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This book spotlights the repressive police tactics of the past thirty years, particularly the urban intelligence operations and abuses that burgeoned during the political unrest of the 1960s and 1970s.

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Protectors of Privilege

University of California Press

A strong case has been made for the thesis that in the course of the past hundred years urban police have served as the protective arm of the economic and political interests of the capitalist system. What is especially compelling is that specialized police units have openly performed such functions. Over time these unitssometimes referred to here as "red squads"have vastly proliferated in American cities; at their peak in the sixties, they numbered in the hundreds and according to a 1963 report (see pp. 8182) were served by a "nearly 300,000 man effort . . . pursuing subversion." These cadres have, beginning in the Gilded Age, predominantly engaged in political repression, which, in the context of policing, may be defined as police behavior motivated or influenced in whole or in part by hostility to protest, dissent, and related activities perceived as a threat to the status quo.

The damaging impact of this police mission on the protected freedoms was facilitated by the fact that the police charged with such responsibilities were typically engaged in line functions bringing them into direct contact with targeted dissenters and operated in a context of broad discretion (discussed below). These units developed an aggressive confrontational style in fulfilling their repressive mission.

The thrust and coverage of these police units have varied considerably over the past century from city to city and reflected such variables as power structure, political culture, ethnic considerations, the role of the press, and industrial development. Over the years, however, especially in the areas of target selection and operations, certain patterns have emerged that explain the process by which police repression was institutionalized throughout urban America. The repressive mission focused first on the classic outdoor protest modes prominent in the nineteenth century, such as demonstrations, mass meetings, rallies, picket lines, pa-

rades, and, in the 1960s, vigils. The tactics that have historically been associated with the police response to outdoor gatherings include dragnet and pretext arrests, use of force or the threat of force to disperse gatherings, indiscriminate clubbings, physical dispersal and banishment of targets, and mounted charges, along with vigilante offensives conducted with police support.

With the maturation of dissent agendas, organizational growth, and the politicization of protest, police intervention intensified. Indoor meetings and activities were also targeted, as were not only individuals ("agitators") but organizations as well. This expansion of coverage led to covert intervention through informer infiltration, a development strongly influenced by the operational style of private detective agencies. Another consequence of the police attack on organizations was the raid, typically conducted at times and in a confrontational manner intended to maximize intimidation.

In the early years of the history of police repression, police authority for intervention was "peacekeeping," a blanket excuse for a virtually unbounded range of activities, and the enforcement of such common law offenses as "unlawful assemblage," "incitement to violence," and "riotous conduct." In the Progressive Era a host of state statutes and local ordinances were added, creating a broad "law enforcement" excuse for restraining the exercise of rights that were then beginning to be recognized as involving constitutionally protected freedoms. An effective device for curbing dissent and protest was the denial by police authoritiesdirectly or vicariouslyof the permits required first for outdoor gatherings and then for indoor ones as well. And where indoor gatherings were not subject to permit requirements, they were controlled in a variety of ways: the discriminatory enforcement of fire, health, and building ordinances; intimidation of meeting hall owners or lessees; a requirement that hall owners or managers submit in advance the names of sponsoring organizations and speakers; and rulings that only English be spoken at meetings. When all else failed, police details flooded the entrances to meeting halls and turned away would-be attendees. Nor can we omit an intimidating practice used to monitor both indoor and outdoor gatherings: the assignment of note-takers, usually familiar with the language of the speaker, in uniform or plainclothes and sometimes accompanied by a guard, to record what was said.

Harsh police intervention spanned almost half a century, but was for the most part curbed by the 1930s as a result of a number of circumstances, most notably constitutional requirements. (However, such intervention was partially revived in dealing with the unrest of the sixties.)

In the thirties the traditional interventionist practices were subordinated to "intelligence." In its traditional configuration, intelligence consists of (1) physical surveillance of a "subject," usually conducted in secret and frequently termed "information gathering" or "data collection," benign usages characteristic of this system of repression; (2) a body of techniques that, in addition to informer infiltration, ranged from observation and mail opening to wiretapping and photography; (3) the compilation and dissemination of files and dossiers about individuals and organizational "subjects"; (4) the assessment of file data; and (5) the aggressive use of such data to do injury to the subject. Whether the monitoring of subjects was open or clandestine, passive or aggressive, intelligence by itself became a force that demoralized and intimidated many targets and their supportersand was intended to do so.

From the very beginning, neither external nor internal standards of target selection and operations were imposed on police unitseven though the targets were typically engaged in political expressionan area where precision in formulating restraints is constitutionally imperative. The head of the Chicago intelligence unit, Lieutenant Joseph Healy, summed up the matter when he testified at a 1969 Chicago conspiracy trial (see pp. 11822) that his squad targeted for surveillance "any organization that could create problems for the city or the country." As will be seen, the Chicago unit and its big-city counterparts elsewhere not only engaged in a wide variety of passive operational practices, but in "dirty tricks" and harassment, such as forcing the eviction or firing of particular subjects.

The police units that emerged in their modern form in the thirties and thereafterearlier in larger cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeleshave undergone revealing transitions in missions, targets, and operations. Originally operating under a "peacekeeping" (later "crowd control") banner, they monitored behavior, especially the alleged potential for violence in conflict situations. Their mission was explicitly broadened in the Progressive Era to cover prevention of violence generally, and later, in the modern era, to include the protection of an assertedly endangered national security. A parallel development saw a shift from passive monitoring, giving rise first to harassment and confrontation short of arrest, then to on-the-spot arrests for allegedly deviant conduct or speech. Clandestine surveillance designed to gather information and to flaunt a "presence" in particular discrete situations evolved into "intelligence" work focused on ongoing...