LAPD Drops Radicals’ Case Rather Than Reveal Data : Police: Rights advocates say decision raises fears that anti-terrorist squad is still involved in political spying.

They call themselves the Pico-Union 21. In court, they looked like a ragtag band of harmless radicals, most of them members of a tiny revolutionary Communist organization. Yet the criminal charges they faced were serious: rioting, resisting arrest, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer.

Prosecutors rarely drop such charges, especially when the alleged victims are police. But that is what happened in Los Angeles Municipal Court late last month. Charges were dismissed against all but one of 21 protesters arrested in the city’s Pico-Union district during demonstrations in the spring of 1990.

The reason: the Los Angeles Police Department’s Anti-Terrorist Division--a controversial unit that operates under strict, court-imposed guidelines designed to prevent political spying--did not want to divulge whether it had been investigating the protesters. Rather than obey a court order to reveal the information, the city asked a judge to dismiss the charges.

The case is being watched closely by civil liberties advocates who eight years ago won a hard-fought legal battle to stop the Police Department from spying on people for their political viewpoints rather than any terrorist threat. Now, these advocates say, the Pico-Union 21 case raises questions about whether the political spying is really over.

Evidence during the Pico-Union 21 trial showed that at least one officer from the Anti-Terrorist Division had been at protests staged by the Revolutionary Communist Party and its affiliates, and that copies of arrest reports had gone to the ATD. But although the revolutionaries have a history of clashes with the Police Department, those familiar with the group say its members can hardly be considered terrorists.

“You would be hard-put to call the RCP terrorists, believe me,” said one civil rights advocate who has followed the group for years. “Obnoxious, yes. Annoying, yes. But terrorists, no.”

Paul Hoffman, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, said: “There has been some concern for quite some time that the ATD might be overstepping its bounds with respect to this group of people. This (the LAPD’s refusal to obey the court order) means that they are not willing to lay that operation before the public and the court.”

Not so, says the lawyer who represents the Police Department. “The Anti-Terrorist Division took the position that it could neither admit nor deny that it had any material relevant to this case,” said Deputy City Atty. Linda Lefkowitz, noting that the government may keep information secret if it believes it is in the public interest to do so. “That’s all the department did, and it has a right to do that.”

In many ways, the central characters in the case of the Pico-Union 21 are as secretive as the police unit they so vehemently decry. They are loath to admit their affiliation with the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade, although when pressed, they acknowledge the connection. They refuse to say where they live or work, keeping this information even from their own attorneys.

Their statements to the press must be cleared through a central spokesman. They use pseudonyms--noms de guerre. One goes by “Sasha.” Another--the only protester against whom charges have not been dismissed--calls himself Rojo, the Spanish word for red. His fellow demonstrators say they don’t know his real name, Francisco Fiallos, even though it has been published in the newspaper.

The case of the Pico-Union 21 stemmed from seven demonstrations that began on May Day, 1990, and continued through the next month. With the exception of the May 1 event, which is an annual celebration of International Workers Day, the protests were organized by La Resistencia, a radical pro-immigrant coalition that is closely affiliated with the revolutionary Communist groups.

The demonstrations were held to protest erection of police barricades in the Pico-Union district and the detention of illegal immigrants at an Immigration and Naturalization Service center in that area.

The protests had a language all their own. The INS detention center was branded “a concentration camp.” The police barricades--erected by the LAPD to keep drug dealers and criminals out of the area--were part of “government plans to secretly round up and lock down immigrants.” The protests were a “fierce and spirited struggle against this police state.”

Police say rocks and bottles were thrown at uniformed patrol officers from the Rampart Division. Protesters say they were clubbed by police. Three protesters and one officer were injured. While the revolutionaries blamed the police, the police blamed the revolutionaries.

Last fall, eight of the Pico-Union 21 went to trial before Municipal Court Judge Veronica Simmons-McBeth. They faced a total of 15 charges, all of them misdemeanors.

The trial dragged on for three months, providing a window--albeit a narrow one--into the workings of the secretive Anti-Terrorist Division. Despite the best efforts of the Police Department to keep the unit’s business confidential, little tidbits sneaked out.

Deputy City Atty. Lefkowitz, for instance, confirmed during the trial that at least one ATD officer was stationed near the May Day protest. A patrol officer testified that his colleagues in the ATD had tipped him off to one of the demonstrations. Evidence showed that copies of the arrest reports were sent to the ATD.

