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Portions of book reviews of Donner's book, September 25, 2005
Reviewer: T. bailey – See all my reviews
    
Book review by The Los Angeles Times, January 20, 1991

… The cops love these free-wheeling, elite units. They were ostensibly created to combat terrorism, but have been used mostly to infiltrate and suppress liberal and radical political organizations and civil rights groups. They lift their members out of the routine of police work into something of a James Bond life. As Frank Donner points out in this excellently researched, thoughtful and well-detailed study of police spying, their excesses have been many. But Donner, who directed the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, concludes with the chilling thought that the Red squads will be around long after there are any Reds.

Why wouldn't the police like them? The elite Red squads work on their own, usually reporting directly to the chief, operating outside normal department procedures. That's dangerous. Even worse, the squads are concerned more with political attitudes than with crime.

Their targets are chosen according to the narrow, conservative political views of the police and usually are selected in a Keystone Cop fashion. Among the Los Angeles Public Disorder and Intelligence Division (PDID) targets, for example, was the organization advocating help for Soviet Jewry. This was an anti-Kremlin movement, but the intricacies of that obviously were too much for the PDID.

Worse yet, the information, and misinformation, gathered by these sleuths is fed into the growing number of intelligence networks maintained by federal, state and local law-enforcement organizations. In the computer age, if you attend a left-wing meeting in Echo Park, your name is likely to be spread as far as New York.

As Donner points out, the squads are not a recent invention. One of his most important contributions is tracing the history of the Red squads, showing how deeply rooted they are in American political, social and economic life….

…That set the pattern for the Red squads, a pattern that continues today. Whatever the city, said Donner, the goal and tactics are much the same: "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."

…You might ask what's wrong with this. Don't the police need a way of detecting domestic terrorism? If somebody is going to blast the bank down the street — or my newspaper office — shouldn't the police be able to prevent it?

Of course they should. And failing to deal with that point is the book's weakness. The answer — and I would have liked to have heard this from Donner — is that law enforcement already has that capability through line officers investigating all sorts of crime. They're regular cops, subject to department oversight and discipline. Treat threats of terrorism the same way as threats of bank robberies, with the investigators subject to the same control — civilian and uniformed — as any other detectives. Demystify intelligence gathering.

Another weakness is the writing. Donner makes hard reading of a fascinating story that features famous exponents of nightstick justice, such as Red Hynes and Philadelphia's Frank Rizzo.

For that reason, this is a book for the experts, the scholars, attorneys, activists, journalists and others who have to deal with the Red squads.

And certainly it's a must for police academies, especially the LAPD's.

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Book review by The New York Times, February 2, 1991

… the roots of repression in this country, and the role played by city police departments in silencing political dissent, are overlooked in the history books.

Frank Donner fills the gap in "Protectors of Privilege." His documented evidence stands in contrast to the secret accusations and invasions of privacy that characterize some urban police department dossiers. Mr. Donner, a lawyer and the director of the American Civil Liberties Project on Political Surveillance, has argued labor and constitutional cases before the Supreme Court. His new study of abuses by the cities complements his previous book, "The Age of Surveillance," which covered political intelligence on the Federal level.

Beginning in the last half of the 19th century, the repressive activities by urban police concentrated on demonstrations, mass meetings, rallies, picketing and parades. The tactics used by the police in response to the exercise of the constitutional right of peaceable assembly have included dragnet and pretext arrests, use of force or the threat of force, indiscriminate clubbings and mounted charges…

…About New York, Mr. Donner writes, "In contrast to the Chicago unit's wide-open, Dodge City style, its scorn for the law it was supposed to uphold, a claim to professionalism dominates the self-image of the New York City red squad (BOSS, as it has commonly been called, an acronym for its formal title, the Bureau of Special Services)." BOSS agents used cameras and video equipment for open surveillance of demonstrations. In the 1960's, it was also a common practice for detectives to flash fake press cards for undercover photography.

As a result of court decisions, the author says, the unit's "most objectionable practices" were stopped. But he does not venture a guess on the extent of BOSS's activities in New York today. Other cities covered in "Protectors of Privilege" include Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Birmingham, Ala., New Haven and Washington.

Mr. Donner warns that police surveillance and dossiers require constant vigilance and that what took place crudely with clubs in the past may be revived quietly with computers and less traceable surveillance technology…

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Book Review: The Nation March 11, 1991

…Protectors of Privilege is the central panel in a triptych of domestic totalitarianism, painstakingly crafted by Donner over the past thirty years. The Un-Americans chronicled the nation's most loathsome inquisition and offered a sort of inverse hagiography of the inquisitors themselves. In 1980 came The Age of Surveillance, Donner's meticulously detailed account of the government's massive campaign of political snooping and harassment from the early red scares through the Nixon years.

Donner's purpose in Protectors of Privilege is deceptively simple: to describe the ways municipal police forces have monitored and muzzled dissent for over 100 years. It's subject of far broader significance than is suggested by the clucking criticism of red squads that generally surfaces from reform quarters. America's red squads are not just the regrettable but fundamentally inconsequential abuses of overweening cops. Red squads kill. That's been true from the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs in 1887 through the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton by Chicago police in 1969 through the deaths of five children and six adults in Philadelphia's bombing of MOVE in 1985. And what's more, these elite police units have had a profound effect on politics in America's cities.

Nearly every major city had (and many no doubt still have) a red squad with decades of spying, harassment and intimidation behind it. And each of those red squads had its own local quirks and wrinkles. Thus in Chicago in the 1960s, police were partial to collaborating with private-sector snoops from corporations like I.T.T., along with the F.B.I. and C.I.A.; in my own city, New Haven, the prurient obsessions of police officers inspired a years-long wiretap campaign of almost inconceivable scope, drawing into its auditory net thousands of individuals and organizations, from radical feminists to the local movie house.

But there's far more to Donner's account than regurgitation of news stories and court testimony. In The Age of Surveillance, he explained why the political intelligence establishment has such staying power. Its roots lie, he said, in "a nativist anti-radicalism." Then he went on:

Nativism is fear-centered, nourished by the twin myths . . . of an all-powerful internal subversive enemy and a permanently endangered national security, which deny vitality to the protected freedoms. . . .It has been sustained by a passionate tribal constituency, which seeks to implement its suppressive commitment at the decision- and policy-making levels of government….

Though the red squads soon took on a life of their own, that open alliance with industry-"the Bargain," Donner calls it – continued down to our own time. In the 1960s and 1970s in Detroit, for instance, Chrysler "provided the red squad . . . with information from its voluminous files concerning the political activities of workers. . . .In return, the police provided Chrysler with membership lists of allegedly subversive organizations and in some cases recommended the firing of activist employees." As recently as 1979, the Bargain was reiterated by the head of Philadelphia's Chamber of Commerce, who told the Federal Civil Rights Commission that "most businessmen . . . feel that police protection is so good that they are willing to put up with instances which, if they happened in their own family, would be intolerable."

The recent political history of America's cities can't be understood without taking into account the red squads.

…Donner is most impressive and original when carefully charting the shifts in police attitudes toward dissent-shifts rooted in an evolving climate of paranoia. In the late nineteenth century, he suggests, even the most extreme police officials envisioned their jobs as simply the protection of industry, and more broadly the preservation of public order. If intimidating radicals was the way to do it, then that's what they did. But by the early twentieth century, the purpose had changed considerably: "Clandestine surveillance . . . 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." The search for enemies, too, became an end in itself, utterly divorced from reality. Thus in the 1960s, police "insisted that evil plotters . . . were the source of ghetto unrest." This obsession with conspiracy, Donner notes, did not arise in a vacuum: HUAC, McCarthy and other Congressional investigators granted the police ever-broader definitions of subversion. "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."

Donner opens more questions than he can properly answer. I'd like to learn more, for instance, about the connection between red squads and antivice crusades. It's a connection that appears over and over in the history of the rad-hunters. The nineteenth-century rise of the red squads occurred in an era of antivice efforts. Many recent antisubversive police campaigns, like New Haven's wiretap operation, were initially aimed at illegal gambling and other sins. Philadelphia's Mayor Rizzo earned his fame as a vice cop and Los Angeles police chief Parker believed that communism and vice were the twin scourges of American life…

…Donner lays the decline of the red squads at the feet of a shifting public mood in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate. He may be right. But that decline also coincides with the flight of major industry from the cities; perhaps the red squads simply ran out of privilege to protect. And it's a telling tribute to the political strength of the nation's permanent government that red squads and the F.B.I. have proved considerably harder to rein in than HUAC and similar legislative. efforts.

When Donner began his investigation, he could not have foreseen the worldwide evaporation of the Red Menace or the Persian Gulf war. But recent events raise an inevitable question: Since the century-old fear of world communism has ended but dissent has not, what shape will America's future red squads take? Donner himself points to the resurgence of private-sector snoops: It's a development that harks back to the days of Haymarket, when private Pinkertons were industry's first line of defense against labor agitation.

And what about enemies? Of course the gulf war has resurrected that favorite inspirational figure for red squads, the Fanatical Foreigner. Today's nativists can also point to such "outsiders" as lesbian and gay activists in groups like ACT UP. And then there's the war on drugs: With gunplay-prone crack dealers feeding fears of both violence and social decay, police forces in a number of cities of cities have revived intelligence squads buried in the 1970s. In New Haven, a police intelligence squad formed last year to combat drug gangs showed up with a video camera at a recent antiwar rally.
–
Monthly Review November, 1991

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…

…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.

Informers were ubiquitous, by far the most widely used method of surveillance and disruption. 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.

Police departments recruited both professional and civilian informers. The numbers are unknown, but may well have reached five figures. By the late 1060s there were over two thousand professional and amateur spies in Chicago alone. For regular police officers, undercover work was a rapid route to advancement. Some civilians enlisted for patriotic reasons, others were police groupies who hoped that working with the red squad might get them a job with the force. In Philadelphia policemen's wives became "pin money" spies. The activities of these informers varied. Some took on single assignments; others, like Chicago veteran Sheli Lulkin, who infiltrated eighty-eight separate organizations, made it a career.

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).

—
The New York Times, June 11, 1993:

Frank J. Donner, a civil liberties lawyer who was an expert on the use of government surveillance and informers to discourage political dissent, died yesterday at a hospice in Branford, Conn. He was 82 and lived in Hamden, Conn.

The cause was cancer, his family said.