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

a threat had already developed. The task at hand was to prevent subversiveideas from finding a popular audience. Clearly, intelligence must play a centralrole in this pursuit.Kitson's analysis reflected an important break from assumptions fundamentalto the police ideology. The earlier obsession with conspiracies and agitatorsreflected a conservative view of society: the political order was fundamentallystable, unrest was anomalous and irrational, dissent was not prompted by socialconditions but by Communist plots. As Frank Donner notes:To equate dissent with subversion, as intelligence officials do, is to deny thatthe demand for change is based on real social, economic, or political conclitions.A familiar example of this is the almost paranoid obsession with the"agitator." Intelligence proceeds on the assumption that most people arereasonably contented but are incited or misled by an "agitator," a figure whotypically comes from "outside" to stir up trouble. The task is to track down thissinister individual and bring him to account: all will then be well again. 177Working from these premises, the police were incapable of understanding socialmovements when they arose, and could do practically nothing to prevent them.Eventually, the shortcomings of this approach necessitated the shiftto COINTELPROtactics and the covert disruption of radical movements. But COINTELPRO, too,was essentially reactive: it sought to dis-organize existing movements and isolatethem from their constituencies, but could not prevent them from arising in the firstplace. Kitson corrected for these problems by abandoning the conservative stance.His analysis suggests that society exists in a state of permanent conflict; this wouldrequire a strdtegy of permanent repression, generdlly termed counter-insurgency. , ·sRather than focusing solely on activists, political repression must be understood interms of controlling whole populations.The shift from anti-Communism to anti-terrorism is minor compared to thf'move trom conspiracy theories to counter-insurgency. The latter has broadenedthe scope of intelligence operations and, at the same time, informed the directionof other police work. In crowd control actions and community policingprograms, as Well as in the work of the red squads, the emphasis is increasinglyplaced on preemptive and proactive efforts. In each case, police seek to enlist thesupport of reliable portions of the population when conditions are stable, and toneutralize disruptive elements before they present a threat.The broader implications of this strategy, and the practical efforts to implement it, will be considered in the chapters that follow.176