Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America [Hardcover]

Frank Donner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520059514 | ISBN-13: 978-0520059511 | Publication Date: November 20, 1990 | Edition: Later Printing

This landmark exposé of the dark history of repressive police operations in American cities offers a richly detailed account of police misconduct and violations of protected freedoms over the past century. In an incisive examination of undercover work in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia as well as Washington, D.C., Detroit, New Haven, Baltimore, and Birmingham, Donner reveals the underside of American law enforcement.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Donner documents the history of local countersubversion efforts on the part of city police forces, detailing their abuses of power.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Library Journal

Donner, a civil liberties lawyer, last wrote The Age of Surveillance (a "powerful and signficant study," LJ 5/1/80), about federal suppression of political dissent. Viewing city police as "the protective arm . . . of the capitalist system," Donner here documents the history of local countersubversion units, focusing on Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles. Repression flourished in the 1960s and early 1970s but was largely curtailed thereafter in reaction to Watergate. Donner presents a litany of police harassment and abuse, including undercover agents who incited the violence they supposedly were hired to prevent. Rather dense prose, with many footnotes and 100 pages of references, gear this book primarily to research and legal collections. A worthwhile, albeit strongly opinionated, contribution.
- Gregor A. Preston, Univ. of California Lib., Davis
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 496 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; Later Printing edition (November 20, 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520059514
• ISBN-13: 978-0520059511
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 6.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,661,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Portions of book reviews of Donner's book, September 25, 2005

By 

T. bailey - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Hardcover)

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... Read more ›

5.0 out of 5 stars Required Reading for Every Citizen, July 24, 2010

By 

Paul Couillard (San Diego, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America (Paperback)

I read this book around 2006. I believe this book to be a factual report on the author's research and to be highly credible.

Frank Donner was a lawyer specializing in civil rights law. He died in 1993. I consider Mr. Donner to be a hero for writing this book.

This book documents massive law enforcement law-breaking conducted over several decades. The Center for Investigative Reporting labels this book the "definitive 1990 book on domestic intelligence gathering."

Every citizen of the United States should be required to read this book.

People do not want to believe that law enforcement officers would break the law. But law enforcement officers allow their personal feelings and political views to influence their on-the-job behavior.

This book is very detailed and has 78 pages of notes.