The Mayberry Spies Among Us

Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

With Americans’ attention focused on the civil liberties encroachments coming from the federal level — the Patriot Act, the Pentagon’s domestic surveillance, the FBI’s secret warrants — we’ve hardly noticed the dangers in our own backyard, U.S. News and World Report says in an important new piece: local police.

With half a billion dollars in federal spending, new high-tech “intelligence” centers, and a mandate to catch terrorists in their hometowns, local police are in danger of returning to the days of the “Red Squads,” when local cops took heavy-handed tactics to catch alleged communists in the 1960s and 70s:

[F]ederal officials have funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into once discredited state and local police intelligence operations. Millions more have gone into building up regional law enforcement databases to unprecedented levels. In dozens of interviews, officials across the nation have stressed that the enhanced intelligence work is vital to the nation’s security, but even its biggest boosters worry about a lack of training and standards. “This is going to be the challenge,” says Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, “to ensure that while getting bin Laden we don’t transgress over the law. We’ve been burned so badly in the past–we can’t do that again.”

Those bad old days, as US News recalls them, included “illegal spying, burglaries, beatings, unwarranted raids, the spreading of disinformation. Americans engaged in constitutionally protected free speech were routinely photographed, wiretapped, and harassed–all in the name of national security.”

Latest Muckraker
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: