admin | September 5, 2009
Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression in Urban America

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.
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Tags: Books, Canada, Frank Donner, Oppression, Protectors of Privilege, Red Squads, Repression, Spies