Defense lawyers, contending that the ATD had been keeping illegal dossiers on their clients, issued subpoenas for the names of all ATD officers who may have been present during the demonstrations. They also asked for any documents related to ATD planning in advance of the protests.

On Jan. 6, Simmons-McBeth ordered the police to comply with the subpoenas--or risk being held in contempt of court. Although the city could have given the information to the judge in a closed-door hearing, outside the presence of the defense lawyers, the officers declined.

That afternoon, the charges were dropped.

“They thumbed their nose at the judge,” said Christopher Armen, a court-appointed defense lawyer who worked on the case. “I think it’s pretty clear that they decided there was too much damaging information that would come to light if they turned it over. They were willing to roll over and lose all of those cases. It’s just unheard of.”

The defendants were ecstatic. “They dragged us into their courtrooms,” said Sonali Perera, 33, who was charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, “and what we did was go into those courtrooms and reveal the truth.”

Even one of the jurors was surprised to hear that the Police Department’s anti-terrorist squad might somehow be involved in monitoring the defendants.

“I didn’t agree with their philosophy but they just didn’t seem like they were any danger to anybody,” said Peter Ornstein, a 39-year-old film producer. “There was never any indication that they were carrying weapons or bombs or had any plans to do anything violent in any way. Even the prosecution never intimated that they are more dangerous than they appear.”

The Police Department , meanwhile, has been closemouthed about the case. The officer in charge of the Anti-Terrorist Division, Capt. Steven Gates--brother of Police Chief Daryl F. Gates--did not return phone calls. The department’s chief spokesman, Cmdr. Robert Gil, declined comment.

Since the trial, charges against another 15 defendants--including some of the original eight--have been dropped by the city. Prosecutor Patrick Shibuya, who handled the case, said he made the decision “in the interest of justice.”

The lone remaining defendant is Fiallos, also known as Rojo. The 23-year-old protester, the only one to face felony counts, is charged with assaulting a police officer. A pretrial hearing is set for Feb. 20 in Los Angeles Superior Court.

For the city’s civil libertarians, these cases have a sense of deja vu. A decade ago, a coalition of civil rights groups and community organizations sued the LAPD, charging that the department’s now-defunct Public Disorder and Intelligence Division kept secret files on innocent people whose political viewpoints the department opposed.

Among the groups that the PDID had infiltrated was the Revolutionary Communist Party; in 1982, one undercover LAPD officer admitted having sex with a woman party member in an attempt to get information. The officer later acknowledged under oath that during 17 months of undercover work, he never heard anyone in the party talk about committing any crimes.

The result of the “political spying case” was that the PDID went out of business and its replacement, the ATD, was forced to operate under a 1984 Superior Court consent decree that keeps a tight rein on intelligence gathering.

Under the new rules, the unit is supposed to focus its attentions only on legitimate terrorist threats. The restrictions set new standards and procedures for intelligence gathering; the guidelines state that the LAPD “considers it both unnecessary and wrong to gather information on any organization unless its ideology advocates criminal conduct and its members have planned, threatened, attempted or performed such criminal conduct.”

The rules also give greater control over the unit to the Los Angeles Police Commission, the five-member citizens panel that oversees the Police Department. The commission conducts annual audits of the ATD, and is supposed to authorize all undercover investigations, although the unit can do other types of investigations without commission approval.

Police Commission President Stanley K. Sheinbaum--a longtime civil libertarian who was chairman of the ACLU Foundation at the time of the police spying suit--declined to say whether the commission had authorized, or knew of, any ATD investigations into the Communist revolutionaries.

However, Sheinbaum said he intends to ask for a review of the case. “I worry about this,” he said.

The court-appointed attorneys who represent the Pico-Union 21, meanwhile, say they are left wondering how the ATD could consider their clients a terrorist threat. They also complain that the city wasted thousands of dollars waging what they say was a political prosecution.

“If you saw these people in court on a day-in and day-out basis, you couldn’t take them seriously,” defense lawyer Arthur Warren said. “They are a ragtag group of people who are childlike in their attitudes. They still believe that there is going to be a workers’ revolution of disenfranchised people. . . . The whole thing was a joke.”