar movement to cycling, have also found themselves watched.

Civil rights attorney Gideon Oliver told NY1 News, “This is going to be the most complete record of police files, of surveillance of political activists, I would venture to say in existence.”

Baruch College Professor Johanna Fernandez battled the NYPD in and out of court for a decade trying to obtain their records detailing surveillance of the Young Lords. One judge ended up throwing out a lawsuit Fernandez filed after finding that the NYPD had sufficiently proven they did not know where the documents were.

That’s probably because the documents were nowhere near where they should have been, making them difficult to find.