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Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America. - book reviews
Monthly Review, Nov, 1991 by Ellen W. Schrecker

Perhaps the central irony in Frank Donner's new book about the political repression practiced by urban police forces revolves around the word "terrorism." Touting their activities as necessary to protect American society against the vaguely defined forces of terrorism, the nation's red squads have routinely practiced that which they supposedly guard us against. They use violence and intimidation against their political enemies with a ruthlessness and flagrant disregard of legality that is all the more terrifying because it is done in the name of the law.

Whether describing Chicago's Subversive Activities Unit, Los Angeles' Public Disorder Intelligence Division, New York's Bureau of Special Services, or their counterparts in other cities, Donner offers a numbing litany of beatings, buggings, and burglaries--all in the name of law and order. The information that Donner has compiled here will force us to grant much more credit to the red squads in escalating the turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s. At the same time, it offers little hope, given the ideological fervor and secrecy that characterize these outfits, that the illegal surveillance and harassment of dissenters has come to an end.

Local police have long been involved in political repression. Throughout the late nineteenth century, when the primary threat to the status quo came from organized labor, police officials often worked directly for big business, taking fees for breaking up picket lines or investigating union organizers. The local red squad leaders soon learned to solicit trade by exaggerating the supposed dangers they were facing. In the process, they adopted a countersubversive ideology that viewed all protest activities as the product of outside agitators.

This ideology was to remain a constant, even as local police departments professionalized their operations and, in the wake of the post-First World War red scare, came to rely much more heavily on surveillance than on disruption. They concentrated on collecting information and keeping files. They also updated their targets, replacing the labor organizers and foreign-born anarchists of the previous century with more modern reds. The conspiratorial, Manichean world-view that red squad members held transformed most situations they encountered into "us" versus "them" confrontations in which, as Los Angeles police chief William Parker indefatigably reiterated, they were "the thin blue line" preserving American freedom from the Communist menance. In many cases, the cops' outside affiliations reinforced their political biases. About a hundred Detroit policemen belonged to the Black Legion, a Ku Klux Klan-type organization, in the 1930s and 1940s. Two thousand of Los Angeles' finest were members of the right-wing John Birch Society in the early 1960s.

More importantly, however, the red squads were themselves right-wing organizations that were an important part of the broader national countersubversive network. Intelligence units often worked closely with right-wing extremists. In Bull Conner's Birmingham during the 1960s, the head of the red squad was in charge of coordinating activities with the KKK. In the late 1960s, Chicago police protected the far-right Legion of Justice when it burglarized the offices of left-wing organizations and set off stink bombs at performances of the Soviet ballet and Chinese acrobats. From the 1930s on, selected journalistic and congressional investigating committees like HUAC provided outlets for the public release of information from red squad files.

There was collaboration with more mainstream groups as well. The Detroit red squad and the Chrysler Corporation shared information on individual activists, as did the New York Police Department and the New York Bar Association. And of course, local politicians often used their red squads to control political enemies, that is, when they didn't, like Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, set up their own covert action teams.

Ties with other police forces and federal agencies were also close. The FBI shared its informers and technology with local police, who in turn conducted wiretaps for the bureau. The CIA also aided the red squads, offering, among other types of assistance, a ten-day course in surreptitious entry to local personnel, apparently in return for cooperating with, or at least overlooking, the CIA's own illegal activities. The establishment in 1965 of the Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit (LEIU) institutionalized the informal networking between police departments. Ostensibly a private organization (and therefore exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests), the LEIU, which received all its funding from public sources, served as a conduit for information and technology and may also have helped local departments evade restrictions on their intelligence gathering. The LEIU's worldview, as Donner has reconstructed it from the speeches and panels at its annual conferences, was very much that of the garden-variety right.

The red squads' activities expanded enormously in the 1960s. Though the FBI had dominated the political intelligence field during the previous decade, J. Edgar Hoover's personal obsession with the Communist menace gave local red squads the opportunity to concentrate on student protestors and black militants. They did so with gusto, recognizing the possibilities that the heightened political unrest of the period offered for both individual and institutional advancement.

Red squad work had always conferred elite status. By the 1960s, that elitism was amplified by the intelligence units' reliance on technology; elaborate electronic surveillance devices, state-of-the-art photographic equipment, and the like contributed to the red squads' professional self-image.

