Keep an Eye on Cops Commissioned to Spy

There was a time when the secrets of hundreds of lives, the political ones and the personal ones, could be found boxed up and stored at a double-wide trailer parked in a down-at-the-heels corner of Long Beach.

It was there, behind a yellow-green cinder-block wall, in a mobile home village between the railroad tracks and the river, that an LAPD detective took his work home with him.

And what homework it was.

His job was “intelligence,” the monitoring of subversives and terrorists, the broad-brush work of the now-disbanded Public Disorder Intelligence Division. The PDID, like its police forebears, defined those terms broadly, as widely as the net it cast across Los Angeles. By April 1975, before it disposed of most of them under court order, LAPD intelligence ops maintained 2 million files on 55,000 groups and individuals.

The PDID hauled in data on the Black Panthers and home-grown Commies, on civil rights groups, anti-police groups, on Quakers and Indian activists and an anti-Soviet Jewish group founded by a man named Zev Yaroslavsky, who is now a Los Angeles County supervisor. It kept tabs on an antinuclear group that traded teddy bears for kids’ toy guns at Christmas. It wrote down how much a municipal judge gambled each week at the track.

Its “Spy vs. Spy” mentality was so entrenched that when City Council members pressed an assistant police chief to put a dollar figure on the PDID budget, he refused: It would “endanger the lives of officers,” he said, and if he were forced to tell them and an officer got killed, each council member would “naturally become a suspect.” It all sounded tragicomically like the old CIA gag, “I could tell you--but then I’d have to kill you.”

Packed inside the scores of boxes the detective took back to his mobile home was some sensitive and confidential information. Some was about sedition from the wild ‘60s and the radical ‘70s, and some of it was nothing more than the gossamer of gossip.

Some days, on the city’s dime, the detective went to his wife’s law office and transcribed files into a computer. The computer was provided courtesy of a right-wing Virginia group called the Western Goals Foundation, the brainchild of the head of the John Birch Society and anxious to know more about the very kind of outfits the LAPD was spying on. Western Goals was given a share of the city’s spy cornucopia.

Well, it was pretty clear where all this was leading: a political blowup, a front-page scandal, a crackdown, a lawsuit, a court order, a few mea culpas and a new set of rules and a pledge to play by them.

The PDID was disbanded, as the discredited CRASH was abandoned after the recent Rampart scandal, to the graveyard of official acronyms.

Definitions were sharpened: who was a threat, and who wasn’t? Undercover work under the new Anti-Terrorism Division was more closely scrutinized.

As with all crackdowns, there came a time for a letup; a dozen years after the restrictions were first laid down in 1984, some of them were loosened by the city’s Police Commission. Requiring “probable cause” to investigate illegal activity was replaced by “reasonable suspicion.” New times required new rules, the commission argued. Threats change, technology changes, terrorism changes.

The identical speech could be made today. Precisely five years after the 1996 rollback, on the heels of Sept. 11, the commission has made another change to the document titled “Standards and Procedures for Anti-Terrorist Division”:

“In an emergency involving a life-threatening situation and the Undercover Committee is unavailable”--that’s the designated commissioners who have to green-light undercover operations--”an undercover investigation may be commenced with the approval of the chief of police. Telephonic notification to the Undercover Committee shall be made as soon as possible, and written approval from the Undercover Committee shall be requested within 72 hours.”

At first glance this looks like mere streamlining. It shows a faith in the current police chief, but even more faith in rules to limit LAPD chiefs, period.

An inspector general for the LAPD and term limits for police chiefs--both approved by voters--mean there will never be another Daryl F. Gates, the rank-and-file cop’s hero-provocateur. For decades, rumors zipped between City Hall and Parker Center that every police chief kept secret dossiers on city leaders, from mayors to ministers, to yank them into line. Ten years ago, Gates declared, “The only files are in my head . . . and I’ve got a lot of those.”

There are real terrorists out there somewhere, and real reason to find them; as the cartoonist said, we have met the enemy. Let’s be careful that, once again, it is not us.

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Patt Morrison’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com