Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

the 1960s in most large American cities, including New York, Philadelphia,Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, and Birmingham.oAt times these relationships went further, as police made use of right-wingparamilitary and vigilante groups to carry out campaigns of violence or dirtytricks. The Legion of Justice, for example, conducted a series of burglaries,beatings, and arson attacks on behalf of the Chicago red squad.81 Less spectacularbut nearly as disturbing, in 1980 New Hampshire State Police worked witha private pro-nuclear group headed by Lyndon LaRouche in order to infiltratethe anti-nuclear Clamshell Alliance.R2 Corporate America also got in on the act.A 1974 lawsuit (Benkert v. Michigan) revealed that the Detroit Intelligence Unithad been sharing files with the Chrysler Corporation, in some cases recommendingChrysler fire employees with radical political views. Chrysler, forits part, provided the police with information on its workers and helped placeinformants among militants on the job.s3The left as a whole has certainly received more than its fair share of unwantedpolice attention, but the police give particular scrutiny to those who criticizethem. In March 1978, the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) received apartial list of LAPD officers. CAPA's secretary, Georgia adorn, appeared on thelist CAPA and the Citizen's Commission on Police Repression quietly circulatedthe list, and two more infiltrators were discovered.84In Philadelphia, the police undertook a prolonged struggle against a communitypaper called the Free Press after it ran a series of articles detailing policeabuses. Reporters were harassed, searched, arrested, beaten, and slandered inthe police-friendly corporate media. Their apartments and cars were burglarized.Their employers and schools were pressured to fire them and withdrawscholarships. The Free Press only survived by seeking-and receiving-federalcourt protection.8>Obviously the police have an institutional interest in defending themselvesagainst criticism. But, it is worth noting the extent to which they treat dissent ofany sort, absolutely any pressure toward social change, with animosity. This hostilityto dissent should be understood not simply in tenus of individual conservatism,but as an institutional feature of the entire criminal justice system-andperhaps even of the state as a whole. Alan Wolfe explains:It is not so much that the state acts mechanistically, always moving tosupport one group and repress the other. as it is that a regularized biasexists in the operations of the democratic state that tends to support theinterests of the powerful against those who challenge them ....Despite some variations, when the state acts in a liberal democraticsociety such as that of the United States, it acts in a biased fashion .... It ispartial to the dominant interests, hostile to those whose power is minimal.By nearly all of its actions, it reproduces a society in which some havepower at the expense of others, and it moves to support the "others" onlywhen their protests are so strong that the "some" stand to lose all theyhave gained.It follows that repression will similarly not be a neutral phenomenonbut will have a class bias. We can predict, with good accuracy, that whenthe state intervenes to repress an organization or an ideology, it will be a163