Infiltrating the Public

Los Angeles police officers are caught undercover

As celebrated in TV programs such as Dragnet and Adam 12, the Los Angeles police department has long been the very model of a modern constabulary: efficient, dedicated and incorruptible. But that image is being dealt a severe blow by allegations that from 1970 to 1981 the department ran a domestic spy operation, infiltrating more than 200 political, religious, labor and civic organizations and amassing information on thousands of Angelenos. Most of the snooping was illegal and politically motivated, charges the American Civil Liberties Union, whose suit on behalf of 131 victims is scheduled to go to trial next month. Says A.C.L.U. Attorney Paul Hoffman: "The targets were critics of the department, people who were pushing for a civilian review board, anybody against the political status quo. They were watching everybody."

According to A.C.L.U. complaints, the Los Angeles police planted three agents in classrooms at California State University in Northridge to spy on students. A woman operative joined the Committee on Nuclear Information, an antinuke group, eventually becoming its president. The police also gathered intelligence on members of the police commission, a state assemblyman, a superior-court judge and even the mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley.

Most of the snooping challenged by the suit was the work of the 62-member public disorder intelligence division (PDID). Police claim that the PDID helped break up dangerous groups and led to the arrest of a potential presidential assassin during a visit by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Insists Police Chief Daryl Gates: "We've never surveilled groups or individuals that we didn't suspect of being in illegal activities."

Plaintiffs in the case claim, however, that PDID agents not only infiltrated law-abiding groups but often acted as provocateurs. They say, for example, that an undercover officer who joined the Coalition Against Police Abuse tried without success to get members to throw a brick through a police-station window during a demonstration in San Pedro. Observes Linda Valentino, who in 1977 helped organize the Citizens' Commission on Police Repression: "After these things started coming out, people were afraid to get involved. The police hurt a lot of groups."

The spy division worked without restraints until the mid-1970s, when a new police commission ordered intelligence data on 50,000 people and organizations " destroyed and adopted guidelines limiting the type of information the PDID could keep. Nevertheless, subsequent investigations into the unit's activities revealed that police had saved some of the material. Last January investigators seized 150 boxes of PDID data in the Long Beach mobile home and garage of Jay Paul, 36, a 15-year veteran of the force.

The district attorney, the police commission, the city council and the police department are all probing the PDID's snooping, but the unit no longer exists. The police commission disbanded it in January, replacing it with the anti-terrorist division. Critics of the police force hope the new unit can avoid the abuses of the PDID, but they wonder. Intelligence gathering, declares Chief Gates, "cannot be and never will be as pristine pure as some would like it. There is absolutely no way that we cannot, on occasion, trample on some people's privacy and their freedom." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.