Opportunism explains only part of the picture. Though bureaucratically aggressive red squads hyped the dangers of urban unrest to justify increased allocations, they also believed in their work. The ideology that governed their activities determined their choice of targets. Most of them were the expected ones--peace activists, student radicals, and, above all, black militants. Cultural antagonism, Donner believes, accounts for the brutality of the crackdown on such groups and individuals.

Still, the inclusion of such innocuous organizations as the Chicago chapter of the League of Women Voters suggests that the process got out of control--and not just in the Windy City. There is, however, an underlying rationality in the seemingly indiscriminate choice of targets. By identifying themselves as the guardians of order, local police forces came to view all of their critics, no matter how law-abiding, as a threat to that order. Self-protection became as much a part of their mission as traffic control. As a result, the red squads came to devote considerable resources to harassing those organizations and individuals that opposed illegal police activities.

In the process, law enforcement received a much lower priority than the disruption of dissent. Surveillance, widespread though it was, prevented few if any crimes. The urban riots of the late 1960s caught local police departments completely unprepared. In those cases where red squad surveillance did provide advance warning, as, for example, with both the 1969 SDS Days of Rage and the Black Panther murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven, the police did not intervene. Nor was the surveillance of radicals any more productive after the fact; red squad investigations involved so many illegalities that most prosecutions based upon them were thrown out of court.

In any event, law enforcement was not the name of the game. The maintenance of order, in the intolerant manner in which the red squads defined it, was. During the 1960s and early 1970s, maintaining order meant repressing dissent through the intertwined techniques of surveillance and disruption. Although much of the surveillance was under cover, much--like the ubiquitous police photographers at demonstrations--was overt and expressly designed to intimidate. Red squad activists enjoyed discomfiting their targets by addressing them by name at demonstrations. Pretext arrests combined harassment with information gathering and, at least in Philadelphia, may well have been devised to trigger violence. Wiretaps, burglaries, and other covert operations were routine, though illegal. Even in a city with a liberal administration, like New Haven in the 1960s, the police wiretapped over a thousand people.

Not only did they provide material for the files, but as agents provocateurs they encouraged the groups they infiltrated to undertake exactly those illegal and provocative activities that would justify the continuing police attention to them. Undercover agents found that their supervisors expected them to turn in lurid reports and the more compliant informers often produced them, even if they had to propose the operations themselves. This was the case, for example, in New York where eager police agents within the Black Panther Party planned bombings and then supplied material for them. Equally important were the activities of undercover agents in sabotaging their organizations' legitimate work.

All of these police activities--overt and concealed--were clearly designed to destroy the targeted organizations. In some cities, notably Philadelphia, which experienced a virtual reign of police terror under Frank Rizzo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the harassment blossomed into a full-scale physical attack on all dissent. Elsewhere, the use of violence was a bit more discriminating: it targeted the Black Panthers. And it was successful. Though Donner does not try to assess the extent to which this repression contributed to the decline of the radical left in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the scope of red squad activism, as well as the self-defeating paranoia that it understandably encouraged within the left, could not but have made a massive contribution to the demise of the movement.

By the late 1970s, many of the red squad abuses were themselves under attack. In the post-Watergate backlash against illegal government activities, there were attempts to curb local red squads. Legislative investigations and litigation revealed the extent of the police lawbreaking and produced legislation or legal settlements that required the destruction of files and the imposition of restrictive guidelines. Even so, many of the abuses persisted. Police departments often ignored the new regulations. They lied and stonewalled when pressed about their failure to destroy files and their continuing surveillance of legal dissent. Moreover, as the judicial and political climate turned conservative, even the limited constraints on the lawlessness of the law of the late 1970s became hard to enforce.

The most effective constraint against police misbehavior seems to be financial. When socked with massive awards for damages, local politicians do try to keep their cops in line. But the main victims of police repression rarely sue. As the recent police brutality cases in New York and Los Angeles reveal, the most serious violations of individuals' civil liberties may well stem from the day-to-day racism of the ordinary police, not the more specialized activities of local red squads. Race is too central to the American polity to exclude the routine harassment of African-Americans from an account of urban police repression. Since Donner is hardly optimistic about the changes of curbing illegal police behavior, when we expand our definition of the nature police behavior, when we expand our definition of the nature of that repression beyond the assault on political and cultural dissidents that Donner charts, the prospect is even grimmer. Still, thanks to Donner's work, we can at least recognize the enemy.

Ellen W. Schrecker teaches history at Yeshiva University and is the author of No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University, 1986).

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