Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America
496
Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America
496eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520343139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2023 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| Sales rank: | 752,275 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Protectors of Privilege
Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban AmericaBy Frank J. Donner
University of California Press
Copyright © 1990 Frank J. DonnerAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-520-05951-4
Introduction
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 units-sometimes 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. 81-82) 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, parades, 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 authorities-directly or vicariously-of 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 supporters-and was intended to do so.
From the very beginning, neither external nor internal standards of target selection and operations were imposed on police units-even though the targets were typically engaged in political expression-an 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. 118-22) 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 thereafter-earlier in larger cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles-have 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 involvement with targets, not as an investigative means to a decision-making end, its blueprinted purpose, but as a (punitive) end in itself. This distortion was glaringly revealed by the failure of the urban units to serve a predictive preventive role as recommended by national commissions investigating the ghetto riots of the late sixties; instead of probing for social causes, they insisted that evil plotters ("subversives"-the successors to the "agitators" of an earlier day) were the source of ghetto unrest. In the same way, ideology almost wholly replaced behavior as a police concern; the original focus on individuals such as strikers and their leaders and supporters gave way to a reflexive blaming of social unrest on political conspiracies. By the forties the congressional antisubversive committees developed techniques of expanding the boundaries of subversion to include a broad spectrum of peaceful dissent, which in turn served as a proscriptive model for political oppression by government agencies on all levels, including by urban police units. This model reflected our national obsession with conspiracy and with scapegoating evil forces in our earthly paradise-insightfully explored by scholars such as David Brion Davis and Richard Hofstadter. The transition from behavior to ideology, from suppression of violence to curbing peaceful dissent, was thus completed: the new, enormously expanded police mission was legitimated by our countersubversive political culture, which in turn was enriched by police contributions to its fear-based assumptions. Moreover, engaged as they were in the pursuit of a common enemy, police units scattered throughout urban America formed a national network and also replaced their historic class allies and protectors in the private sector with state and federal support. In addition, this embrace of openly political concerns escaped the adverse fate of some police abuses in part because of its lofty aim-how could one challenge police programs designed to preserve our very existence as a nation?-and its secrecy.
The institutionalization of radical-hunting in the United States can best be understood as the culmination of historical stimuli beginning with the Haymarket bombing in 1886 and its aftermath. This was followed by another traumatic spur: the Russian Revolution and domestic post-World War I unrest. To these must be joined the police response to the protests spawned by the Great Depression of 1929; the beginnings of the Cold War and consequent recruitment of local police units as partners of the FBI in spy-hunting; and, finally, the disturbances in the wake of the assorted protests of the sixties. Of these influences, Haymarket is the most notable, in the areas both of overt police behavior and covert surveillance. A survey published by the International Association of Chiefs of Police assesses the role of Haymarket in this way:
The Haymarket bomb was responsible for the first major red scare in American history, and led to the immediate popular condemnation of Socialism, Communism and Anarchism by the national press and opinion leaders. In addition, the bomb resulted in the establishment of the first sustained American police intelligence operation aimed at leftist groups. Two years after the Haymarket riot the Chicago police declared that they had learned an invaluable lesson in 1886, that "the revolutionary movement must be carefully observed and crushed if it showed signs of growth."
At the time of their greatest impact in the early sixties, these units had become, in some quarters, a welcome balm to the fear and dependence spawned by the youth revolt, riots, campus disturbances, and an ever more aggressive antiwar movement. The debate among scholars in the sixties on whether police authoritarianism and brutality are rooted in psychological or occupational influences was never resolved. What is clear is that police antiradical units became the dominant voice of the countersubversive tradition (with a new, added note-racism) and, as in the past, attracted passionate ideologues, venerated by the far right, who served as "culture bearers" (in Karl Mannheim's phrase) of the countersubversive tradition, members of the "Gallery of the Obsessed" as they are called here.
At root the embrace of the protection of national security as a prime mission reflected the thrust of almost a century of police repression: to define protest in such a way as to warrant the most freewheeling target selection and the most punitive modus operandi. In a society programmed for fear, this mission served as a protective barrier against challenge and a sure-fire path for ambitious police officials, the "Big Men" who, in an earlier day, had instead sought the patronage of the elites whose interests they guarded.
But popular fear and dependence, autonomy and elitism, professionalism and secrecy gave leaky shelter when, beginning in the late sixties, hard rain began to fall on the red squads and, indeed, on the police generally. It could no longer be concealed that the red-hunting units and their leaders had invented or exaggerated the subversive threat posed by their targets in order to deflect criticism and to fabricate an acceptable justification for violating the constitutionally protected rights of peaceful dissenters. And it was too late for a revival of the timeworn political rescue efforts of grateful powerholders. Coalitions of civic groups, lawsuits, legislative probes, urban power shifts, the outcries of victimized minorities, and a new generation of adventurous journalists, supported by a media turnabout, all contributed to the restoration of police behavior to reform agendas despite the die-hard rescue efforts of congressional committees and their constituencies. (Continues...)
Excerpted from Protectors of Privilege by Frank J. Donner Copyright © 1990 by Frank J. Donner. Excerpted by permission.
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