'60s Redux: Cops at the Peace Rally

Police surveillance of political groups is, unfortunately, nothing new. There were police "Red squads" active in Chicago as early as 1886 in the aftermath of the Haymarket Riot. In 1906, the New York Police Department established an "anarchist squad" to keep tabs on potential subversives. At the height of the Cold War, communist organizations and those of their sympathizers were routinely monitored and infiltrated by local police forces, and in the 1960s and 1970s police watched and kept detailed files on members of the NAACP, the ACLU and groups protesting the Vietnam War.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that the county sheriff's office in Fresno is apparently doing it again; it has been accused of employing an undercover detective to infiltrate an anti-Iraq-war organization called Peace Fresno. The Sheriff's Department -- although refusing to confirm or deny the accusation -- says it reserves the right to conduct surveillance and collect intelligence on "terrorist and organized crime organizations."

So what's wrong with that? Well, the main problem is that the Fresno sheriff appears to be going after an organization that, as far as anyone can tell, is neither criminal nor terrorist. Just as the groups monitored in previous eras were often not truly subversive, Peace Fresno is described by The Times as merely a mix of retirees, teachers, college students and social workers who stage a monthly antiwar protest at a Fresno intersection.

The news of the infiltration is particularly dispiriting because it comes 30 years after a national backlash that was supposed to curb such harassment against peaceful, noncriminal groups. In 1975, a Senate select committee led by Frank Church began investigating the domestic spying practices of federal agencies, including the FBI and the CIA; its powerful final report stated clearly that those agencies had interfered with the lives of individuals who had committed no crimes, branding them undesirables, making them suspects in future cases, spreading distorted information about them and generally chilling their political action.

But it wasn't just federal agencies. Across the country, similar tactics had been pursued by police departments in major cities. In Los Angeles, charges of abuses by the Red squad ran back to the 1920s. In millions of pages of secret intelligence files, the LAPD kept tabs on "the Wobblies in the '20s to the labor agitators of the '30s, the interned Nisei of the '40s, the alleged subversives of the '50s and some antiwar demonstrators of the '60s," according to the Los Angeles Police Commission. Police Chief William H. Parker's right-wing politics drove his obsession with intelligence; it was widely rumored that he had the goods on everybody. And he built a system that continued long after he left.